Multilingualism from a Monolingual Habitus: The View from Scotland

Abstract

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‘I need to know what to say when children are crying’: a language needs analysis of Scottish primary educators learning Arabic

“…The 1 + 2 Language Strategy is committed to enhancing the links with 'language communities' to 'derive maximum benefit from foreign language communities in Scotland' (ibid., p. 24). The implementation of the strategy is, however, still rather patchy, and it espouses a view of multilingualism that is labour-market oriented (Kanaki, 2020). Moreover, the extent to which this policy has benefited community languages remains questionable, as it still largely centres on English, while ostensibly celebrating the diversity of community languages spoken in Scotland (ibid.…”

Multilingualism and Social Inclusion in Scotland: Language Options and Ligatures of the “1+2 Language Approach”

“…One could wonder how culturally-and historicallymediated ligatures could be sustained. In education, issues of teacher shortages and problematic recruitment of teachers for Gaelic medium education, as well as the scarcity of books and literacy resources in Gaelic, could be seen as obstacles in the revitalisation of Gaelic (Kanaki, 2020), destroying the future opportunities/options of, and for, Gaelic speakers. At the same time, those obstacles also destroy attempts to establish cultural and historical ligatures with Scottish Gaelic, and particularly with the cognate Goidelic Gaelic languages in Eire, the Isle of Man and Cornwall.…”

“…But, in reality, as Hancock and Hancock (2018) observe, only Urdu and Chinese are taught in some Scottish schools and there are almost no other opportunities in mainstream schools to learn other heritage languages. Polish should be mentioned here as one example of the lack of consideration of heritage languages of migrants (Kanaki, 2020). Polish is the largest community language in Scotland according to the 2011 Census (NRS, 2013), spoken as their main language by 61,000 speakers, i.e., 1.2% of the population.…”

“…Unfortunately, there is no Scottish provision of any form of formal language teaching, or any offer of school language qualification in Polish. The Scottish Qualification Authority does not offer any qualifications in Polish, and there is no opportunity for teacher training under GTCS for heritage languages such as Polish (Hancock & Hancock, 2018;Kanaki, 2020).…”

“…Languages have been commodified in the policy (Kanaki, 2020); they have been considered as objects "rendered available for conventional exchange in the market" (Heller, Pujolar, & Duchêne, 2014, p. 545). Speaking 'languages' offers justified and justifiable employability.…”