APLNG 491 Second Language Acquisition_ Tianyu Fu, Qiannan Zhang, Yuanyuan Wang

Bilingual and Multilingual Education at the University

I.

Introduction

Aim of the study

All the issues discussed in this chapter are under a particular context that an area in Europe where the
minority language is Basque while the majority language is Spanish, so it is facing a bilingual
situation: Basque versus Spanish. However, with the wide spread of English as a language of
international communication, the situation changed radically: the minority language Basque together
with the majority language Spanish versus English. As a result, the situation transfers from
bilingualism to multilingualism.
Given that we are majored in Teaching English as a Second Language, our priority is language
teaching and language education, so in this paper, we aim to take a close look at the process of that
transfer: the monolingual education to the bilingual education to the multilingual education. And two
questions are answered:
1. During the process of transfer, what challenges, difficulties are taking place?
2. What counter-solutions we have or we may have to solve the problems or ease the situation?
Related theory
Basically, this paper illustrates the fact of language use in the Basque area, and for the author
himself, there is little SLA theory has been included. However, we still want to refer and discuss
some theories in our paper, among which are the sociocultural theory, the universal grammar, the
relationship between acquisition and learning claimed by Krashen. There are also several other
theories related to these major issues, like socialization and social identity.
Background information
Nowadays, teaching through English at university is more and more popular, and there are several

APLNG 491 Second Language Acquisition_ Tianyu Fu, Qiannan Zhang, Yuanyuan Wang

specific factors to promote the use of English at the university level. In the first place, English is the
main language of science and technology. The majority of the scientific papers and work are
translated in English rather than other languages, and on scientific conferences, most speakers use
English to communicate with the scholars from all over the world. Some people even claim that the
English-speaking country scholars have advantages over non-English-speaking country scholars.
Secondly, students mobility has increased in the last years. In European countries, more and more
international students prefer to be taught in English rather than the language used in the country
where they come from. Last reason is that the English proficiency is an advantage when looking for a
job.
Reasoning
With the appearance of multilingualism, the instructional language in the classroom has more than
one choice and in the next part, we will focus on the use of Basque at the University of the Basque
Country.
In order to keep language diversity and the gradual introduction of the Basque, the government came
up with plenty of plans. In 1981, the Basque Language Service started to support the publication of
textbooks and the teaching of Basque to teachers, students, and staffs. The University of the Basque
Country has developed several plans for the use of Basque at the university, for instance, to use
Basque for all the courses in some studies, to use Basque for the first years only in all the studies or
to have only compulsory courses in Basque but not necessarily optional courses. Meanwhile, the use
of Basque gained greatly legal support, for example, the University of the Basque Country has been
developed as a bilingual university and its status states that Basque and Spanish are the official
languages of the university. According to the status, all official documents have to be bilingual and

APLNG 491 Second Language Acquisition_ Tianyu Fu, Qiannan Zhang, Yuanyuan Wang

the university will give special attention to the scientific and technical aspects of Basque language
and culture.
II. Difficulties and Challenges
If the Basque University wants to promote the use of Basque as an instructional language, it has to
face and solve some challenges. Basically, there are two major challenges. One is not having
sufficient number of teachers and the other one is lacking of enough teaching materials. However,
the situation becomes more complex in the university level because of the larger number of courses
provided by all departments and the higher specialization requirement for the teaching staff. As a
result, it seems to have more detailed aspects to be considered and we personally, divided them into
two categories--inside aspects and outside aspects.
Teaching staff, students, supporting staff, materials are all more related to the Basques university
itself, consisting the inside aspects.
Teaching Staff
Teaching staff is one of the major challenges at the university level. From the Chart 1.1 we can make
a conclusion that only 35.1% teachers in the University of Basque are bilingual and can teach in
Basque and the subjects with the largest number of Basques teachers are Law and Social Science. On
the contrast, Health Science has the least number of teaching staff with an ability of using Basques as
an instructional language.
To solve this problem, the university has taken into account several positive actions. Retirements and
new contracts is the first choice. Through retirements and new contracts, there will be 57 jobs created
every year for those teachers who can teach in Basque and by the end of 2012, the number of
teaching staff who can use Basque to teach will reach 43%. Besides, if somebody wants to apply for

