Abstract
This introductory chapter is meant to serve as a background for a more thorough consideration of psycholinguistic issues related to multilingualism which will be discussed in the subsequent chapters of the present work. In the following subsections an attempt will be made to explore various aspects of the multifaceted concept of multilingualism. The underlying objective of the chapter is to show that multilingualism is a separate phenomenon from bilingualism since, as Herdina and Jessner argue, it not only produces a quantitative shift but, above all, it leads to a substantial change of quality in the speaker’s language system(s).
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Notes
- 1.
The term “tertiary education” (also “tertiary languages”) has been adopted by some linguists to refer to foreign languages learned after the first foreign language, i.e. as one’s second, third, fourth, etc. foreign language (cf. Hufeisen 1991, 2004).
- 2.
Cf. The European Commission's White Paper Teaching and Learning: Towards the Learning Society (1995) considers that European citizens should be proficient in three community languages and recommends foreign language teaching at pre-school level in order to allow for second foreign languages in secondary school.
- 3.
Cf. A New Framework Strategy for Multilingualism [Brussels, 22.11.2005 COM (2005) 596 final].
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Szubko-Sitarek, W. (2015). Beyond Bilingualism: Issues in Multilingualism. In: Multilingual Lexical Recognition in the Mental Lexicon of Third Language Users. Second Language Learning and Teaching. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-32194-8_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-32194-8_1
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