Search Results (13)

Recognising linguistic diversity as a person’s characteristic is arguably central to their multilingual identity and is important as an equity issue. Different indicators suggest that students with migrant backgrounds, whose linguistic diversity is often not reflected in European education systems, tend to underperform compared to their peers without migrant backgrounds. There is a dire need, therefore, to alleviate the educational inequalities that negatively affect some of the most plurilingual students in European school systems. This can be carried out by revisiting assessment tools. Developing assessments to make children’s full linguistic and cultural repertoire visible, and what they can do with it, is one way that potential inequalities in school systems and assessment practices can be addressed so that cultural and linguistic responsiveness of assessments and practices can be improved. This paper explores the concept of discontinuities or mismatches between the assessment of plurilingual children’s linguistic practices in one primary school in Catalonia and their actual linguistic realities, including heritage languages. It asks: (1) What are the children’s linguistic profiles? (2) What mismatches and/or educational inequalities do they experience? and (3) How does the co-creation and use of a rubric assessing plurilingual and intercultural competence attempt to mitigate these mismatches and inequalities? Mismatches are identified using a context- and participant-relevant reflection tool, based on 18 reflective questions related to aspects of social justice. Results highlight that mismatches exist between children’s plurilingual and intercultural knowledge and skills compared to the school, education system, curriculum, and wider regional and European policy. These mismatches highlight two plurilingual visions for language education. The paper highlights how language assessment tools and practices can be made more culturally and linguistically fair for plurilingual children with migration backgrounds. Full article

This study investigated the intersection between macro-level institutional narratives on plurilingualism and language education, and the increasingly complex linguistic repertoires that students bring to their school experience in South Tyrol (Italy). The paper first outlines the main specificities of this historically multilingual substate entity, and discusses how current educational guidelines celebrate linguistic diversity while failing to explicitly acknowledge the epistemic capacity of more recently settled minoritised language communities. Zooming in at micro-level classroom experiences, the paper then looks at the educational stances of one primary school teacher who took part in a participatory action research initiative aimed at the valorisation and mobilisation of students’ complex linguistic repertoires. Over two years, the initiative fostered collaboration among teachers and researchers to co-construct strategies aligned with the principles of pedagogical translanguaging. Through qualitative analysis of data generated through individual semi-structured interviews and a short reflective text, this paper shows how the selected teacher began to reconceptualise plurilingual education in more inclusive and equitable ways, i.e., supporting both institutional and non-dominant languages and legitimising the children’s diverse knowledge bases. By highlighting the role of teachers’ agency in challenging macro-level narratives from below, the study addresses the imbalances of power between institutionalised and non-institutionalised languages, and contributes to research framing plurilingual education as a socially engaged phenomenon in increasingly multilingual contexts. Full article

In Spain, the learning of foreign languages has become one of the most interesting educational challenges in recent decades. Regulatory changes have been proposed to align with the Council of Europe’s language policy, which aims to promote plurilingualism and pluriculturalism among European Union citizens. Although the development of plurilingual competence in students has become a key goal, there is little evidence regarding the beliefs of current teachers, especially in monolingual contexts, where multilingualism is mainly developed through instruction. This study involved 307 teachers who taught languages or subjects in a foreign language. The results reveal beliefs about the promotion of plurilingualism, the objectives of language learning, the importance of plurilingual competence, and its characterization that at times do not align with the European language policy and its approach to plurilingualism, though there is agreement on other issues. Among the variables analyzed, two variables—academic training and the number of languages known—were found to significantly influence the beliefs revealed. Full article

Teaching and assessing summary writing remains in the focus of research into academic literacy, the issue revisited by every new generation of researchers in the light of the emerging affordances and plurilingual reality. In higher Ukrainian education, where teaching academic skills has gained momentum only in the past 15–20 years, summary writing pertains mostly to teaching Ukrainian to international students, teaching English for professional communication and training post-graduates. A 15-year practice of teaching academic English to students of linguistics has provided the author with extensive empirical data which, upon analysis conducted within action research, have enabled maximized effect on teaching summary writing. Along with the teaching methodology, the assessment technique was also optimized, based on rating scales with the criteria accepted by the students and detailed feedback provided to them via the Google Classroom platform. The comparison of pre-and post-tests of writing summaries of Ukrainian research articles verifies the hypothesis about the transferability of summarization skills built in English to academic L1. The author formulates the limitations of the action research project, implications and prospects of further research. Full article