APLNG 491 Second Language Acquisition_ Tianyu Fu, Qiannan Zhang, Yuanyuan Wang

a job of teaching in Basque, he needs to get a certification proving the proficiency of Basque first,
and another thing that may help is the financial support from the government. But till now, there are
still two things needed to be taken into consideration. One is about creating a large scale plan and the
other one is about increasing the specialization of teaching staff. The last action is to open free
classes and special workshops to help teachers have a better understanding about Basque.
Besides the problem related to the number of teaching staff, there are still two more things. The first
one is about the low rate of holding a PhD degree of Basque teaching staff and the rate is much lower
than those who teach the class in Spanish. Two ways to minors this phenomenon, one is leaving of
absence for staff to finish their PhD and the other one is to hire PhD staff only in the future. The
other problem is about the heavy burdens of those Basque teaching staffs since they need to teach
more credits, more different subjects, teaching at different faculties, and teaching mainly undergraduation courses. Supports from the Basque Language Service can help to mediate such problem
to a certain degree.

1.1
Students
There is a basic requirement for those students who want to take a class in Basque, that they should
have Basque as the language of instruction in their pre-primary, primary and secondary school. To
help those students who do not achieve this requirement, the university is expecting to open two

APLNG 491 Second Language Acquisition_ Tianyu Fu, Qiannan Zhang, Yuanyuan Wang

optional subjects. One is about norms and use of Basque in the daily life and the other one is about
terminology and professional use of Basque.
Supporting Staff
There is about 1600 supporting staff in the University of Basque now and they work at various jobs,
such as librarians, lawyer, secretaries, translator, technicians, computer experts and clerks. The
requirement of having more supporting staff understanding Basque in the university level becomes
more important and serious than it in the secondary education, because of the higher relative number
of supporting staff and the their more contact with teachers and researchers.
From Chart 2.1, we can find the basic language profiles for the supporting staff and the current
situation of supporting staff in the university. But with the statistics from the university, it comes out
that nearly a half of supporting staff cannot speak Basque at all and only 17% supporting staffs have
a higher level quality of using Basque which is corresponding to the profiles 3 and 4. Three positive
actions are taken to change such situation. There will be free classes during the working hours,
special courses and workshops meeting with specialization and also an online program 'AZPidazki'.

2.1
Materials
At the moment, there are only 40% books and 20% journals are written in Basque, and finding

APLNG 491 Second Language Acquisition_ Tianyu Fu, Qiannan Zhang, Yuanyuan Wang

enough material becomes more difficult and emergent with subject like experimental sciences,
technical studies and health sciences. And those materials with Basque version are either original
edited or translated from other languages. Then with those translated version materials, two problems
occur. Mistakes may happen and results in an inaccuracy during the translation process and long time
translation working may cause the materials out of date which is useless. Even though, in the future,
30 more books planning to be translated and half of them will be in Technical Studies. Whats more,
the university is trying to publish the material in an electronic format and some of them have already
been published.
On the other hand, research and the use of Basque which received more influence from the outside
world contribute the outside aspects.
Research
Generally speaking, researches did in Basque are not very common and it can be revealed from the
number of PhD thesis did in Basque versus those in Spanish in the past, which is 15 versus 200. To
mediate such situation, a series book named ZIO is created for scientific research and a magazine on
research for secondary school students is also on its way.
Within the spread of English as a global language, it also influences the research in the Basque.
Basically, the thesis written in English has a similar or lower number comparing with those did in
Basque. However, when the research needs to relate to researches conducted in other countries, the
impact of English is potentially bigger. Moreover, publications in international journals are in most
cases in English which may lead to unfairness.
Use of Basque
It is a challenge to enhance the use of Basque in every day communication. The actions of putting

