Session Information
31 ONLINE 25 A, Educational responsiveness to language diversity: What approaches are needed for evolving contexts?
Paper/Poster Session
MeetingID: 810 4757 8710 Code: rif6WL
Contribution
Guided by the question posed in the description of the conference theme of whether “[we are] managing to successfully integrate the global with the local" (n.p.), this presentation looks at how these two centrifugal forces are mobilized through different languages pursuing sociopolitical and economic agendas (Pujolar, 2007) in multilingual Switzerland’s educational landscape.
Multilingualism has historically played a major role in Swiss society with its four national languages, French, German, Italian, and Romansh, enshrined in policy. Laws protect each language region’s historical ‘homogenous’ composition and seek to guarantee mutual understanding and social cohesion at a national level. Yet, the legal/policy framework does not account for the plethora of local varieties notably in German (Swiss German), the influx of heritage languages such as Portuguese and the international and intra-national lingua franca English which increasingly shape Switzerland’s ‘indigenous’ linguistic landscape from the outside. Embedded in on-going sociopolitical debates in Swiss language education policies, the study analyzes the interplay among the neoliberal forces leading to a growing popularity and (perceived) necessity of English, the romantic, traditionalist view on national languages and the social justice perspective of including heritage languages. It is framed in critical theories of language (Bourdieu, 1991), education (Gramsci, 1971), power (Foucault, 1982) and multiculturalism (Kubota, 2010) and draws on concepts of plurilingual identities (Hu, 2018), heteroglossia (Bakhtin, 1981), and translanguaging (García & Li, 2014) to examine individuals’ linguistic repertoires, lived experiences of language, perspectives on Switzerland’s multilingualism and multilingual education, and language (sub-)hierarchies. By elucidating underlying (obfuscated) power, hegemonic, and ideological mechanisms, it strives to ameliorate linguistic and educational practices and increase equity and social justice for minoritized speakers. It further aims to contribute to innovative, non-hierarchical approaches to language learning and bottom-up policy decision-making processes by showcasing students’, teachers’, and policy makers’ perspectives on languages, language learning, and policies.
The study asks the following overarching research question: How are ‘localness’ and 'globalness’ constructed through (the use of) language and how does this produce belonging and exclusion?
Sub-questions include:
1) What are students’ and teachers’ lived experiences of language?
2) What are students’, teachers’, and policy makers’ perspectives on Switzerland’s multilingualism and its multilingual education?
3) How do they (de)construct and legitimize (existing) language hierarchies?
Method
Adopting a phenomenological research design zooming in on individuals’ perspectives and practices within their multilingual lifeworlds, the study also draws on the poststructuralist approach to methodology with its focus on disruption, exclusion, and suppression which can be experienced throughout one’s life trajectory based on language (Derrida, 1996). Individuals are viewed as subjects who position themselves and are positioned within a given historical-political, power- and-ideology-laden space full of norms and categorizations (Butler, 1997). Their biographical trajectory and perspectives are thus clouded by the position they take and are attributed within this space. Through phenomenology, I seek to elucidate those perspectives and raise awareness of inequitable treatment, discrimination based on language, and symbolic violence. The data consist of 94 student questionnaires, 34 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with students and teachers from the cantons of (French-speaking) Fribourg, (Romansh-speaking) Grisons, and (German-speaking) Zurich, and four in-depth, semi-structured interviews with federal policy makers. van Manen’s (2017) phenomenological qualitative data analysis technique was employed for the interviews and the open-ended questions of the questionnaire. The questionnaire was analyzed using descriptive statistics.
Expected Outcomes
The data analysis reveals that Switzerland’s multilingualism is restricted to official and prestigious languages, which is detrimental to plurilingual identity expression and does not mirror the society’s linguistic diversity. This situation is exacerbated within the education system which continues to impose a ‘monolingual habitus’ or, at best, ‘bilingual habitus’ despite the increasing heterogeneity of its students. The data also show that language hierarchies are legitimized and reproduced within the education system attributing prestige and power not only to certain languages but also to their speakers. Ideological influences legitimize and reproduce sub-hierarchies based on speakers’ ‘deviance’ from the native-speaker yardstick or local varieties’ resemblance to standard-speech norms. The study found that linguistic prejudices and discrimination result in symbolic violence to the detriment of speakers’ linguistic repertoires, well-being, self-confidence, integration, and language teaching in schools. This is especially the case in German-speaking Switzerland where local dialects mark belonging to and legitimacy of a certain geographical space and, as results show, are the expected way of speaking to adopt for social integration as well as academic/professional success. Finally, the study advocates the (institutional/official) recognition of each individual’s linguistic repertoire, the ‘normalization’ of linguistic and cultural diversity, and a critical awareness of the interdependency of language, education, and power among all education sphere actors.
References
Bakhtin, M. M. (1981) The dialogic imagination. University of Texas Press. Bourdieu, P. (1991). Language and symbolic power. Polity Press. Butler, J. (1997). Excitable speech: A politics of the performative. Routledge. Derrida, J. (1996). Le monolinguisme de l’autre: Ou la prothèse d’origine. Galilée. Foucault, M. (1982). The subject and power. Critical Inquiry 8(4), 777-795. García, O. & Li, W. (2014). Translanguaging: Language, bilingualism and education. Palgrave Macmillan. Hu, A. (2018). Plurilingual identities: On the way to an integrative view on language education? In A. Bonnet & P. Siemund (Eds.), Foreign language education in multilingual classrooms (pp. 151-172). John Benjamins. Kubota, R. (2010). Critical multicultural education and second/foreign language teaching. In S. May, & C. E. Sleeter (Eds.), Critical multiculturalism: Theory and praxis (pp. 99-112). Routledge. Pujolar, J. (2007). Bilingualism and the nation-state in the post-national era. In M. Heller (Ed.), Bilingualism: A social approach (pp. 71-95). Palgrave Macmillan. van Manen, M. (2017). Researching lived experience: Human science for an action sensitive pedagogy (2nd ed.). Taylor & Francis Group.
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