Embracing multilingualism, experiencing old tensions. Promoting and problematising language at a self-declared multilingual school

ABSTRACT

While much research has focused on how Western schools contain or silence the increasing multilingualism of their pupils, this paper investigates how a Dutch-medium school in Brussels has decided to take a different approach by branding itself as multilingual. Based on sociolinguistic-ethnographic fieldwork, it will show that teachers invested in a multilingual school policy and that they recruited, and allowed pupils to speak, other languages for didactical purposes, as well as in more informal conversations. Nevertheless, as its curriculum remained predominantly Dutch-medium, the school was a site for contradictory behaviour: teachers problematised pupils’ flexible language practices and limited proficiency in Dutch, and restricted their use of other languages out of a concern with pupils’ acquisition of Dutch, access to curricular knowledge, and future educational and professional success. So, despite the school’s attempts to transcend the struggles that arise in schools which are more averse to multilingualism, similar tensions emerge in this setting, as teachers need to find a balance between their pedagogical goals and concerns about monolingualism in the wider society.

KEYWORDS:

• School ethnography
• language policy
• multilingualism
• Brussels
• Dutch-medium schools
• classroom interaction

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 According to a survey issued by the school.

2 CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) is possible in Dutch-medium education in English, French and German. Further requirements are that a maximum of 20% of non-language courses can be CLIL-courses (Onderwijs Vlaanderen 2018).

3 Although teachers’ informed consent was collected prior to fieldwork, they did not know beforehand which classes would be recorded. At the time of the fieldwork (the week preceding this interaction) newspapers reported on state schools’ efforts to organise additional training for Islam teachers to counter and prevent radicalisation (cf. Vermeylen 2017). So, although Mr H. allowed for eight of his Islam classes to be observed, he might have been apprehensive.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the ULB/Brussels-Wallonia Federation (Action de recherche concertée, 2016-2020).

Notes on contributors

Sue Goossens

Sue Goossens is a doctoral researcher at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. Her research interests are sociolinguistics, linguistic ethnography, and linguistics and education.