APLNG 491 Second Language Acquisition_ Tianyu Fu, Qiannan Zhang, Yuanyuan Wang

Basque at the same level of Spanish have been taken from the range of official level, like in all
official documents to the university level, like signs at the university, on the university website and
all its resources.
Critiques in this part
In this part of the chapter, the author spends much time to figure out some main challenges for using
Basque as an instructional language and provide several positive solutions. It seems that the author
has already revealed the most important issues, but when we think them deeper, there are still more
aspects need to be discussed.
First of all, in the paper, the author does not mention how those teachers, supporting staff and
students who can speak Basque now, learn or require their Basque. From the paper, we think, besides
Basque, they could also speak Spanish (since it is the official language of this area). Then the
question comes out, whether they acquire Basque as their first language corresponding to what
Chomsky said language acquisition device or UG, or they learn it as a second language. This will
make a difference in their motivation for using or receiving Basque as an instructional language. If
Basque is their first language and they acquire it in a natural way, they will feel more comfortable
and have a preference to use it in the classroom. If they learn it, according to Krashens theory, there
is a gap between the language learned in a formal setting with the language acquired in the society
and it is non-transferable so that their motivation may be reduced. They may more prefer to choose
those classes teaching in their native language even though they may have received education in
Basque for their secondary education.
Secondly, the aim of giving out those classes for learning Basque is not clear. On one side, the school
is opening classes for students in the academic level. Does this mean that they only want students to

APLNG 491 Second Language Acquisition_ Tianyu Fu, Qiannan Zhang, Yuanyuan Wang

use Basque in the classroom, and is there any way to push them using Basque for their daily
socialization? On the other hand, for the supporting staff, what exactly outcomes the school wants to
get from the study of Basque, communicative capacity or simple terminology understanding?
Last but least, we really expect to see more detailed mediation with theoretical supporting to help
change and improve the current situation, especially on how they will organize and perform their
Basque language learning classes.
III. Data extension
In this paper, the author also argues about the multilingualism at the university in the Basque
Country. In this area, the minority or official language is Basque while the majority language is
Spanish. With the globalization of English and the desire to increase mobility, schools begin to
emphasize on English communication and some courses are required to be offered in English and all
compulsory courses are offered in Basque and Spanish. To foster mobility and participation in the
European Higher Education Area (EHEA), schools prepare students to study in universities in other
countries and go to the European labor market. Besides, the multilingualism project developed in this
area is mainly for secondary education and postgraduate level, probably because those students in
postgraduate level would use more English. Of course, schools do not just limit in English learning,
but also French and German teaching for students. The multilingual environment will be formed and
students have access to other languages. There is no doubt that students would have lots of benefits.
For example, they will have a broad vision and achieve the language diversity and the culture behind
this language. Those who have access to other languages would be more competitive if they go to the
job market. More and more employers would like to hire people who have a second language
background since it is beneficial for cooperating with international companies.

APLNG 491 Second Language Acquisition_ Tianyu Fu, Qiannan Zhang, Yuanyuan Wang

Case 1: Advantages of multilingualism

Besides the multilingualism talked above, we also collect some data in other areas. We have a friend
who is originally from Brunei, and she came to the United States when she was 12 years old. She
shared some of her language learning experience with us. The majority language there is Chinese and
the official or minority language is Malay. She told us that, most of the courses were offered in
Malay and Chinese at the very beginning. They even had Chinese class offered by a native Chinese
speaker. She communicated in Chinese in both her community and home. But with the grade
growing up, they had more courses taught in English and the Chinese was only used for Chinese
class. Sometimes, they had teachers from other countries, like Philippines, so they had no other
choice but to be taught in English. She mentioned that one course was offered only in Malay. It was a
course about how to behave appropriately, some Malay culture, politics, morality and tradition.
When it came to talk about the benefits of being in such multilingual education, she said that it is
easy to understand a different culture and can be tolerant all different cultural issues.
Case 2: Disadvantages of multilingualism
In addition to those advantages of being in the multilingual education, there are also some
drawbacks. For example, English teaching in Tibet causes several severe problems. The medium of
instruction there is Mandarin instead of Tibetan, which will increase students burden to learn
English since Mandarin is their second language to some degree. Additionally, our friend from
Brunei also mentioned that she was very confused when she received three languages at the same
time. Thats hard for a young kid to learn more than two different languages at the same time.
Moreover, those schools in Tibet need to hire more English teachers from outside areas, and most of
them have little knowledge about Tibet. When teachers dont have any Tibetan background, it will

