The Multilingual Edge of Education

Piet Van Avermaet, Stef Slembrouck, Koen Van Gorp, Sven Sierens, Katrijn Maryns, Piet Van Avermaet, Stef Slembrouck, Koen Van Gorp, Sven Sierens, Katrijn Maryns

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781137548566
• Topic: Langues et linguistique
• Subtopic: Sociolinguistique

This book highlights the need to develop new educational perspectives in which multilingualism is valorised and strategically used in settings and contexts of instruction and learning. Situated in the current educational debate about multilingualism and ethno-linguistic minorities, chapter authors examine the polarised response to heightened linguistic diversity and how the debate is very much premised on binary views of monolingualism and multi- or bilingualism. Contributors argue that the diverse linguistic backgrounds of immigrant and minority students should be considered an asset, instead of being regarded as a barrier to teaching and learning. From its title through to its conclusion, this book underlines the current perspective of multilingualism as possessing cutting edge potential for transforming diverse classrooms into more inhabitable, more equitable and more efficiently organised spaces for learning. This book will be of interest to scholars and researchers in educationallinguistics, applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, anthropological linguistics, pedagogics, educational studies, and educational anthropology.

Part IMultilingualism in Education in a Context of Globalisation: A Status Quaestionis

© The Author(s) 2018

Piet Van Avermaet, Stef Slembrouck, Koen Van Gorp, Sven Sierens and Katrijn Maryns (eds.)The Multilingual Edge of Educationhttps://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54856-6_2

Begin Abstract

Strategies of Multilingualism in Education for Minority Children

Stef Slembrouck¹ , Piet Van Avermaet² and Koen Van Gorp³

(1)

MULTIPLES, Linguistics Department, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium

(2)

Centre for Diversity and Learning & MULTIPLES, Linguistics Department, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium

(3)

Center for Language Teaching Advancement, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA

Stef Slembrouck (Corresponding author)

Piet Van Avermaet

Koen Van Gorp

The research reported here was funded by the Municipality of Ghent. The PIs were Piet Van Avermaet, Stef Slembrouck, Koen Van Gorp and Machteld Verhelst. We are especially grateful to Luc Heyerick, the then Director of the Local Education Department. He initiated the conversations and remained the driving force behind the Home Language in Education project during its implementation. We are also grateful to Anne-Marie Simon-Vandenbergen for her detailed comments on an earlier version of this chapter.

When working on this project Van Gorp was affiliated to the Centre for Language and Education, KU Leuven – University of Leuven.

End Abstract

Introduction

Across Western Europe , policy in the context of education for minority children has in the past 20 years increasingly stressed proficiency in and use of the dominant language as a condition for school success (in most cases, this has meant the ‘national’ language). The use of the children’s first language or home language(s) has been valued by policy makers as a cultural marker of identity, but not pedagogically as a didactic asset for learning, or as a ‘scaffold’ for the acquisition of the dominant language (Cummins 2011, 2013; Van Avermaet 2009; Extra and Spotti 2009).

A monolingual ideology is at the basis of such policies. The occurrence of monolingual ideologies is neither recent nor incidental. They are the result of specific social, historical and political contexts. Linguistic ideologies can be defined as ‘systems of belief’, collectively or individually held ideas about the role, function and value of (a) language in a societal context (Woolard 1998; Spolsky 2004). However, language ideologies are also related to interactional moments of identity construction and reflect power relations in a given society (Kroskrity 2000; Pavlenko 2002). As Woolard (1998: 3) puts it, ‘ideologies of language are rarely about language alone’. Perceived as common sense, inherent contradictions often remain implicit, while the continuation of language ideologies is assured in official documents, through policy actions, media debate, national curricula and so on, and implemented in practice by principals, teachers and so on, and via mission statements, learning materials, language tests and so on. (Shohamy 2006; Gkaintartzi et al. 2015). Creese (2010) stresses how language ideologies in educational contexts always interact with local school contexts and the beliefs and convictions of teachers.

The multilingual make-up of today’s schools and classes is a topical theme for many schools and teachers, and in society more generally. Many schools in Flanders struggle with the multilingual constitution of their student population. On the one hand, there is a strong historically rooted belief in the European context that knowledge of more than one language results in surplus value, and this has been especially the case in countries like Belgium and the Netherlands and in Northern Europe. Hence, young people are generally encouraged to learn and actively use French, English, Spanish or Italian, for professional and economic reasons or for holiday purposes. Yet, at the same time the multilingualism of minority children and their parents is seen as an obstacle to learning and school success. Parents are encouraged to use their first or home language as little as possible with their children, and the use of other languages than Dutch is mostly banned from school settings. Local school policies are not necessarily informed by negative perceptions of the children’s mother tongue, as school measures often originate in a genuine concern with learning opportunities. Immersion is held to be the most optimal response and one and only route to learning the dominant language well enough to guarantee school success . In such an educational universe, there is no room for the children’s first languages.

