Immigrant teachers’ integration and transformation of the linguistic market in Israel

ABSTRACT

Immigrant teachers – although discussed in different disciplines and from different perspectives, their potential to transform the educational approach towards multilingualism remains unknown. The present paper addresses this lacuna by focusing on language beliefs in one specific group: new immigrant teachers. Arriving as professionals and integrated in the regular school system, their language expertise constitutes a potential resource in the classroom, at school and for the society in general. Yet, this group of teachers is extremely small, as their access to regular education systems is usually limited. This paper presents a qualitative study framed by a specific historical and national context – the Israeli policy on ‘New Immigrant Teacher Absorption.’ Based on Bourdieu's Theory of Practice and drawing on data from linguistic biographies, the study focused on teachers’ experience as immigrant language speaker. The results allow deep insights into how immigrant teachers come to perceive their migration-induced multilingualism as a capital and emphasize the importance of political measures in this process.

KEYWORDS:

• Multilingual education
• language policy
• teacher education
• immigrant teachers
• linguistic market

Acknowledgement

I would like to include an Acknowledgement section. I hope, it is fine if I paste it here: "Acknowledgements to Andrea Young from France, Kutlay Yagmur from the Netherlands, Andrea Shalley from Sweden and Susana Eisenchlas from Australia for the access to the national research review on immigrant teachers. I would also like to thank Ksenija Gumenik and Maria Giakovenko for their support in data analysis and evaluation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. This term follows the wording used in the policy on “New Immigrant Teacher Absorption” and the research landscape in Israel (Michael 2006; Levenberg, Patkin, and Sarfaty 2013), but also in studies from other countries, e.g. Australia (Collins and Reid 2012), New Zealand (Stewart 2010) or the USA (Fee 2011).

2. This slogan was commonly found on the dishes given to the new arrivals in the kibbutzim of the communities receiving the immigrants (Burteisen 2003).

3. In order to contextualize the examples, they start by the pseudonym of the person and the year of arrival, followed by the translation in English by the author.