Session Information
31 SES 03 A, Heritage Language Education in Europe: Embracing multilingualism
Symposium
Contribution
The linguistic repertoire of bilingual and multilingual pupils is one of their strongest resources. However, schools still make little use of these multilingual skills in (specialised) teaching, even in an officially quadrilingual country with a long history of immigration such as Switzerland. School teaching is orientated towards the norm of monolingualism in the language of instruction, although the social reality is characterised by linguistic superdiversity (Blommaert, 2015; Vertovec, 2007). Pupils who grow up bilingual or multilingual are disadvantaged by monolingual language practice, the concept of "monolingual habitus", as Ingrid Gogolin (1994) called it, and are unable to utilise their entire repertoire of linguistic resources for learning. Based on Bourdieu's distinction between legitimate and illegitimate languages (Bourdieu, 1982/ 1991), the delegitimisation of languages of migration in the Swiss education system is the starting point for subsequently addressing the untapped pedagogical potential of multilingualism in the growing migrant population (Martin-Rojo, 2011). The practical-orientated research project "From A, like Arabic to Z, like Zulu. Language diversity in post-migrant Switzerland" explored the question of how teachers of the heritage language (HL) and regular teachers can work together to practise integrated language support (Zingg & Gonçalves, 2022). As part of the project, the HL and mainstream teachers observed each other. This qualitative approach by means of observations was continuously reflected upon, supplemented with further training sequences and resulted in documentation of the jointly designed teaching units (Heller, Pietikäinen & Pujolar, 2018). The project, supported by the Federal Office of Culture (Switzerland), aimed to use action research (Altrichter, Posch & Spann, 2018) and the model inclusion of HL teachers in the mainstream structure to overcome monolingual superiority and break down the linguistic stigmatisation of these illegitimate languages of migration, and to critically rethink current models of teaching the so-called legitimate languages.
References
Altrichter H., Posch, P. & Spann, H. (2018). Lehrerinnen und Lehrer erforschen ihren Unterricht. 5. grundlegend überarbeitete Auflage. Heilbrunn: Klinkhardt. Blommaert, J. In K. Arnaut, J. Blommaert, B. Rampton M. & Spotti (Eds.). (2015). Language and Superdiversity (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315730240 Bourdieu, P. (1982). Ce que parler veut dire. L’économie des échanges linguistiques. Paris: Fayard. English version 1991: Language and Symbolic Power (J.B. Thompson (ed.), Cambridge: Polity Press. Gogolin, I. (1994) Der monolinguale Habitus der multilingualen Schule. Münster: Waxmann. Heller, M., Pietikäinen, S. and Pujolar, J. (2018). Critical Sociolinguistic Research Methods. Studying Language Issues That Matter. New York: Routledge. Martin-Rojo, L. (2013). (De) capitalising Students Through Linguistic Practices. In Language, Migration and Social Inequalities, edited by Alexandre Duchêne, Melissa Moyer and Celia Roberts. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Vertovec, St. (2007). Super-diversity and its implications. Ethnic and Racial Studies 30 (6), 1024–1054. Zingg, I., & Gonçalves, M. (2022). Línguas (i)legítimas ou 'o que falar quer dizer': o caso da Suíça. Sisyphus, Journal of Education 10 (3): 265–293. https://doi.org/10.25749/sis.27255
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