**3. Multilingualism as fact or multilingualism as political construct?**

The question is which studies regarding multilingualism should be trusted: those regarding the benefits of multilingualism, or those claiming that monolinguals and multilinguals, or bilinguals and multilinguals can have the same skills? Is multilingualism just a trend supported by the European Commission, and part of the current values regarding diversity and multiculturalism, and respect for these, or is it more?

The answers could be given on the basis of personal experience of both students and teachers. The answers could also be given due to individual skills, since certain persons seem to be more gifted than others at learning foreign languages. One should consider the factors that can influence the results of all the experiments presented in the research papers, and also the limitations pointed out by the authors of the studies. At this point, studies with various groups of learners that are multilingual may seem dependent on other variables, while evidence coming from studying the brain of multilinguals can seem more convincing, as physical evidence can be given. For instance, according to [59], native languages and languages learned later activate the same areas of the brain and use the same neural resources. However, it is not known "whether the brain processes these languages in the same way or not." Such findings could help support the arguments that knowledge of previously known languages could help learners in their study of a new language. Yet, researchers have not agreed whether all languages can be processed by the brain in a similar way. This could suggest that a multilingual may not learn any other language with more ease.

After all, what is convincing evidence depends on the perception of the person looking for evidence, whether the respective person is more inclined to believe in studying the behavior and skills of a group of persons or is more inclined to look for physical, scientific proof that can be explained by looking at the human physical brain. Most likely, most foreign language teachers will judge these matters based on their own experience with teaching groups of multilingual, bilingual, or monolingual students. They will take action regarding the way they can teach their students efficiently considering the situation at the very moment.

In some cases, multilingualism depends on an individual's language learning skills, more than on anything else. What is more, some teaching methods can prove to be more efficient than others, and more suitable for learners to better understand the respective language. In other cases, knowing more languages can be an imposition regarding the place where someone lives, if there are several official languages.

Schools and universities are reflections of the rules of the culture and society students and teachers live, and so certain languages can be studied.

Therefore, multilingualism can be the result of various circumstances: values imposed by the European Comission, by the culture someone lives in, as well as of personal preferences.
