Making all repertoires count: Re‐envisioning TBLT through critical multilingual language awareness

Abstract

As calls intensify for language education to provide authentic exposure to linguistic and cultural diversity—an essential condition for preparing learners to navigate an interconnected world—concerns about the declining status of additional language study reveal an important challenge. At a moment when exclusionary nationalisms are resurging and multilingualism itself is increasingly contested, language education must reaffirm its civic role in cultivating empathy, connection, and equitable participation. Yet the transformative promise of the multilingual turn remains only partially realized, often confined to theory rather than systemic change. At the same time, mainstream language teaching approaches, like task‐based language teaching (TBLT), continue to rest on monolingual assumptions that marginalize learners’ full linguistic repertoires. This Perspectives article argues for a reorientation of the language education field by integrating TBLT's cognitive–interactionist strengths with a critical, translanguaging‐informed view of language use. I outline a unified framework that reconceptualizes tasks as spaces for multilingual meaning‐making, reframes task‐based language assessment around functional adequacy and multilingual performance, and identifies critical multilingual language awareness as the stance needed in teacher education to counter monolingual policy pressures. Together, these domains chart a pathway toward a socially responsive multilingual pedagogy that positions multilingualism not only as a cognitive asset but as a civic commitment and a foundation for educational justice.