Opening up towards children’s languages: enhancing teachers’ tolerant practices towards multilingualism

ABSTRACT

Mainstream teachers struggle with linguistic diversity, often leading to restricting multilingualism. Scientific research, however, recommends including pupils’ home languages in school. Various qualitative studies have evaluated implementations in schools and indicated possibilities for improving teachers’ attitudes towards multilingualism. This paper evaluates an experimental implementation targeting an increase in tolerance towards multilingualism. The implementation was facilitated by external school coaches and consisted of 3 experimental tools affecting the school. Data originated from 62 Flemish primary schools (of which half were experimental schools) that participated in 3 survey waves (2012 and 2014; 763 teachers completed both waves). We used multilevel regression. We concluded that the implementation leads to higher rates of tolerance. The fulfilment of the basic conditions needed for a successful change was important, and the linguistic diversity of the pupil population and the investment by external school coaches did not affect the tolerant practices of teachers towards multilingualism.

KEYWORDS:

• School improvement
• multilingualism
• teachers
• language policy
• innovation

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Agency for Innovation by Science and Technology [grant number 110008].

Notes on contributors

Anouk Van Der Wildt

Anouk Van Der Wildt is a post-doctoral researcher at the Department of Sociology, Research Group CuDOS, at Ghent University (Belgium). She participates in the project “Valorising Linguistic Diversity in Multiple Contexts of Primary Education”.

Piet Van Avermaet

Piet Van Avermaet is professor at the Department of Linguistics and the director of the Centre for Diversity and Learning at Ghent University. In his research, he focuses on diversity and social inequality in education, multicultural and multilingual education, language and integration, and sociolinguistics.

Mieke Van Houtte

Mieke Van Houtte is professor at the Department of Sociology, Research Group CuDOS, at Ghent University. Her research interests cover diverse topics within the sociology of education, particularly the effects of structural and compositional school features on pupil and teacher outcomes.