Bilingual education: the road to multilingualism

Bilingual education: the road to multilingualism Julijana Vučo, Katarina Zavišin University of Belgrade Faculty of Philology Summary Globalisation emphasizes the importance of foreign languages by influencing the development of national strategies for learning languages, thus contributing to conservation or harmonization of language ecological balance in the world. The increasing attention given to language issues in Europe resulted from the intention to overcome numerous problems related to language, communication, interaction and multi-layered international cooperation and understanding in the context of ethnic, religious and cultural differences on global level, but also to promote the integration processes enhanced by various forms of mobility. What also contributes to this is an overall democratization of public life and raising awareness in different minority groups, as well as parallel processes of globalization, localization and glocalization: comparison, permeation, survival and adaptation of local environment to global context. At the same time, there are concerns based on the prejudice that globalization trends could endanger citizens' needs at individual and local level of identification with their people, country, religion, cultural specificities and so on. In the area of foreign language teaching policy there have been inappropriate reactions to the "danger" threatening the dominant language and culture that are allegedly jeopardized by the presence of other cultures and languages in a formal education system and environment. Bilingual education (in Serbia since 2004) promotes multilingualism, with the belief that it contributes to overcoming linguistic, cultural and communication barriers and develops tolerance. This paper, as an appendix to the introduction of bilingual teaching, interprets the results of research on the importance of learning foreign languages, cultural and linguistic bias in students of bilingual and regular classes. The aim of the paper is to identify similarities and differences in the attitudes of bilingual and regular students.