Plurilingual tasks in TESOL: Improving learners’ emotionality

Current Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) practices are often anchored in monolingual and monocultural ideologies that focus solely on the cognitive dimension of language learning. Unaware of the term plurilingualism, learners may nevertheless resort to plurilingual strategies to express different emotions and navigate language differences. On the one hand, the impact of emotions on language learning has been documented; similarly, there is evidence on the positive impact of plurilingualism on language acquisition among learners. However, there is little knowledge on the role of plurilingualism in improving learners’ emotional well-being and the consequent implications for language acquisition. For that, this chapter reports on the pedagogical application of five tasks that incorporate plurilingual pedagogy while addressing learners’ emotional well-being, with a focus on design, implementation, and outcomes. The tasks were applied in three undergraduate English language classes in a university in Lebanon. The results reported in this chapter are based on my perspective as an instructor and on students’ feedback. Major outcomes included (1) increased student motivation to learn English, (2) increased confidence using English, and (3) improvement of vocabulary. The benefits were not only academic; the tasks helped create a bond of trust among students and decreased students’ anxiety toward learning English as a second language. Although these TESOL tasks were implemented in a Lebanese context, they could be used in other multilingual contexts. The significance of these tasks goes well beyond the individual level; they highlight the unavoidable hybrid and fluid interconnectedness of individuals as social agents with external social and cultural influences and other social agents.