The change of paradigm from a traditional second language acquisition (henceforth SLA) perspective to multilingualism has contributed enormously to developing the field of multilingual research. However, findings derived from research on third language acquisition (henceforth TLA) and multilingual education has not been applied in the classroom setting. However, teacher training programmes devoted to deal with the multilingual factor in current language pedagogies have been absent in Europe (De Angelis, 2011) and have been dominated by the English-only policy (Otwinoswka, 2017). For this reason, teachers may have preconceived ideas about various issues in third language (henceforth L3) learning and teaching, especially in multilingual contexts. …show more content…
As far as we know, no previous research has explored pre-service infant and primary education teachers’ beliefs about multilingual education. It seems relevant to see whether their beliefs are in line with existing literature or they are totally misinformed. Additionally, our study tries not only to explore prospective teachers’ beliefs about multilingualism and multilingual pedagogy but also to ascertain the impact of instruction on issues such as the linguistic and cognitive benefits of multilingualism and the earlier the better …show more content…
Multilingualism is the norm in almost every single place of the world and current governments are challenged to implement multilingual policies in educational contexts. In Europe, transnational agencies, such as The European Commission, encourage all their citizens the learning of their mother tongue and two other languages. As a result, multilingual education programmes have been on the rise in the last two decades. As proposed by Cenoz and Gorter (2015, p. 2), multilingual education could be defined as “the use of two or more languages in education, provided that schools aim at multilingualism and multiliteracy”. In the case of Spain where several languages coexist in the bilingual regions of Spain, multilingual programmes combine the use of the national state language (i.e. Spanish), the regional language (e.g. Catalan in the Valencian Community) and the international language of communication (i.e.