After many decades of research, publications, and exchange of good practices, the debate about intercultural pedagogy, the importance of bilingual education and the promotion of existing multiculturalism in school classes remains topical in the public educational system in Greece. My ongoing research interest focuses on the inclusive education of students with migrant backgrounds, taking into account the foreign language lessons in public education in Greece, specifically the teaching of German as a second foreign language. The empirical part of the study took place in a public primary school in a Province of the city of Karditsa during the school year 2021/2022. A class of 18 students of the 6th Grade, where 7 of them were bilingual/multilingual with a migrant background, was under research during the second and third trimester in the German language lesson. The research work is based on the methodology of the Functional-Pragmatics language theory by Ehlich and Rehbein. The data analysis is in progress; however, questionnaires were given to all participant students, and interviews were conducted with all bilinguals parents. Full article

This paper will attempt to visualize adult refugees and migrants, as well as a specific multilingual and multicultural educational setting in Greece. This study aspires to depict/present the plurilingual profiles, language needs, and challenges of L2 Greek students through a variety of tools/methods, e.g., questionnaires, portraits, narratives, needs analysis, and assessment tools. In a complementary way, this research focuses on highlighting the value of language portraits, identity texts, and translanguaging in L2 Greek classrooms. Conditions regarding the educational process in the specific educational setting will also be discussed. This was a case study conducted in an open school for migrants in Greece. Eight volunteer teachers at the school and twenty students participated in this research through a multimethod research design. Multilingual profiles and learners’ needs and goals became visible, and the teachers managed to “hear” the multilingual voices of their students and understand their multilingual profiles. Overall, it is clear that these findings pave the way for large-scale research to investigate in depth everything presented in this research. Using language portraits and identity texts as group activities helps to conduct a productive discussion in the classroom, through which students gain access to the use of concepts such as “multilingualism”, “multiculturalism”, and “diversity”. Full article

Code-switching (CSW) is the phenomenon where speakers use two or more languages in a single discourse or utterance—an increasingly recognised natural product of multilingualism in many settings. In language teaching and learning in particular, code-switching has been shown to bring in many pedagogical benefits, including accelerating students’ confidence, increasing their access to content, as well as improving their participation and engagement. Unfortunately, however, current educational technologies are not yet able to keep up with this ‘multilingual turn’ in education, and are partly responsible for the constraint of this practice to only classroom contexts. In an effort to make progress in this area, we offer a data-driven position paper discussing the current state of affairs, difficulties of the existing educational natural language processing (NLP) tools for CSW and possible directions for future work. We specifically focus on two cases of feedback and assessment technologies, demonstrating how the current state-of-the-art in these domains fails with code-switching data due to a lack of appropriate training data, lack of robust evaluation benchmarks and lack of end-to-end user-facing educational applications. We present some empirical user cases of how CSW manifests and suggest possible technological solutions for each of these scenarios. Full article

Dramatically increased population flows since at least the 1980s, primarily through economic migration and refugee resettlement, have brought considerable ethnic and linguistic diversity to classrooms around the world. This diversity has been amplified by the rising recognition of in-country indigenous and minority languages. In such plurilingual learning environments, teachers require sophisticated language education skills. They need to be able to teach the dominant language/s across the curriculum, support plurilingual learners, and often teach foreign or additional languages. One conceptual lens through which to analyse the presence of these competencies in current teacher education policy is that of language awareness. While this term originally referred to the raising of student awareness of features and functions of language, it now incorporates knowledge about flexible languaging practices. Through a comparative analysis of the two key teacher education policy documents in Norway and New Zealand, we have investigated how the concept of teacher language awareness is incorporated in high-level policy documents pertaining to ITE in these two countries and how these converge and diverge in their treatment of language awareness. Our in-depth comparison of these important educational policies urges both jurisdictions, as well as others, to be aware of local particularities and broader patterns in meeting the needs of teachers to be plurilingually aware and equipped for 21st-century classrooms. Full article

This paper reports on a study of teachers’ engagement with their own multilingualism in a pre-service teacher education context. As linguistic diversity in society and schools around the globe is increasing, teachers are required to meet the challenges of teaching children who live with multiple languages. However, teachers are seldom required to reflect on and engage with their own multilingualism, which forms the basis of a subjective and experiential approach to educating teachers multilingually. Embedded in an arts-based visual methodology, this study used the concept of Dominant Language Constellations (DLCs) as both a theoretical underpinning and a creative qualitative tool for collecting data. It included fourteen DLC artefacts created by future teachers of English in Grades 1–7 and Grades 5–10 in northern Norway, supported by oral and written narratives. Plurisemiotic analysis of teachers’ DLC artefacts indicates that teachers ‘saw’ or perceived themselves as plurilingual individuals for the first time. Furthermore, they reflected on the classroom implications of including multilingual practices in a context of increasing linguistic diversity in Norway, through capitalizing on their own and potentially their learners’ multilingual identities. Full article

