Assessing metalinguistic awareness in multilingual classes. The ISSBM2022 Case Study

This paper explores the potential of multilingual practices in a multilingual classroom to facilitate the learning of linguistic theoretical tools and the development of metalinguistic thought. To teach linguistics to graduate students from diverse backgrounds, it is essential to provide a solid foundation of basic concepts, such as phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, to establish common ground (Caffarel & Martin, 2010). The class thus becomes a laboratory for a positive feedback loop, in which linguistic examples from different languages become social knowledge and identity recognition for each member of the class. Translanguaging, a technique for teaching a second language (Benes 2015), is a useful tool for metalinguistic assessment. In the present work, the role of multilingualism is described in how it was developed within the "International Summer School on Bilingualism and Multilingualism" (ISSBM 2022) which we organized in 2022 and that gave as a result the contributions collected in this book. Multilingualism played a crucial role in strengthening students' ability to refer to metalinguistic concepts and to deal with them in a scientifically valuable way.