Teaching Minority Languages in Multiethnic and Multilingual Environments: Teachers’ Perceptions of Students’ Attitudes toward the Teaching of Basque in Compulsory Education

The literature reveals the difficulty of teaching minority languages in multiethnic and multilingual regions. Studies about teachers’ perceptions when instructing a minority language might help stakeholders to design interventions to overcome this problem. The first aim of this study was to describe teachers’ perceptions of type of issues, student complaints, and behaviors when teaching in Basque. The second aim was to state whether there is any relation between the origin of the students, the teachers’ working experience, and working region with the occurrence of issues, type of complaints in class, and the role of students’ parents. The data for this study were collected using an online questionnaire answered by 197 teachers. A descriptive analysis of the answers was performed using SPSS^® (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences). Chi-square analyses were conducted to study the relation between variables. Results indicate that teachers believe Basque is sometimes undermined in their teaching practice, but no difference is perceived between local and migrant students. Conversely, regarding teachers’ views, negative attitudes toward Basque are mostly influenced by students’ families. This provides evidence to encourage education stakeholders to design better lessons involving the teaching of Basque. View Full-Text