While this chapter addresses some of the consequences of monolingual policies, it raises the question whether it is sensible to continue to ignore the multilingual realities of today’s diverse school populations. If this question is answered negatively, schools are still saddled with the question of how best to respond to the challenges posed by the educational environment. In this chapter, we engage with these issues by reporting on the results of a longitudinal pedagogical intervention in four primary schools in Ghent, the so-called Home Language in Education project (HLiE), which ran from January 2009 to the end of 2012. The HLiE project was funded by the municipality of Ghent. Its implementation followed the local education authority’s decision to both try out and assess the learning potential of an alternative sociolinguistic climate which is more positively oriented to the multilingual resources which minority children bring to school and in which home language use is encouraged as an asset for learning. The scientific part of the project consisted of a mixed-method pre/post-design intervention study. We will discuss the research findings and critically reflect on both the design of the project and the dynamic relationships with the local policy makers and other stakeholders. Before we turn to the details of the implementation and its accompanying research project, it is important to first discuss some of the effects of monolingual language policies as a background for a discussion of possible alternatives.

The Effects of Monolingual Thinking

Social inequality and educational underachievement are among the most persistent problems in education. Successive PISA results (OESO) have revealed the relative failure of national educational responses in meeting these challenges. Above and beyond socioeconomic variables (e.g., socioeconomic status [SES]), the PISA results show that children who speak another language at home than the dominant language perform less well in school. The PISA data, however, show that the effect size of this variable is much smaller than the effect size of SES. In most other studies, the correlation between language spoken at home and school success disappears when controlled for SES. Moreover, we should caution against easy causal interpretations of the connections between home language use and school success . A statistical correlation does not necessarily point to a straightforward causal connection. In addition, Cummins (2018, this volume) compares the PISA results in a number of national contexts and notes that there are success stories to be found of bilingual learning trajectories and educational achievement. Other studies do show, however, that the negative impact of low SES is fed by language difference (see also Van Avermaet et al. 2015). A second consequence of a negative causal reading of the relationship between school success and home language use is that conditions for success crystalize exclusively around pupils’ knowledge of Dutch, the dominant language . This, however, goes against the state-of-the-art knowledge about processes of second language learning (e.g., The Douglas Fir Group 2016). It reinforces the monolingual ideology. Yildiz (2012) notes the contradictions in the continued pursuit of and belief in monolingual responses with its values of civic inclusion and national language, despite intensive and widespread ‘on the ground’ experiences of multilingualism. It is important to gauge how the back-and-forth between the two tendencies plays out in practice. One noted dimension is the continued belief in monolingualism as a recipe for school success and the perception of minority multilingualism as detrimental to educational success. Pulinx et al. (2014) report how the two sides of monolingual thinking prevail in Flemish teacher populations. Monolingual belief is deeply rooted.

In a questionnaire, 700 teachers in 16 Flemish schools (see Fig. 1) were asked to rate a list of propositions on a five-point scale of (dis)agreement.

Fig. 1

Teachers’ monolingual beliefs

Eight out of ten teachers agreed that pupils should not be allowed to speak another language than Dutch at school. A similar segment of the examined population identified lack of knowledge of the dominant language as the main cause of lack of progress in learning. This contrasts with other research which identifies low SES as the most important cause (Ministerie van Onderwijs en Vorming 2014; Van de gaer et al. 2006). For every ten teachers, there are three who agreed with the claim that pupils should be penalized for speaking their mother tongue in school. Less than 13% of the teacher population who participated in the research felt that school libraries should also hold a collection of books in the pupils’ home languages. The latter point needs further qualification, as this finding contrasts rather starkly with the observation that secondary school libraries in Flanders typically harbour a collection of books in French, German, English and so on—the languages taught as second, third and fourth language, respectively, in secondary education. When it comes to the perception of negative effects that multilingualism would have on learning, there appear to be double standards. A distinction is clearly made between (economically viable, prestigious) ‘good’ multilingualism and (educationally counterproductive) ‘bad’ multilingualism (Blommaert and Van Avermaet 2008). Slembrouck (forthcoming) makes a comparable analysis of the unequal distribution of opportunities for learning particular foreign languages in the Flemish context and points to the existence of a spatio-temporal scale of relative proximity/distance. ‘Closer’ are the languages of neighbouring countries learnt for purposes of trade, tourism and cultural exchange with widely available and long-established ‘mainstream’ opportunities of learning, while more ‘distant’ are the minority languages, for example, Turkish, Arabic and so on, with more recent and more scarcely resourced ‘niche’ opportunities for learning. While English and French are very much taken-for-granted competencies presupposed in the secondary school diplomas of prospective teachers as they enter into higher education, a strategic investment in the learning of a minority language is not even an available option in teacher training today.

Common opinion identifies multilingualism in a minority language as a problem and a cause of learning deficit. Youngsters who speak another language at home than the language of instruction are easily classified as ‘pupils with a language problem’. Sometimes they are perceived as not very proficient, and even as ‘not having much language’ (even in their home language). ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Introduction: The Multilingual Edge of Education
• Part I. Multilingualism in Education in a Context of Globalisation: A Status Quaestionis
• Part II. Linguistic Diversity in the Home Context and the Normative Discourses of Educational Institutions
• Part III. Perception, Experiential Voice and Narrative in Accounts of Multilingualism
• Part IV. The Added Value of Plurilingual Repertoires
• Conclusion: Multilingualism, Diversity and Equitable Learning: Towards Crossing the ‘Abyss’
• Back Matter