What if there is linguistic and cultural diversity in contemporary classrooms? Secondary school teachers’ attitudes, practices, and challenges towards student multilingualism

ABSTRACT

Despite cultural and linguistic diversity in contemporary societies, research revealed teachers' unpreparedness to welcome diversity in classrooms (e.g. Burner & Carlsen, 2019). Considering the impact of teachers' attitudes on their practices and students' learning (e.g. Fives, & Buehl, 2016), further research on teachers' attitudes to multilingualism and practices is needed, especially in countries where monolingual policies are adopted, such as Greece (Fotiadou et al., 2022; Gkaintartzi et al., 2015). The present study explores 237 Greek secondary education teachers' attitudes, practices and challenges regarding student multilingualism through a questionnaire and explains the relation between practices, attitudes, challenges and teachers' demographic features through a model. Quantitative data analysis shows that, despite teachers' positive attitudes towards multilingualism, they fail to integrate students' funds of knowledge. Simultaneously, their insistence on the official language use as the exclusive language of instruction and their belief that L1 maintenance is a family obligation reflects the impact of monolingualism and misconceptions about multilingualism in formal education. The effect of attitudes, challenges and certain demographic features (e.g. gender, age and training) on teachers' practices is also discussed. Findings imply the need for reconceptualising educational policies and teacher development programmes in the direction of multilingual education to consider all students' needs.

KEYWORDS:

• Teachers’ attitudes
• teachers’ practices
• multilingualism
• language diversity
• multilingual education
• teacher development programmes

Acknowledgement

Τhis paper has been financed by the funding programme “MEDICUS” of the University of Patras.

Disclosure statement

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