The planed contribution works on the assumption that school is a space, where people with diverse language biographies and language repertoires come together, where language heterogeneity is lived in everyday life. Seeing school as a multilingual space is a perspective that allows us to focus on the research objective, which is to explore how language practices in schools create such social spaces, where multilingualism is lived.

In last decades it is evident that due to social (and partially also historical) circumstances (e.g. migration, free movement of persons in the EU) and political development, multilingualism is becoming a norm in today’s diverse society – some scholars even talk about super-diversity (Vetrovec, 2007). The same phenomena can be seen in schools: students with various linguistic repertoire come together at one place – they experience and at the same time co-construct the space school. 

Space is in our contribution not understood only in the physical sense, but as encompassing people and relationships, too. That is why researchers use the use term social space in this context (z.B. Lefebvre, 1991; Löw, 2009). Understanding space as a social space draws our attention not only to objects themselves in the space, but also to social and personal relationships and their positioning in the space. The term “space” in the social connotation is always connected to power (in Foucault’s sense). For instance, Rose (1999, p. 248) defines “space as strategy of power”, that is reproduced and constructed. Following the sociolinguistic tradition, Blommaert, Collins, and Slembrouck (2005) understand space as a potentiality how language practices and language regimes can be put together. In means that multilingualism can be realized through potentialities in such space. Furthermore, space and potentialities in space can influence the use of a specific linguistic repertoire, or how the speakers position themselves in relation to language(s).

Talking about languages, in our contribution we assume that everyone is “equipped” with a specific register of languages, dialects, varieties, routines etc. that can be used by speakers to produce (social) meaning – this register is called linguistic repertoire. According to Gumperz (1964, p. 137), linguistic repertoire can be understood as the “weapons” of everyday communication. Speakers choose among this arsenal in accordance with the meanings they wish to convey. It means also that speakers use different languages, language elements from more languages or/and language systems but also various non-verbal forms. In this view, one language (language system etc.) does not exist prior to and independently from the other one(s); rather, multilingual practice comes into existence with enaction that is realized within an immediate context (Kloss & Van Orden, 2009). Some scholars describe this manner as “hybrid” and – in contrast to the understanding of languages as isolated systems of strict rules proposed.

The overall objective of the contribution is to provide a better understanding of the multilingual reality at schools that increases in last decades in Europe. The major benefit of the contribution is that it will provide a deep insight into the actual language practices in schools thru spatial lenses.

Research aim and research questions The main aim of the contribution is to explore how the multilingual social spaces in schools are constituted. The research questions are lied as it follows: - What practices contribute to the constitution of multilingual spaces in a school? - Which representations of real-live multilingualism are in the space are apparent? - How are languages are experienced in the school. Research sample Two schools in Brno, Czech Republic (we decided to choose urban schools over small town or village schools as urban locations are often more diverse; e.g. Otsuji & Pennycook, 2010) were selected according to their language positioning on languages (schools that define themselves as multilingual). In every school, the following participants will be involved, two teachers (one language teacher and one science teacher) and the headmaster (we opted for interviews with two teachers from different fields in order to explore various viewpoints as it is believed that language teachers are more sensitive to languages than science teachers). There will also be four parents from each school asked for an interview. Also language biographical interviews with 10 students asking everyday language using based on language portraits drawings and LEGO kit creations will be conducted. Research Methods The research methods consist from: - Semi-structured interviews with teachers about their experiences with languages in the school, their perceptions of language regime and space practices in the school. - Semi-structured interviews with headmasters about their experiences with languages in the school, their perceptions of language and space practices in the school, their motivation, intentions and measures related to languages and language regime. - Interviews with parents about lived experiences with languages of their children in the school, about motivation, intentions and wishes in language choice (in relation to language biography of students). - Linguistic landscaping to capture and analyze the school spaces. The verbal data will be transcribed and analyzed using qualitative content analysis, data driven coding will be used. In addition, student`s drawings on language portraits (Krumm, 2001) as well as LEGO creations (Purkarthofer, 2017) will be analyzed. The linguistic landscaping approach in our approach lean on Landry & Bourhis (1997) as it aims at mapping and measuring linguistic diversity within the social communication space.

The preliminary results show that multilingualism is, to a certain extent, taken into account in the school, but, unfortunately, linguistic diversity is presented in a disconnected way according to the students and their languages. Our preliminary results from the analysis of interviews and language portraits of the students, show that they usually have diverse linguistic repertoires and it is of interest that the pupils do not seem to perceive of their linguistic resources as one repertoire. Overall it can be assumed that despite the multilingual reality and the promotion of multilingualism, the monolingual norm remains operative in the schools.

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