Are bilingual teachers more liberal than monolingual teachers? Differences between the language attitudes of Hungarian teachers in multilingual and monolingual environment

ABSTRACT

Teachers’ language attitudes play a key role in their decision-making, evaluation, and behaviour in the classroom. This is as true in a monolingual environment as it is in a bilingual or multilingual linguistic situation, but it is fair to assume that the two different linguistic environments are associated with the dominance of different attitudes and ideologies. Among the related research, it is hard to find any that examine the difference between monolinguals and multilinguals from the perspective of language bias, especially in the field of education. The present study explores the language ideologies and attitudes of Hungarian language teachers. The study was based on the language attitudes of 502 Hungarian language teachers, of whom 57% teach in a bilingual setting and 43% in a monolingual environment. The research instrument was a tool similar to a verbal guise test. It was used to assess standard and non-standard language variants, the students who use them and their oral presentations to the teachers included in the survey. The primary hypothesis, that bilingual or multilingual teachers are more linguistically tolerant than their monolingual colleagues, was not confirmed. In fact, in some cases, the data revealed the opposite.

KEYWORDS:

• Standardism
• linguistic discrimination
• multilingualism
• language attitudes
• multilingual teacher
• school

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the two anonymous peer reviewers who provided invaluable suggestions and critical remarks that helped me in the development of this paper. The study was supported by Magyar Állami Eötvös Scholarship (MAEO 2022-23/172352).

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Although there is no data on bilingualism explicitly for teachers, the proportion of bilingual speakers in Hungary can be inferred from census data: less than 5% of the total population may be bilingual in functional terms. In addition, the Hungarian sample did not include teachers who teach in, live in or come from bilingual settlements.