Description:
Linguistic diversity and multilingualism on the part of individuals are aprerequisite and a constitutive condition of enabling people to live togetherin a world of growing heterogeneity. Foreign language teaching plays animportant part in democratic education because it can be seen as a trainingin respecting otherness and developing an intercultural, non-ethnocentricperception and attitude. This is all the more important because of the neces-sity of integrating children from migrant families into school life.My article argues that language education policy has to take this per-spective into account, i.e., of establishing a planned diversification so thatpupils (and their parents) will not feel satisfied with learning English only,but also become motivated to learn languages of their own neighbourhood,such as migrant and minority languages. However, in order to make use ofthe linguistic resources in the classroom, relating it to the democratic impetusof foreign language education, it is necessary to revise existing languagepolicies and to develop a multilingual perspective for all educational institutions.