ELT teachers find themselves working in increasingly multilingual classrooms. To challenge the monolingual bias and promote additive multilingualism, better tools for classroom observations are needed for teachers and supervisors. This presentation introduces the Multilingual Approach to Diversity in Education (MADE) as a tool for instructional design and assessment in multilingual ELT contexts.
As ELT classrooms are becoming increasingly diverse with the influx of work migrants, refugees, and other newcomers, ELT teachers and program administrators need to be prepared to provide high quality education to this changing demographic. In fact, according to the European Commission (2013), teachers in Europe perceive working with multilingual students as one of the most urgent areas for professional development. Consequently, there is a clear need to provide ELT teachers, supervisors, and program administrators working in multilingual contexts with better guidelines for lesson planning and delivery as well as with improved assessment tools. New approaches to language teaching must address and challenge the monolingual bias that continues to dominate many language classrooms (Hall & Cook, 2012), engage learners' whole linguistic repertories (Cenoz & Gorter, 2014), and enact "the multilingual turn" (May, 2014) by promoting multilingualism as a core resource. Some instructional and assessment models already exist, such as the Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol (Echevarría, Vogt, & Short, 2017), which emerged in the U.S. in the context of structured English immersion in K12 and was designed to support English development. In this presentation, we introduce the Multilingual Approach to Diversity in Education (MADE), which was designed specifically to support multilingualism and serve teachers, supervisors, and administrators working in linguistically diverse ELT contexts. The model consists of the following indicators: Classroom as multilingual spaces; Developing and using teaching materials; Interaction and grouping configurations; Language and culture attitudes; Metacognition and metalinguistic awareness; Multiliteracy; Teacher and learner language use. This presentation will introduce an innovative instructional protocol that promotes multilingualism and includes teacher indicators that are research-based and that can be incorporated into contexts with culturally and linguistically diverse groups of learners.
