Volume 8, Issue 1 - Special Issue: Linguistic Diversity and its Challenges for Educational Institutions and Teacher Professionalisation / Guest editors: Drorit Lengyel, Tobias Schroedler & Patrick Grommes

Over the years and because of globalization, English has undoubtedly become an international language, a lingua franca. In this interconnected context, a new reality for the EFL educators has arisen: the need to prepare learners for intercultural encounters, that is being able to learn and use English, for effective and appropriate interaction with other native or non-native speakers of English worldwide. It is, thus, imperative that teachers become aware of the importance of this competence so they can adapt their teaching approaches and incorporate them in the EFL classroom. This exploratory study investigated the beliefs and attitudes of EFL teachers, with regards to incorporating intercultural communicative competence (ICC) in their classroom. The aim of this study was to gain more understanding of the current status of teaching English for Intercultural Communication in the Greek EFL state classroom in terms of teachers’ understandings and attitudes towards cultural teaching and ICC. To this end, an online questionnaire with closed questions was employed to collect data from sixty-two EFL teachers teaching at Greek state schools. Statistical analyses showed that EFL teachers have high appreciation of integrating ICC in English teaching. Moreover, they seem highly value the affective and behavioural components of this competence. These findings are hoped to contribute to a better understanding of intercultural teaching in ELT so that implications should be made to enhance the quality of ELT in Greece.

The school environment of the 21st century is shaped by rapidly changing social and societal conditions that teachers need to adapt to, increasing linguistic, cultural and ethnic diversity among other things. The development of attitudes to cope with these constant societal transformations is one of the main challenges of teacher professionalization today. In this chapter, we concentrate on the self-positioning and argumentation patterns of two Luxembourgish primary school teachers. We focus on the question how these teachers construct differences and homogeneity, what kind of categories and norms they rely on (e.g. performance, sociocultural background, and language) and in how far mechanisms of in- and exclusion become visible. With its trilingual tradition and school system (mainly Luxembourgish, French and German), and at the same time a highly diverse society with more than 170 nationalities, Luxembourg represents a particularly interesting case. As the recent PISA studies have repeatedly shown, the Luxembourgish school system (including its traditional trilingualism and strong orientation on language education) produces a high degree of inequality, and represents an important challenge especially for children of migration. With our study, which is based on in-depth interviews and which adopts an analytical approach combining elements of content and discourse analysis, we found a tendency towards a backward oriented idealized orientation of the past and a high degree of insecurity. We also show which ambivalences the teachers are confronted with and their efforts to deal with these ambivalences. We hope to contribute to a deeper understanding of how teachers position themselves vis a vis the existing diversity in schools, and which discourse and argumentation patterns they rely on. We see this study as part of research on teacher professionalization that will be useful for reflexive pre- and in-service teacher training.

This paper describes and discusses findings gained in a teacher training reform project at the University of Hamburg in Germany. In a newly implemented structure, pre-service teachers partake in an integrated model of courses that prepare them to deal with multilingualism in the subject classroom. For the first four semesters of the new model, a complex evaluation tool was employed in a pre-post design to better understand student competence development, curricular components of the teaching degree and student beliefs about multilingualism. This paper sheds light on the professional beliefs that pre-service teachers have about linguistic diversity and multilingual learners. The overall results show generally positive beliefs about multilingual learners, multilingualism in schools, and language support for multilingual learners. Moreover, the data show that multilingual pre-service teachers have more positive beliefs, female participants have more positive beliefs, and that there is a significant interdependence between beliefs and relevant opportunities to learn. Comparing the pre-test and the post-test data using explorative factor analysis, it can be shown that students’ beliefs are far more structured and follow a clear five-dimensional pattern in the post test, whereas the pre-test data can be described as diffuse and unstructured.

This article presents recent developments around multilingual secondary education in the officially bilingual province of Friesland, the Netherlands. As in other European contexts, schools in this region face the challenge of a growing language diversity due to migration. Despite this larger variety of languages in society, schooling is still mainly through the national language (Kroon & Spotti, 2011), based on the idea that immersion in each of the target languages triggers the best outcomes, thus leading to language separation pedagogies. Also, in teacher training programmes, pre-service teachers are educated with a pedagogy of language separation. This is in contrast with research that has repeatedly shown the importance of using all language resources of multilingual pupils in optimizing learning (Cenoz & Gorter, 2011; Cummins, 2008). Against this backdrop, recent developments for multilingual secondary education within the province of Friesland focus on a. less separation between the three instruction languages (Frisian, Dutch and English); b. creating bridges between foreign languages in secondary education (German and French); c. valorising and including migrant languages in mainstream education. The Holi-Frysk project (holistic approach for Frisian and language education) was set up as an answer to these issues (Authors, forthcoming). In this pilot-project three secondary schools of different types developed, implemented and evaluated multilingual teaching approaches to include all languages present in the school in teaching. Teachers were trained through workshops and school visits and the activities were video recorded, transcribed and analysed on their translanguaging practices. The article will first of all present and discuss a few examples of the pedagogical activities and secondly zoom in on its effects at the interactional level by focusing on moments in which different functions of pedagogical translanguaging (García & Wei, 2015) appear. Finally, suggestions are given how these findings could be integrated in the teacher training programmes to prepare our pre-service teachers for today’s multilingual and multicultural classrooms.

This article examines the intersection between teacher agency and national language policy in Sweden. We present data from qualitative research across multiple urban Swedish school districts that explores the experiences and perspectives of multilingual classroom assistants (MCAs) on their work and in relation to national and district-level policies. We interrogate what it means to uphold translanguaging stances in otherwise monolingual Swedish classrooms. Data showcase the complexity with which MCAs articulate their roles as advocates for their students in translanguaging spaces, and in relation to school, district, and national policies. This inquiry also uncovers the need to position the experiences of MCAs more centrally in educational policy to support alternative visions for inclusion of newly arrived migrant students in school. It concludes with insights regarding the multifaceted nature of teacher advocacy and its relevance to future scholarship on the education of newly arrived migrant children.

The cross-disciplinary research project ‘SprabiPiKs’ (‘Sprachbildungsprofis in mehrsprachigen Kitas’) – ‘Language education professionals in multilingual ECEC institutions’ – investigates a number of components related to the quality of interactions in multilingual early childhood education and care (ECEC). The project closely examines the interplay between the quality of interactions and pedagogical orientations on multilingualism, competencies of the professionals, and the conditions in ECEC facilities as well as in their neighbourhoods. To address the complexity, the sample consists of six childcare centres and their professionals. The project’s data collection method consists of interviews and group discussions with the professionals, videography of verbal interactions, and questionnaires on the conditions in the facilities and the neighbourhood. The objective is to contribute significantly to the understanding of the complex quality pattern in ECEC institutions from both an intercultural-educational and a linguistic perspective. Moreover, the project’s findings can be informative to enhance the quality of interactions with respect to the diverse linguistic backgrounds of children.