Modelling linguistic diversity at school: the excluding impact of inclusive multilingualism

Abstract

This paper discusses data from a Dutch-medium secondary school in 8 Brussels where almost all pupils speak a different language than Dutch at home. It 9 illustrates that teachers' preference for maintaining the school's monolingual policy 10 did not preclude their creation of haphazard or humorous multilingual interstices 11 that temporarily alleviated the friction between the school language policy and the 12 reality of pupils' linguistic repertoires, and promoted the construction of an 13 agreeable classroom climate. The paper argues, however, that these multilingual 14 interstices also suggested ideal models of language use across differently valued 15 discursive zones at school, and that the inclusion of unofficial linguistic resources in 16 specific discursive slots implied their exclusion in other, more important ones. The 17 scarce openings for linguistic diversity that teachers made, in other words, at the 18 same time socialized pupils into the broader sociolinguistic hierarchy that creates 19 their own disfluency and problematization. 20 21 Keywords Classroom interaction Á Multilingualism Á Metapragmatic 22 regimentation Á Socialization Á Brussels Á Dutch-medium schools 23 24 2526 Introduction 27 Language policies have become critical tools for nation-states to reinvent 28 themselves in a time and age governed by what has come to be called late or 29 advanced capitalism. Confronted with an economy that exceeds national bound-30 aries, with supranational organizations (such as the European Union) that produce 31 linguistic policies of their own, and as they see their own turf become increasingly A1 J. Jaspers (&)

The transformative limits of translanguaging

“…Or, inversely, how do you make pupils learn a collectively valued register without implying that their individual linguistic skills are less important? To resolve this teachers sometimes resort to makeshift strategies, promoting translanguaging during group-work, for example, but frowning upon its occurrence in other contexts (in writing, in higher education) (Martínez et al, 2015); other teachers explicitly insist on a monolingual policy but in practice recognize and even use pupils' home varieties (Jaspers, 2015).…”

The Effects of Translanguaging on Participation in EFL Classrooms

“…Translanguaging has been found to occur in organizational and non-school related matters as well as curricular activities and knowledge transfer (Jaspers, 2015;Rosiers, Van Lancker, & Delarue, 2017). Translanguaging potentially serves a socio-emotional purpose that allows students and teachers to demonstrate knowledge of social hierarchies within the classrooms as well as to mediate multilingual identities, which may improve student participation (Garcia et al, 2017;Rosiers et al, 2017).…”

Soft power: teachers’ friendly implementation of a severe monolingual policy

“…While Brussels is officially bilingual (Dutch-French) since 1963, it does not offer bilingual educationthe four, exclusive, EU-funded European schools excepted. This has complex institutional and ideological origins that, for reasons of space, we shall not go into here (but see Sherman Swing 1988; Mettewie and Janssens 2007;Jaspers 2015). Suffice it to say that education in the Brussels Capital Region is not organised by the city authorities but by the Dutch-and French-speaking Community in Belgium who also provide education in the Flemish and Walloon Region, respectively; and that less than a third of Brussels' schools are Dutch-medium.…”

“…Also French-medium schools are welcoming an increasing number of pupils with non-French linguistic backgrounds, but this evolution is less pronounced and invites less public concern. Indeed, while pupils' often unpredictable difficulties with the instruction language invite pedagogical challenges in schools of both linguistic communities, the practical multilingualism of the pupil population, and the resulting spread of French as a lingua franca (as is common in Brussels) leads to ideological anxieties in Dutch-medium schools in particular because it minoritises Dutch speakers in the schools that were designed to address their needs (Jaspers 2014(Jaspers , 2015(Jaspers , 2018cp. Heller 1995).…”