The emergence and coming into being of multilingual and multicultural education under the conditionsof traditional monolingual thinking

The paper is devoted to the processes of emergence, development and coming into being of bilingual and multilingual education, as well as factors influencing the effectiveness of language education. Multilingual education has a rather long history, and is not a result of the growth of linguistic and cultural self-consciousness and a need for interlingual and intercultural communication in the second half of the 20 century. Unlike most of the European countries, where with the introduction of the compulsory education, the linguistic policies, with the exception of a few multinational states, were directed at supporting monolingualism, in the USA a number of bilingual schools were opened for the children of European immigrants. The organization of bilingual schools allowed ethnic communities to preserve and maintain the cultural and linguistic heritage of the countries of their origin. After the First World War bilingual teaching was ousted from the system of national education as the result of the growth of anti-immigrant sentiments in the American society. Next, the paper presents the analysis of the reasons for the revival of the bilingual education in the USA in the 70s of the 20 century, and of the reasons for the failure of the bilingual education for language minorities on the basis of a number of legislative acts passed by the US Congress in the 60s and 70s. The American legislation on introducing bilingual education was a result of the reaction to the political movements for civil rights. The theoretical basis of bilingual education, which was based on using first the native tongue as the medium of instruction and then changing over to the second language, was provided by the theoreticians of the "supportive education in the mother tongue". Bilingual education, however, did not lead to the expected results, and in 2002 the action of the bilingual education law was discontinued. The causes for the bilingual education experiment failure are based in the rejection of early foreign language teaching, which led to artificial delay in the native language education and to depriving students of the advantages of early language teaching in achieving balanced multilingualism. Another conclusion made in the paper concerns the importance of a favourable supportive language environment in providing for the development of balanced multilingualism, which can be achieved through accumulating a rich language experience by participating in diverse language activities in an unconstrained informal setting. Next, the paper considered the experience in organizing multilingual and multicultural education in Europe. In the process of economic and political integration of Europe, multilingualism and multiculturalism were declared the leading principles. Linguists and researchers in the field of language teaching methodology were given the task of looking for ways of achieving individual multilingualism and multiculturalism in the European society. On the basis of an analysis of the organization of multilingual education in the world, the paper proposes a number of measures in developing multilingual programs aimed at balanced multilingualism, including early language teaching, creating afavour-renderable supportive language environment and using the Content and Subject Integrated Teaching and Learning, based on the use of the second language as the medium of instruction in non-language subjects

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