A monolingual approach in an English primary school: practices and implications

Abstract

This paper investigates a monolingual approach to the teaching of linguistic minority pupils in an English primary school at Key Stage Two (7-11 years old). The work is based on a longitudinal case study of one Russian-speaking migrant pupil and her schooled experience. The analysis and discussion explicate the prohibition of the first or home language (Russian) in the school, and reveal how denying a seven-year-old migrant child permission to use her L1 is detrimental to her learning experience and her well-being. The focal data derive from participant-observation fieldnotes, visual artefacts and interviews with the child, her mother, and a class teacher over a 7-month period. Through an analysis of the participants' stancetaking, we show how the pupil's voice is inaudible in her struggle against a monolingual attitude towards her bilingualism and multicompetence. Our contribution therefore builds on work in critical migrant language education, to identify the importance of enabling the presence of the L1 in learning for migrant pupils.

Teaching English to Young Learners: Second Language Acquisition or Foreign Language Learning? – A Case Study

“…As mentioned previously, these data can be explained not only by the "comprehensible input" hypothesis, but also by the "common underlying proficiency" hypothesis proposed by Cummins (1979;1981;2008), where the assumption is that languages share common features, only being diferente at the surface levels. This certainly adds up to our understanding and research on L2 acquisition, as there is an overall uninformed view that primary school children cannot acquire the L2 because they are immersed in a monolingual setting (Lucas 2020;Gundarina & Simpson, 2021). While most often a buzzword is language awareness, this study sheds light into the process of acquiring a second language, while preserving the first, native language.…”

Towards multilingual pedagogies for social justice in the primary school

“…This wider context is important in order not to misconstrue monolingual practices in linguistically superdiverse classrooms as shortcomings of individual class teachers or schools. The dominance of monolingualism in the English primary school has been documented throughout the last two decades (Bourne, 2001a;Cunningham, 2019;Gundarina & Simpson, 2021). Kenner and Ruby (2012) as well as Welply (2017) portray the monolingual norm as working invisibly and as implicitly expected rather than explicitly formulated.…”

“…Kenner and Ruby (2012) as well as Welply (2017) portray the monolingual norm as working invisibly and as implicitly expected rather than explicitly formulated. Pearce (2012), however, reports about a school policy that explicitly prohibited the use of children's home languages, and Gundarina and Simpson (2021), too, observed situations, where the researcher was explicitly asked by the school not to use a non-English language with the pupil in lessons, and where the same child was threatened with sanctions if she used her Russian again. The monolingual norm in the classrooms of this study was not based on the claim that English is the only legitimate language but rather on the assumption that English is the only official language for learning.…”

“…In response to the increasing number of children and young people who grow up with more than one language in their daily life, multilingual pedagogies are used in this paper, in the context of English primary schools, as an umbrella term for approaches that acknowledge, include and use these students' languages (García & Flores, 2012, p. 242) or, in similar terms, acknowledge, engage with and promote their multilingual repertoires (Cummins, 2021, p. xxxvii). On the whole, multilingual pedagogies are simultaneously practices which are established in some settings of formal education, a rapidly developing pedagogical field and an area that is conceptually and politically contested, both internationally (e.g., Duarte & Gogolin, 2013a;Conteh & Meier, 2014;Probyn, 2019;Little & Kirwan, 2019;Juvonen & Källkvist, 2021;García et al, 2021;Cummins, 2021) and in the UK (e.g., Conteh et al, 2014;Cunningham, 2019;Gundarina & Simpson, 2021).…”

Using young adult fiction to interrogate raciolinguistic ideologies in schools

“…Such policies and ideologies work to erase the home language practices of racialised speakers whilst reifying notions of the ‘native’, ‘ideal’ and ‘standard’ speaker (e.g. Leung et al, 1997; Gundarina and Simpson, 2021).…”