Multicompetence Approaches to Language Proficiency Development in Multilingual Education

Abstract

Due to a significant increase in interest in the phenomenon of multilin-gualism, research on multilingualism and multilingual education has grown over the last two decades. Some influential developments in research on second language acquisition and bilingualism have begun to exert an impact on second language teaching and bi-and multilin-gual education. These concerns include the symbiosis of the hitherto isolated fields of second language learning and bilingualism, the intro-duction of the concept of multicompetence, reflecting a bilingual view of bilingualism, and the application of dynamic systems theory to second language acquisition and multilingualism. After an outline of the Chomskyan concept of language competence, these new developments will be described in more detail and the most important areas of research which have provided contributions to the development of multicompetence approaches to language proficiency will be examined. A central theme of the paper is that multilingual edu-cation can only be successful if the cognitive potential of multilingual-ism is explicitly acknowledged on the societal level. The concept of language competence was introduced into linguistics by Chomsky (1965), who was one of the first linguists to develop an explicit theory of competence. His theory of competence can be seen as marked by two characteristics, that is, first, the distinction between native-speaker competence and native-speaker performance, and sec-ond, the assumption that competence is not immediately accessible to the native speaker. Chomsky (1965, p. 3) stated that '[l]inguistic theory is concerned primarily with an ideal speaker-listener, in a completely homogeneous speech-community, who knows its language perfectly and is unaffected by such grammatically irrelevant conditions as memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest, and errors (random or characteristic) in applying his knowledge of the lan-guage in actual performance.' Furthermore he noted that '[l]inguistic