Bilingual teaching practices in an Albanian community school in Greece

Author(s):

Aspasia Chatzidaki(presenting / submitting)Christina Maligkoudi(presenting)

Conference:

ECER 2017

Network:

31. LEd – Network on Language and Education

Format:

Paper

Session Information

31 SES 10 B, Literacy, Bilingual Education, EFL and Out-of-School Contexts

Paper Session

Time:

2017-08-24

15:30-17:00

Room:

W4.20

Chair:

Joana da Silveira Duarte

Contribution

Community or ‘complementary’ schools are usually voluntary, community organizations in the form of after-school and weekend programs aiming at teaching the heritage languages and transmitting cultural elements to the second and third-generation of speakers of a particular community (Lytra & Martin, 2010). Ideally, complementary schools constitute ‘safe spaces’ (Conteh & Brock, 2011) where minority children are allowed to perform the full range of their linguistic repertoires and develop their multilingual and multicultural identities (Creese, Bhatt, Bhojani, & Martin, 2006; García, Zakharia & Otcu, 2013). However, community school teachers may sometimes attempt to impose on the students a linguistic and cultural norm compatible with ‘monoglossic’ bilingual education policies (García, 2009), by discouraging the use of the majority language during courses either explicitly or implicitly (e.g. Klein, 2013; Li Wei & Wu, 2009). In other cases, they engage in ‘flexible bilingualism’ practices (Creese & Blackledge, 2010), using all their students’ linguistic and semiotic resources to create opportunities for meaning-making and identity construction.

Our research attempts to study relevant issues by focusing on Albanian immigrants, the largest immigrant community in Greece. Although recent studies (Gogonas, 2009) suggest that there is a definite shift underway towards Greek-dominant bilingualism, the desire for ‘heritage-language’ learning remains strong among plenty of families as both quantitative and qualitative studies suggest (Chatzidaki & Maligkoudi, 2013; Gkaintartzi, Kiliari & Tsokalidou, 2015; Gkaintartzi, Chatzidaki, & Tsokalidou, 2014).

The research site is an Albanian complementary school established by an association of Albanian immigrants in Thessaloniki, the second largest city of Greece, in 2004. It offers Albanian language courses for ninety minutes every Sunday morning and it is currently attended by around eighty children aged between 6 and 16. The school teachers are also Albanian-origin immigrants who offer their services on a voluntary basis.

The two authors have been involved since the fall of 2015 in an ethnographically informed study of this particular school. Our aim is to present a detailed portrait of the language repertoires and practices performed by the school participants. This paper discusses findings related to some of the research questions of the broader study, namely to the question of translanguaging among students and teachers. In particular, we wish to investigate the following issues:

ü What are the school’s aims with regard to ethnic identity formation and heritage language transmission? How are these elements formulated in teachers’ discourse?

ü What practices do teachers follow with regard to language use in the classroom?

ü How do students make use of their two languages in their repertoire at school? How do they negotiate their hybrid identities in communication that takes place in this space?

This paper seeks to extend further our understanding of Albanian complementary school classrooms as sites for learning and social identification by exploring teachers’ language practices and ideologies in this school and how students exercise their agency to respond to them.

Method

Our study follows a qualitative methodology, which will allow us to bring to the fore the perspectives of the agents themselves. Data collection involves the following:  Audio-recorded interviews with (i) the teachers and the President of the Albanian Association, (ii) six children who will be the focus of our study and (iii) a number of parents, including the focal children’s parents.  Collection of additional information on language practices from the six focal children through the use of ‘language diaries’ (Jones, Martin-Jones, & Bhatt, 2000)  Ethnographically informed observations of courses in all four grades (but mainly in the ‘advanced’ class, where the focal children are drawn from) and occasional school events (December 2015- May 2017). The data used for this particular paper comprise interviews from the school teachers and field notes collected through ethnographic observations. Interviews will be analysed through thematic content analysis (Boyatzis, 2008).

