Beyond multilingualism. A view from the past

The 21st century is often dubbed as the era of multilingualism in applied linguistics and language teaching, in contrast to the previous century, when the monolingual approach prevailed. The importance of this paradigm shift cannot be overestimated as it is also enshrined in the recently compiled Companion to the CEFR. However, the multilingual approach has a long history and arguably underpins several language teaching textbooks that rely on the learners’ L1 as a bridge to the L2 and as such are associated with the often reviled Grammar Translation method. Recent research has shown that the negative portrayals of L1 use and translation as featured in historical language teaching materials are based on second-hand information, and close analyses of these pedagogical materials may provide a different picture. Against this background, this article focuses on a corpus of English language materials published in Italy in the 20th century, an area of investigation that is still under-researched. The analysis shows that the learners’ L1 – Italian – is extensively exploited across the corpus, although the impact of the monolingual paradigm can be detected in the more recent materials. Several instances were found in the corpus where the L1 acts as a cognitive, cultural as well as linguistic mediation tool, in ways that are not far removed from what is envisaged in the CEFR Companion.