Building on other projects from the Pluri-L AppEALS lab, this study was designed to consolidate the results from our developmental research and apply them to additional language (Lx) teacher education. The ultimate goal of this project was to apply our crosslinguistic-communicative teaching model to various contexts and language combinations. In light of research conducted in plurilingualism, we determined to first implement the model in formal settings where the target language is typologically close to one of the learners’ known languages. For example, native speakers of French (L1) who have already learned English (L2) and are enrolled in a German (L3) course will be able to use their knowledge of English to better understand German. The same applies to native speakers of English (L1) who have already learned Spanish (L2) and are enrolled in a French (L3) course, because the parallels drawn with Spanish are likely to support French acquisition.

We have selected two formal settings for our study. The first formal setting was a German course taught in Quebec, a French-speaking Canadian province where English classes are mandatory from elementary school onward. The second was a French course taught in Texas, a state of the United States where the majority of the educated English-speaking population learned Spanish in school and is exposed to the language on a day-to-day basis thanks to a large Hispanic population. In both groups, students of German and of French had no exposure to the target language outside of the formal classroom settings.

The first phase of this project, aimed at evaluating the model to ensure that its application met the needs of education stakeholders (learners and teachers), has been completed and has resulted in several publications (see Jasor, Woll & Paquet, submitted; Woll & Paquet, in press; Wouters, Paquet, Woll & Jasor, 2023). The second phase, aimed at implementing the model in the classroom practices of teachers at various academic levels, has given rise to a larger scale implementation project (more details to come).