The project Multilingualism in Teacher Education (MultiTEd) was launched in 2018 to bring together academics from different national backgrounds interested in how teacher education programmes prepare pre-service teachers for multilingual classroom realities (Wernicke et al. 2021). Overall, eight different national contexts were examined to describe and discuss how ITE addresses linguistic diversity and multilingualism as part of teacher education curricula. Through various workshops, meetings and knowledge exchanges, a wide range of challenges emerged. In an attempt to compare the participants’ programmes within their different multilingual realities, it became evident that a number of categories and patterns cannot easily be adopted for different national contexts. In this presentation, two examples of such variables are presented and discussed: 1) understanding multilingualism, and 2) assessing formality. First, it is somewhat self-evident that multilingual realities and multilingual environments differ across the world. Mirroring Coulmas (2018) claim that “one multilingualism is not like all others”, the project quickly exposed that conceptualisations of multilingualism and multilingual learners differ immensely between national contexts and that conceptual groundwork is needed to commensurate these different orientations. A framework that demystifies terminology and brings clarity of different types of societal multilingualism was hence developed (Schroedler 2021). In this paper, the inclusive perspective of this model will be critically discussed in relation to the ways in which multilingualism is an important topic for ITE. A second major challenge in comparing pre-service teacher education approaches for multilingual learners concerns how to assess teacher education curricula on a formal level. Comparisons between different national and local ITE programmes with regard to multilingualism demonstrated that an enormous degree of micro-differentiation is in order when capturing the size (measured in CP/ECTS) and the formality (level of obligation) of relevant curricular components (Hammer et al. 2021). In summary, project results show that when comparing and critically discussing differences between ITE programmes, typological advancement and terminological precision are indispensable, and that only through profound international collaboration research into the advancement of approaches to prepare teachers for multilingual learners can succeed.

Coulmas, F. (2018) An Introduction to Multilingualism. Language in a Changing World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hammer, S., Hansen, A. & Wernicke, M. (2021) Diversity in a Teacher Preparation for Multilingual Contexts. In Wernicke, M. et al. Preparing Teachers to Work with Multilingual Learners. 216-230. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Schroedler, T. (2021). What is Multilingualism? Towards an Inclusive Understanding. In Wernicke, M. et al. Preparing Teachers to Work with Multilingual Learners. 17-37. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Wernicke, M., Hammer, S., Hansen, A. & Schroedler, T. (eds.) (2021). Preparing Teachers to Work with Multilingual Learners. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.