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From https://www.languagemagazine.com/2018/08/21/mutual-understanding-with-intercomprehension/

Mutual Understanding with Intercomprehension
by Clorinda Donato and Pierre Escudé
August 21, 2018

What if the target language suddenly became multiple languages learned in tandem through a strategy that encouraged students to seek reciprocal, similar, and contrasting patterns with the languages they already knew? In 1913, Jules Ronjat offered a scientific description for this natural and spontaneous strategy to explain the high level of European multilingualism prior to World War I.

He attributed this phenomenon to what he called intercomprehension, which he defined as a speaker’s ability to understand the speech of another speaker who communicated in a dialect of the same language or a related language. While the restrictive nationalistic language policies that emerged after World War I almost definitively curbed plurilingualism and the individual’s multilingual propensity, since the 1970s scholars have worked to reverse this. They have developed Ronjat’s observation about comprehension into a language-learning strategy that has been reaping benefits for students through a number of intercomprehension projects in Europe.

Now intercomprehension has come to the U.S. through a collaboration between California State University, Long Beach and the University of Toulouse II, France, with the support of the Office of Cultural Services, Embassy of France. Just as linguists like Claire Benveniste have revitalized and adapted this method for new audiences of language learners in Europe, intercomprehension has now been tailored to fit the language acquisition profile of a growing majority of American students: those who come to the language classroom and are already bi- if not tri- or even multilingual.

Read the full article at https://www.languagemagazine.com/2018/08/21/mutual-understanding-with-intercomprehension/