Teaching Georgian in a Multinational Classroom: Challenges and Strategies from a University Teacher’s Perspective

Abstract

Teaching Georgian to international university students requires more than the presentation of grammar and vocabulary. The teacher must make an unfamiliar writing system accessible, manage substantial differences in linguistic background, connect classroom language with students’ immediate academic and social needs, and create participation conditions in which learners are willing to speak before they feel fully accurate. This practitioner-perspective article examines recurrent challenges in a multilingual Georgian-language classroom and proposes strategies that can be adapted in university programs serving international students. The discussion draws on reflective teaching experience and scholarship on multilingual education, intercultural language learning, translanguaging, scaffolding, and task-based instruction. Five areas receive particular attention: learning the Georgian script, structural distance between Georgian and learners’ previously known languages, uneven proficiency within one class, anxiety and participation, and the transfer of classroom knowledge to authentic communication. The article argues for a staged, meaning-oriented approach that combines explicit instruction with visual scaffolding, multilingual mediation, predictable interaction routines, medical and campus-based scenarios, formative assessment, and systematic recycling. Its central claim is that multilingual diversity can be treated as a pedagogical resource. Drawing on learners’ linguistic repertoires while progressively increasing their use of Georgian can create opportunities to practise functional communication and participate in the university and wider community.

Keywords: Georgian as a foreign language, multinational classroom, multilingual pedagogy, international students, university teaching, intercultural communication

DOI: 10.7176/JEP/17-9-07

Publication date: September 30th 2026