Mother’s tongue vs. mother tongue vs. language of schooling

At the risk of being fired from my job as a “foreign-language educator”, this article reveals that I am a terrible language learner! Indeed, after living for significant amounts of time in numerous countries, I am fully operative in only English and am not even operational in my mother’s tongue! To justify my non-multilingual-ness, I bare my language-learning life as a case-study which might indicate that, while being schooled in a dominant language has many advantages, this choice risks reducing our need to use other languages, potentially depriving us of more multidimensional life experiences. Well-meaning parents, beware! To redeem myself (and keep my job), I discuss “language-moments” from my childhood to illustrate how language, be it a foreign language or even disciplinary academic language in L1, shapes school experiences in different ways, for all. Indeed, for those of us who are not experts of a disciplinary-community (i.e. all students), even in L1, disciplinary-discourses sound like foreign languages. I suggest that insights delineated through bilingual education are relevant for cultivating academic literacies (and academic confidence) in both a target foreign language as well as L1, and offer ten “considerations” plus some strategies I have gained from researching CLIL/EMI.