Internationally, multi-/plurilingualism has been defined as an important educational goal and plurilingual education as a right for all learners. The present study investigates the readiness of Norwegian pre-service teachers (N = 54) to lay the foundations for multilingualism and life-long language learning (LLLL) for all pupils in the elementary school English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classroom. For this purpose, we studied pre-service teachers’ conceptualization of multilingualism and their cognitions about laying the foundations for LLLL, using pluralistic approaches, and the importance of cross-linguistic awareness. The following data collection instruments were employed: (a) a survey with open- and closed-ended questions and (b) a short Likert scale survey with items based on the Framework of References for Pluralistic Approaches to Languages and Culture (FREPA). We found that the participants’ conceptualization of multilingualism reflected key dimensions in the field. The great majority of them had a positive view of the contribution that elementary school EFL teaching can make to multilingualism. The overwhelming majority were also positive about laying the foundations for LLLL and agreed that cross-linguistic awareness is important for pupils. However, almost one-third of the pre-service teachers were skeptical about pluralistic approaches to teaching. Full article

Intercultural Education is a key feature in the development of inclusion strategies aimed at ethnically diverse students. Transformative approaches towards learning such as Culturally Responsive Teaching (CRT) are essential in order to answer the educative needs that arise due to the coexistence between ethnic minorities and mainstream society. Therefore, cultural and historical representation of these communities play an important role as gatekeepers in order to achieve positive results as far as inclusive education is concerned. This article explores research based on a case study carried out in a high school located in the North-West of Spain developing successful learning stories after implementing the CRT methodology within the teaching of English as a foreign language. For its development, this article examines the trajectory of education with Roma-Gypsy students and moves forward with previous studies that endorse the success of using this approach among ethnically diverse students for their inclusion within the educative system. Intercultural and Plurilingual Education is a key feature in the development of inclusion strategies aimed at ethnically diverse students. This article includes research based on a case study carried out in a high school located in the North-West of Spain. It is aimed at: 1. Engaging ethnically diverse students to become part of the mainstream classroom through the inclusion of their culture; 2. Improving their language skills and competencies in the learning of a foreign language; 3. Raising the attendance at schools of ethnically diverse students. To achieve these targets the Culturally Responsive Teaching (CRT) Methodology has been implemented. CRT is considered essential to answer the educative needs that arise due to the coexistence between ethnic minorities and conventional communities. After gathering and analyzing data, results show that: ethnically diverse students’ motivation has been increased; it also expanded their social skills among peers; they gained more visibility; and finally, both diverse and non-diverse learners improved their proficiency in the English language. The discussion section states that the use of CRT Methodology traditionally used with Afro-American and Native-American students is also relevant for the Roma-Gypsy students that took part in this study. Full article

Current higher education policies include several challenges, such as the academic internationalization of universities, mobility, and cultural plurality. Beyond the official curriculum, university educators have conceptions of citizenship and pluricultural competence. To understand the conceptions of educators on both topics in the Hispanic and Japanese contexts of higher education, this article presents a quantitative study involving a collaboration between a sample of education and social sciences teaching staff from universities in Spain and Japan. The CYASPS^® (Citizenship and Plurilingual Social Actors in Higher Education) instrument and a categories system were designed for data collection and analysis with the support of SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences) software. Using a comparative approach, this study investigated the teaching staffs’ conceptions about citizenship and pluricultural teaching–learning environments, which focused on their views regarding different kinds of citizenship, citizens’ participation, and sources for the development of pluricultural competences. Based on a descriptive and factorial analysis, there were significant correlations between citizenship and pluricultural competence, with relevant connections between key aspects of pluricultural competence, including awareness of the rights from the liberal citizenship model, civic commitment of the republican citizenship model, and several elements of cosmopolitan and radical citizenship. Full article

This study diagnoses how the plurilingual repertoires of mature students (MS) in higher education (HE) are constructed throughout their lives. It addresses the main characteristics of MS; the contexts in which they move throughout their lives, and the situations they contact with languages. Data were collected by means of a questionnaire, mostly comprising open-ended questions. The questionnaire was emailed to 485 MS and was filled in by 195 (40.2%). The results highlight the intrinsic relationship between the MS’ life histories and the construction of their plurilingual repertoires. The findings reinforce the relevance of considering the MS’ plurilingual repertoires and life histories in the development of educational linguistic policies in HE. Full article