PLURILINGUALISM IN TEACHER EDUCATION FOR MULTICULTURAL SCHOOLS AND KINDERGARTENS IN ESTONIA

Plurilingualism as the principle and the aim of education policies presupposes that all teachers know several languages, are aware of particularities of multicultural educational environments and can apply methodology of content and language integrated learning. This paper will discuss how these principles of plurilingualism are realized in teacher education in Estonia which is a multicultural country inhabited by representatives of more than 100 ethnicities with Estonians being the title nation. The Russian language is spoken by almost 30% of the 1.3 million population of the country. Such an ethnic and linguistic composition of the society puts forward a number of challenges for the Estonian system of education – to its system of general education with 20% of it working in Russian, to tertiary education and to teacher education in particular. One of the ways of meeting the requirements set to plurilingual teacher education is the implementation of a trilingual teacher education model with the focus being placed on content and language integrated learning (CLIL) and with language immersion being a part of it. By analyzing various aspects of the model the authors will present the advantages and challenges of its realization.