Expected Outcomes

Initial findings suggest that the teachers in this school adopt different language ideologies and practices with regard to their teaching; the male teacher remains attached to a ‘monoglossic’ ideal of community language teaching and avoids using the majority language as he considers it counterproductive for the acquisition of Albanian. In his classroom, the use of bilingual practices is rare and somewhat artificial. On the other hand, the two female teachers are closer to what has been described as ‘flexible bilingual’ pedagogies; they allow and even encourage their students to move freely between all their languages (even English), to interact with texts in both languages, and to engage in practices such as translation and cross-linguistic comparison which enrich their metalinguistic awareness. Once the analysis is completed we expect to have a more thorough understanding of how the teachers’ view their ‘mission’ in such a school; at the same time, we hope to unravel the students’ perspectives and how they exercise their agency to negotiate the social and linguistic norms promoted by the school with regard to a ‘Greek-Albanian identity’. Our findings may be useful as the background for similar research in other Albanian immigrant communities in European countries such as, for instance, Italy (Mai, 2005) or Switzerland (Schader, 2006). Comparisons can also be drawn between this study and studies already conducted in Albanian complementary schools in other contexts (cf. Sneddon, 2010).

References

Chatzidaki, A., & Maligkoudi, C. (2013). Family language policies among Albanian immigrants in Greece. Ιnternational Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 16(6), 675-689. Conteh, J., & Brock, A. (2011). ‘Safe spaces’? Sites of bilingualism for young learners in home, school and community.International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 14(3), 347-360. Creese, A., & Blackledge, A. (2010). Translanguaging in the Bilingual Classroom: A Pedagogy for Learning and Teaching? The Modern Language Journal, 94, 103-115. Creese, A., Bhatt, A., Bhojani, N., & Martin, P. (2006). Multicultural, Heritage and Learner Identities in Complementary Schools. Language and Education, 20(1), 23-43. García, O. (2009). Bilingual Education in the 21st Century: A Global Perspective. Malden, MA: Wiley/ Blackwell. Gkaintartzi, A., Chatzidaki, A., & Tsokalidou, R. (2014). Albanian Parents and the Greek Educational Context: Who is Willing to Fight for the Home Language? International Journal of Multilingual Research, 8(4), 291-308. Gkaintartzi, A., Kiliari, A., and Tsokalidou, R. (2015). ‘Invisible’ bilingualism – ‘invisible’ language ideologies: Greek teachers' attitudes towards immigrant pupils' heritage languages International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 18(1), 60-72. Gogonas, N. (2009). Language Shift in Second-Generation Albanian Immigrants in Greece. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 30(2), 95-110. Jones, K., Martin-Jones, M., & Bhatt, A. (2000). Constructing a critical, dialogic approach to research on multilingual literacies. Participant diaries and diary interviews. In M. Martin-Jones, & K. Jones (Eds) Multilingual Literacies. Reading and Writing Different Worlds (pp.319-351). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Klein, W. (2013). Speaking Punjabi: Heritage Language Socialization and Language Ideologies in a Sikh Education Program, Heritage Language Journal 10(1), 36-50. Li Wei, & Wu, C.-J. (2009). Polite Chinese children revisited: creativity and the use of codeswitching in the Chinese complementary school classroom. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 12(2), 193-211. Lytra, V., & Martin, P. (2010). Introduction to Sites of Multilingualism: Complementary schools in Britain today (pp.11-20). Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham Books. Mai, N. (2005). The Albanian Diaspora-in-the-Making: Media, Migration and Social Exclusion. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 31(3), 543-561. Schader, B. (2006). Who’s ‘‘mixing’’ the languages? Statistical-sociolinguistic analyses of differently developed bilingual practice of Albanian-speaking school pupils in German-speaking Switzerland, International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 178, 75–91. Sneddon, R. (2010). Abetare and dancing: The story of a partnership. In V. Lytra, & P. Martin (Eds.), Sites of multilingualism. Complementary schools in Britain today (pp. 45-56). Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham.

Author Information

Aspasia Chatzidaki (presenting / submitting)

University of Crete

Department of Primary Education

Rethymno

Christina Maligkoudi (presenting)

School of Modern Greek, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece

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