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Accueil > Pluralistic approaches

Pluralistic approaches to languages and cultures

Pluralistic approaches to languages and cultures (Language awareness, Integrated didactic approaches, Intercomprehension between related languages, Intercultural approaches) are based on activities that include several linguistic and cultural varieties.They develop a concrete concept of the multilingual and multicultural competence promoted by the Common European Framework of Reference for languages. They provide tools which allow for the design and bringing together of didactic interventions favorable to the development and continuous enrichment of this competence by learners. Dedicated to plurilingual and pluricultural dimensions of learning, FREPA complements the other instruments of the Council of Europe.


The term “pluralistic approaches to languages and cultures” refers to didactic approaches which use teaching / learning activities involving several (i.e. more than one) varieties of languages or cultures.

This is to be contrasted with approaches which could be called “singular” in which the didactic approach takes account of only one language or a particular culture, considered in isolation. Singular approaches of this kind were particularly valued when structural and later “communicative” methods were developed and all translation  and all resort to the first language was banished from the teaching process.

Language teaching methodology has seen the emergence of four pluralistic approaches over the past thirty years:

Intercomprehension between related languages

In the approach termed Intercomprehension between related languages the learner works on two or more languages of the same linguistic family (Romance, Germanic, Slavic languages, etc.) in parallel. One of these languages is already known, being either the learner’s mother tongue, or the language of education, or even another language having been learnt previously.

In this approach there is a systematic focus on receptive skills, as the development of comprehension is the most tangible way of using the knowledge of a related language to learn a new one. Of course, this does not exclude some added benefits for productive skills.

In the second half of the 1990s there was innovative work in this area with adult learners (including university students), in France and other countries speaking romance languages, as well as in Germany, Scandinavian and Slavophone countries. Many were supported at a European level in the programmes of the European Union. In general there has been little development of intercomprehension in schools.

Intercultural approach

The intercultural approach has already had a clear influence on the methodology of language teaching and is therefore relatively well-known

Its many variants are all based on didactic principles which recommend relying on phenomena from one or more cultural area(s) (conceived of as hybrid, open and dynamic) as a basis for understanding others from one or more other area(s)

They also advocate developing strategies to promote reflection about contact situations involving persons with different cultural background.

Awakening to languages

Several European projects have enabled awakening to languages movements to develop on a broader scale, defining it as follows: “awakening to language is used to describe approaches in which some of the learning activities are concerned with languages which the school generally does not intend to teach.” This does not mean that the approach is concerned just with such languages. The approach concerns the language(s) of education and any other language which is in the process of being learnt. But it is not limited to these “learnt” languages, and integrates all sorts of other linguistic varieties – from the environment, from families… and from all over the world, without exclusion of any kind... Because of the number of languages on which learners work – very often, several dozen – awakening to languages may seem to be the most extreme form of pluralistic approach. It was designed principally as a way of introducing schoolchildren to linguistic diversity (and the diversity of their own languages) at the beginning of school education, as a vector of fuller recognition of the languages “brought” by children with other home languages, as a kind of preparatory course developed at primary schools, but it can also be promoted as a support to language learning throughout the learners’ school career.

L’Eveil aux langues (Awakening to languages) as it has been developed specifically in the Evlang and Jaling programmes is explicitly linked to the Language Awareness movement initiated by E. Hawkins in the 1980s in the United Kingdom. However, the éveil aux langues nowadays is to be seen as a sub-category of the Language Awareness approach, which is also generating research which is more psycho-linguistic than pedagogic and which does not necessarily involve confronting the learner with a number of languages. For this reason those promoting éveil aux langues prefer to use another term in English – Awakening to languages – to describe this approach.

Awakening to languages today - a Powerpoint by Michel Candelier and Ildikó Lörincz (6th EDiLiC Conference, Györ, July 2016)

Integrated didactic approach to languages

The Integrated didactic approach to languages (IDAL, also known as Integrated language teaching and learning) corresponds to what some English-speaking authors call a Crosslinguistic Approach to Second / Foreign Language Teaching, Crosslinguistic Pedagogy or Teaching for Transfer. It is directed towards helping learners to establish links between a limited number of languages, which are taught within the school curriculum. IDAL works on the central principle advocated by pluralistic approaches of capitalising on what is already known in order to access what is less known : the language of schooling for accessing the first foreign language, which can then be used as a springboard to facilitate the acquisition of a second foreign language etc., keeping in mind that mutual support between languages goes in both directions.This approach does not neglect the home languages of the learners either, especially when they are explicitly taught.

In La didactique intégrée des langues - Apprendre une langue avec d'autres langues (Candelier & Manno 2023, 27) an updated and expanded definition of IDAL can be found, which takes account of the general development of this approach over the previous ten years: “Integrated language teaching and learning [= the Integrated didactic approach to languages] aims to help learners make connections between a language they are learning and other languages present in their developing repertoire. In addition, Integrated language teaching aims to help learners make connections with language learning and processing strategies developed in relation to other languages.” In this definition, the languages on which learning is based extend beyond those taught in school: they are those in the learner's repertoire. In addition to transfers from one language to another, this definition also includes transfers of strategies that have been built up during previous language learning. Diagram.

IDAL can be applied to the teaching of any language, whatever its status. It also applies to bilingual teaching whenever languages are brought into contact.

Like the approach Intercomprehension between related languages, IDAL often uses activities based on similarities between languages. However, unlike this approach, IDAL does not focus solely on written or oral comprehension of other languages, but also aims at the development of production skills.