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Hello everyone, This is an interesting topic and I will share my thoughts. I am multilingual: I speak English, Spanish, Portuguese and I am familiar with other languages. So I am an advocate for multilingualism. However, I am not an advocate for transforming the ESOL classroom into a multilingual one, for it would no longer be ESOL. Yes, it may be welcoming for students if their teachers learnt some pleasantries in their own languages. But that is not the reason they go to your classroom, they go to learn English. The only time I really see multilingualism being helpful is for beginner learners - and even this is debatable. After this initial stage, we should avoid as much as possible their native language; if they keep falling back to converse in their own language and we regularly permit this, it will prevent them from hitting i+1 as it were, they will not progress. The other point is, based on what I read, some have talked about this being helpful for a group of students from Eritrea. When you have a class of people from one place who share the same language, learning 10 words / phrases is simple, but when you have a class of 30 ESOL students, each from a different country, each with a different language, the amount of words and phrases to learn becomes much more challenging. It is not impossible to learn vocabulary from so many languages, but is this a good use of teacher's time? Or could it be better spent on other forms of CPD, or student assistance? My answer is simple, as an English teacher, my priority is my students' learning of English. Saying bonjour, hola, oi, salaam, ni hao, or konichiwa may be pleasant, but in reality, that was an opportunity lost to practise an English greeting and it does not bring us any closer to learning English. Best regards, Shaun Gurmin BA (Hons) PGCE CELTA MInstLM MSET *********************************** ESOL-Research is a forum for researchers and practitioners with an interest in research into teaching and learning ESOL. ESOL-Research is managed by James Simpson at the Centre for Language Education Research, School of Education, University of Leeds. To join or leave ESOL-Research, visit http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/ESOL-RESEARCH.html To contact the list owner, send an email to [log in to unmask]