APLNG 491 Second Language Acquisition_ Tianyu Fu, Qiannan Zhang, Yuanyuan Wang

block off the emotional communication between teachers and students, and this will influence their
learning motivation too.
IV. Related to the theory of SLA
Social identity
Language cannot be isolated from the society, and the use of language is inseparable from
communications and interactions among people. Everyone who gets involved in an interaction would
generate an ongoing chain in which people could make conversation. Identity of a person can also be
able to shape the context itself. And at the same time, the social context would generate impact on
people who are making conversation, and shape positions to them. So the identity of a person and the
whole context would influence each other and be shaped by the other. Similarly, sociocultural
theories indicate that learning is a social process, where participants engage in culturally-valued
activities and use cultural tools. All of these indicate an intense relationship between the social
contexts and how people identify themselves in such context.
These data above illustrate how the social identity is conceptualized in the whole social context. It is
like a sandwich, and those second language learners are in the middle, and their native language and
the target language are located on both sides. Their identities are not static, but moving based on the
social context. We once talked with our friend, who is from Brunei. She insists that she is a Chinese,
since her family is from China and they speak a Chinese dialect. However, she grew up in the United
States and received American culture naturally. When she hangs out with her American friends, she
is an American.
Multilingual speakers tend to devalue their own language knowledge and consequently undermine
their own legitimacy as multilingual. For example, I remember that when I was learning English, I

APLNG 491 Second Language Acquisition_ Tianyu Fu, Qiannan Zhang, Yuanyuan Wang

sometimes would forget how my fabulous Chinese background is and think all kinds of American
culture are worth learning. That is really dangerous. There is a paper about social identity, in which
one English language learner from Taiwan said she thought American English is that one thing she
would pursue. She does not care her native language, and believes that if she can speak English like a
native speaker, that will be awesome and this can also improve her social status. Its reasonable to
learn a second language and its true that it will be probably more competitive when they go to the
job market. But, second language learners do not need to throw away their self-esteem coming from
their native language.
Sociocultural theory
When it comes to sociocultural theory, we are interested in the mediation that approaches for helping
students understand new knowledge. So if teachers want their students acquire more knowledge, they
need to think about how to make the mediation more effective. Most people tend to use their first
language to mediate their second language learning. However, in the Case 2, those Tibetans who
learn English with Mandarin teachers cannot work in an effective approach, since using a second
language to understand another language sounds difficult and students cannot be motivated well
enough to learn a third language. That would be harder for them to develop the ZDP since they
would meet more obstacles, even in the negotiation process with their teachers.
V. Evaluation
In this part, several drawbacks of this chapter are elaborated. The most severe problem is that all the
issues are discussed from the perspective of teachers or the authorities, instead of the students.
Consequently, it lacks of statistical support from students, like students interviews, questionnaires,
and the analysis of students needs. Students are the major participants involved in this issue, but

APLNG 491 Second Language Acquisition_ Tianyu Fu, Qiannan Zhang, Yuanyuan Wang

they gain such little attention in this chapter.

In order to spread the use of Basque as instruction, the University of Basque makes several courses
taught in Basque. However, it lacks of detailed encouragement for students who enroll courses in
Basque, for instance, whether they can be rewarded by getting extra credits compared with students
enrolled in Spanish-taught courses. Meanwhile, for the teachers teach in Basque, it fails to mention
any encouragement either. We believe that the university can come up with plenty of inspirations like
job promotion, increasing salary, social welfare, or exchange opportunities.
VI. Conclusion
During the transfer from monolingual education to bilingual education to multilingual education, the
University of Basque came across plenty of challenges internal and external, and they are trying to
help resolve those problems. Nevertheless, some of the solutions are still needed further discussion
and may relate to more theory in details.

Reference:
Cenoz,J.(n.d.).BilingualandMultilingualEducationattheUniversity.InTowardsMultilingualEducationBasque
EducationalResearchfromanInternationalPerspective(pp.213230).