Empirical data and normative discourse in pedagogy suggest that a monolingual approach at school results in underperformance of students from immigrant families, and request to transform the educational concept (Cummins 2000, Gogolin 2010, Fürstenau 2012). A key role in this transformation process is (politically) assigned to minority teachers which has led different educational actors across Europe to call for a more diversified teacher population. These hopes are associated with the presumption that minority teachers are competent in dealing with linguistic diversity. Up to now, little or no evidence has been established that supports this presumption (Lengyel/Rosen 2015). The findings indicate that minority teachers tend to advocate a monolingual approach, replicating the strategies of the monolingual school system (Tatar et al. 2011, Panagiotopulou/Rosen 2015). The key issue in multilingual education is the question whether language ideologies at school can be transformed.

This paper will first focus on the ways in which this transformation process was intended by a top-down strategy – Israeli Language Policy in 1995 that declared multilingualism as concept of education – and present the underlying socio-political discourse as well as its actual implementation in school practice (Ben Dror 1991, Michael 2006, Shohamy 2010).

Research focus

The main part of the paper will present how this political intervention was perceived by migrant teachers in Israeli society. Since individual linguistic biography appears to influence teachers’ attitudes towards linguistic diversity in class, the predominant research aim was to reconstruct their personal experience with family language use and self-perception on the micro-level as influenced by language policy and practice on the meso-level.

Theoretical framework

Basing on Bourdieu’s theory of linguistic market (Bourdieu/Passeron 1998) particular attention was paid to subjects’ experience with linguistic diversity at school and their perception of multilingualism as capital. How multilingualism emerges, how it is maintained and how it changes depends on various individual and social factors, especially the way linguistic diversity is managed within the society (Blommaert 2010). Social and political relations, the underlying language ideology, are reflected and reproduced at school, which affects not only the language but also students’ academic achievement (Levin/Shohamy 2008, Gogolin 2010). School constitutes therefore a place of possible transformation, a place where the status of languages could be changed by accepting home languages as a legitimate source. At the same time, it remains a sight of constant struggle highly resistant to change (Fürstenau/Niedrig 2011, Shohamy 2010).

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