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ABSTRACT
Linguistic diversity at Czech schools has increased in the last decade, and it has become a new everyday reality. Nevertheless, there is still a lack of studies investigating lived experiences with managing multilingualism at schools. Our study examines schools as multilingual social spaces in which the visible language choice on signs reveals the language regime based on ideologies and policies. We contextualize our study according to top-down language policy, and the essential theoretical concepts such as social space or language regime are explained. The linguistic landscapes at schools (so-called schoolscapes) are analysed and interpreted to capture schools as multilingual social spaces. The focus lies on (1) displayed languages; (2) authorship of the object: (3) location of the object. The data from schoolscaping are complemented by interviews with school principals, who are responsible for language choice decisions. The investigation took place in four schools, where multilingualism plays an essential role. The results indicate that despite the multilingual reality and the promotion of multilingualism by anchoring it in the agenda of inclusive education, language homogenization is operative in schools. Our results are relevant for exploring the linguistic environments and language regimes at schools and reveal possible explanations for linguistic homogenization.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Languages of ethnic groups or minority groups are not surveyed in the Czech Republic, and they are not the main focus of this study.
2 The following ethnic groups were dominant in the Czech Republic: Ukrainian, Slovak, Russian, Vietnamese, Romanian, Bulgarian, Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian, and Roma. Typical migrant groups are: Ukrainian, Vietnamese, Slovak and Russian. More information about migration in the Czech Republic: International Migration Outlook Citation2020 (Citation2021). This situation rapidly changed after the migration wave from Ukraine in 2022.
3 Unquestionable first position of mother tongue, a preference for European languages, and a specific position of English as the first foreign language.
4 The data from Eurostat show that 98% of pupils at the secondary level (ISCED 2) learn two foreign languages in the Czech Republic. In 2016, 99.2% of pupils learned English, 60% learned German, 14% learned French, and 12% learned Spanish (Foreign Languages Learnt per Pupil in Upper Secondary Education Citation2018). Pupils must start learning the first foreign language by the age of 8–9 years and the second foreign language by 13–14 (Key Data on Teaching Languages at School in Europe Citation2017).
5 The term ‘pupil-foreigner’ is often used by a top-down language policy, it is not based on any scientific background, and it does not have any English equivalent. It covers a description of pupils with non-Czech citizenship who can be multilingual, or come from a migrant background, or belong to different ethnic minorities with other citizenship than Czech. We use quotation marks to show the authors’ reservations about using this term.
6 The term family language refers to the language of socialisation of multilingual children within the family (De Houwer Citation2009; Slavkov Citation2017).
7 It means that ‘power is everywhere’, diffused and embodied in discourse, knowledge and ‘regimes of truth’.
8 Language ideology refers to explicit or implicit representations on the intersection of language and how human beings exist in social world (Woolard Citation1992).
9 The education system in Czech Republic is essentially egalitarian, differences between schools are based on various school focus (sport, arts, sciences, languages …), size of the school, management, founder etc.
10 Curricular documents in the Czech Republic are developed at two levels – state level and school level. The state level is represented by the The Framework Educational Programme for Basic Education (FEP). The school level is represented by School educational programmes (SEPs).
11 Selection of schools was conducted following an analysis of SEPs in all schools (96) in Brno (Czech Republic). If schools describe themselves in connection with languages, they do so in the following ways: schools focusing on foreign pupils (11 schools), international and European schools (4 schools), and schools focusing on foreign languages (11 schools). In our sample, we selected one representative school from each group.
12 Classrooms were not included in the sample because at Czech schools ‘class teachers’ are traditionally responsible for decorating them and the linguistic landscape of classrooms does not automatically have to match the school-based language regime.
13 We decided on a deductive procedure with pre-defined categories based on categorization of languages in the FEP (see above).
14 The average length of interviews with principals was 33:17 min (Principal A: 33:14 min, Principal B: 34:07 min, Principal C: 28:46 min, Principal D: 37:02 min).
15 Since the principals used mainly the terminology of educational policy which mirrors the categorization of displayed languages based on FEP, we decided not to do inductive coding and use the same categories plus one category capturing the overall conception of multilingualism at the school.
16 In the international school, this position is taken over by English.
17 Terms pupils' family languages (other than the language of instruction) and family languages will be used synonymously.
18 All extracts were translated into English by the authors. The presented extracts just illustrate the discussed phenomena, i.e. it is not complete and exhausting summary of all utterances on the particular phenomena.
19 This illustrates also mixing of language categories with categories related to ethnicity and nationality in schools that is typical for the language policy (see chapter 1).
20 In the context of so-called international schools, English is the common language of instruction (Hayden and Thompson Citation1995).
21 The relationship of language policy and schoolscape was described by e.g. Landry and Bourhis (Citation1997).
22 The choice of elementary school is entirely up to the parents. But each public school has its ‘catchment area’. The district school must preferentially accept children who live in its ‘catchment area’, incl. pupils with migration background, who live in the ‘catchment area’.
23 The school offers courses in Czech, organizes classes with language assistants, and cooperates intensively with the regional integration centre.
24 The international school follows the curriculum of Cambridge International Education. Additionally, the school offers Czech as foreign language and Czech classes according to The Framework Educational Programme for Basic Education. Parents are required to pay a tuition fee.
25 Two different numbers are caused by the fact that the international school pupils' family languages (other than the language of instruction) correspond for some pupils with foreign languages.
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Notes on contributors
Miroslav Janík
Miroslav Janík is an assistant professor at the Institute for Research in School Education at the Faculty of Education of Masaryk University (Czech Republic) and a lecturer at the university in Trier (Germany). In his research activities, he concentrates on various forms of multilingualism at schools and foreign language teacher education.
Marie-Antoinette Goldberger
Marie-Antoinette Goldberger is currently working as a project collaborator at the Institute for Research in School Education at the Faculty of Education of Masaryk University (Czech Republic) and teaching German as a second language at a private language school in Vienna (Austria). Her research focuses on migration-related multilingualism and the discursive construction of migrant children in media.