Session Information
31 SES 02 A, Language Attitudes and Learning: From primary school to higher education
Symposium
Contribution
In this paper Suzanne and Joana will show how project 3M addresses the issue of attitudes in order to reshape education for pupils in the multilingual province of Fryslân, the Netherlands. The successful implementation of alternative approaches for multilingual education requires positive attitudes towards the home languages of students and multilingualism in general (Cummins, 2000; Fürstenau 2016; Hélot 2012). Research has shown that teachers are positive towards multilingualism as a whole, but attitudes towards preservation of migrant and languages are less positive (Lee & Oxelson 2006; Pulinx et al, 2015). These languages are often seen as tools to discuss private matters, and not as a source for learning. However, previous studies has shown that even minimal instruction on multilingual education can change these attitudes (Ellis 2004; Lee & Oxelson 2006). This research is carried out as part of the 3M project: Meer kansen met Meertaligheid (More opportunities with Multilingualism), which aims to implement school pedagogies that include the students’ home languages as a resource in order to support pupils with migrant and minority languages. The goal of the current research is to monitor both teacher and student attitudes to map the positive effects of the teacher training within the 3M project. We will measure how various didactic approaches in primary schools have a positive and durable effect on language attitudes of teachers and pupils towards migrant and minority languages for the duration of the project (Pulinx, Agirdag & Van Avermaet, 2015). For this, we will employ a triangulation methodology to map both implicit and explicit attitudes towards multilingualism and multilingual education throughout the project (cf. Pantos & Perkins, 2012). Explicit attitudes will be measured via surveys for teachers and questionnaires for students. Implicit attitudes towards migrant and minority languages will be measured via Implicit Association Test (IAT), a reaction-time experiment designed to show relative strengths of association that are either positive or negative (Greenwald et al., 1998; Pantos & Perkins, 2012). In order to measure a lasting effect, we will repeat these measures two years after conclusion of the implementation phase in the 3M partner schools. In this paper, we will present the data from the first set of questionnaires and surveys with both teachers and students collected close to the beginning of the project.
References
Cummins, J. (2000). Language, power, and pedagogy: Bilingual children in the crossfire. Clevedon: Multilingual matters. Ellis, R. (2004). The definition and measurement of explicit knowledge. Language Learning, 54, 227-275. Greenwald, A. G., McGhee, D. E., & Schwartz, J. L. (1998). Measuring individual differences in implicit cognition: the implicit association test. Journal of personality and social psychology, 74(6), 1464. Fürstenau, S. (2016). “Multilingualism and School Development in Transnational Educational Spaces. Insights from an Intervention Study at German Elementary Schools.” In A. Küppers, B. Pusch, & P. U. Pınar Uyan Semerci (eds), Bildung in transnationalen Räumen. Wiesbaden: Springer Fachmedien, 71-90. Hélot, C. (2012): “Multilingual Education and Language Awareness”. In: Chapelle, C.A. (ed.), The Encyclopaedia of Applied Linguistics. New York: Wiley Blackwell, 258-300. Lee, J. S., & Oxelson, E. (2006). “’It’s not my Job”: K-12 Teacher attitudes towards students’ heritage language maintenance.” Bilingual Research Journal 30 (2): 453-477. Pantos, A.J. & Perkins, A.W. (2012). Measuring implicit and excplicit Attitudes Toward Foreign Accented Speech. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 32 (1): 3-20. Pulinx, R., Van Avermaet, P., & Agirdag, O. (2015). “Silencing linguistic diversity: The extent, determinants and consequences of the monolingual beliefs of Flemish teachers.” International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism.
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