Session Information
31 SES 04 A, Effectiveness of Multilingual Education Programmes on (Academic) Language Proficiency, Home Literacies and Teacher Perspectives
Symposium
Contribution
In this presentation recent developments around plurilingual secondary education in the officially bilingual province of Friesland, the Netherlands, are presented. Several languages play a role in everyday life in the province: the dominant language Dutch, the regional minority language Frisian, a growing number of migrant languages and also typical school foreign languages, such as English or German. Despite this variety of languages, schooling is mainly solely in the national language, Dutch. In fact, there is still a widespread belief that it is best to teach target languages through immersion without any interference from the other languages, leading to language separation pedagogies. Even in Frisian trilingual education the three closely related target languages Frisian, Dutch and English are offered separate from each other (Arocena & Gorter, 2013; Duarte & Günther-van der Meij, 2018). Different studies have shown, though, that to enhance learning, it is important to use all language knowledge pupils have at their disposal (Cenoz & Gorter, 2011; Cummins, 2008). These insights led to the Holi-Frysk project (a holistic approach towards Frisian in secondary language education) that focused on: a) less separation between the three languages of instruction (Frisian, Dutch and English); b) creating bridges between foreign languages in secondary education (German and French) and c) valuing and including migrant languages in mainstream education. Three different types of secondary schools participated in the project. The project works with a bottom-up approach in which the questions from the schools regarding multilingualism were foremost in the development of multilingual activities. The activities and accompanying materials were created in co-construction between teachers and researchers in design-based research (Cobb et al., 2003) during three cycles of development and implementation (McKenney & Reeves, 2013). The developed activities were implemented and evaluated by means of analysing classroom video-recordings and interviews with the teachers. The collected data were used to zoom in on the forms of interaction that were used in the classroom and on teachers’ beliefs on using multiple languages in teaching, both of which will be discussed in the presentation. Results will show several examples of the role of plurilingualism in education, but also ways in which teachers learn to act plurilingually by using all languages available in their classes.
References
Arocena, E., & Gorter, D. (2013). The multilingual classroom in primary education in the Basque Country and Friesland: beliefs of teachers and their language practices. Leeuwarden/Ljouwert: Mercator European Research Centre on Multilingualism and Language Learning. Cenoz, J., & Gorter, D. (2011). Focus on Multilingualism: A Study of Trilingual Writing. The Modern Language Journal, 95(3), 356–369. Cobb, P., Confrey, J., diSessa, A., Lehrer, R., & Schauble, L. (2003). Design experiments in educational research. Educational Researcher, 32(1), 9–13. Cummins, J. (2008). BICS and CALP: Empirical and Theoretical Status of the Distinction. In B. Street & N. H. Hornberger (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Language and Education (2nd edition, pp. 71–83). New York: Springer. Duarte, J. & Günther-van der Meij, M. (2018). A holistic model for multilingualism in education. EuroAmerican Journal of Applied Linguistics and Languages. Special Issue, 5(2), 24-43. McKenney, S., & Reeves, T. (2013). Systematic Review of Design-Based Research Progress: Is a Little Knowledge a Dangerous Thing? Educational Researcher, 42(2), 97–100.
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