Multilingual Classrooms—Danish Teachers’ Practices, Beliefs and Attitudes

ABSTRACT

Multilingualism is a major feature of European schools. The current study examines Danish data regarding teachers’ behaviours, beliefs and attitudes about multilingualism. Data were collected using the Multilingual Classroom Questionnaire (MCQ) devised by the European Literacy Network. Sixty-one participants contributed to the Danish sample (85% females). The teachers who completed the questionnaire had a positive attitude to multilingualism, the value of maintaining and supporting children’s first language (L1), and the importance of proficiency in L1 for developing language and literacy in children’s second language (L2). Teachers’ attitudes were influenced by their competence in a foreign language. Limitations and pedagogical implications of the findings are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Multilingual
• classroom
• teacher
• Danish

Acknowledgements

Thanks to participants, to colleagues in COST Action, 1401, ELN for cooperation on the multilingual questionnaire, and to Professor Kristine Jensen de López, CeDAPS, Aalborg University for help with back-translation.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 First language or mother tongue refer to language acquired in early childhood before the age of 3 year

2 https://www.is1401eln.eu/en/working-groups/working-group-1/

3 https://www.is1401eln.eu/en/

4 In the questionnaire the term “views” are also applied. However, in the present article we use only the term attitude to describe both views and attitudes.

5 The term “bilingual”, and not “multilingual”, is applied in official Danish documents. A bilingual child is here defined as a child with a different mother tongue than Danish, who learns Danish when they get into contact with the Danish society (Bekendtgørelse, 2016 [Act]). However, both terms are applied in this manuscript, as they appear in relevant articles and documents.

6 https://www.cost.eu/cost-actions/

Additional information

Funding

This present work was supported by COST Action IS1401 - Strengthening Europeans' capabilities by establishing the European literacy network, ELN (https://www.eln.eu/en/) workgroup 1 members and of a steering group (https://www.is1401eln.eu/en/working-groups/working-group-1/). Julie Dockrell chaired the work group, Timothy Papadopoulos was deputy chair and Charles Mifsud coordinated the sub-group on Multilingual Classrooms, leading on questionnaire design.