This study provides insight into Vocational Education & Training (VET) students’ plurilingual repertoires, their behaviours during and attitudes towards interactions in daily life, school and work. A multi-modal approach comprising language mapping, reflective discussions and focus group (FG) interviews with VET students in the Netherlands (N = 38) shows that both heritage- and majority-language students possess rich plurilingual repertoires which are used in distinctly different ways in daily life and at work, but not at school. Students generally possess an open attitude towards plurilingualism, which is tempered by perceived limitations in language proficiency and language retrieval difficulties. The study shows that students’ existing plurilingual competences, and issues encountered when employing these, are currently neither recognised nor addressed in the school context. Implications for education are formulated.
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Inaugurele rede uitgesproken in verkorte vorm bij de aanvaarding van de positie van lector Meertaligheid en Geletterdheid aan de NHL Stenden Hogeschool. In deze rede gaat Joana Duarte dieper in op het thema meertaligheid in het onderwijs vanuit een sociolinguïstisch perspectief op het noorden van Nederland.
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Across the globe, linguistically heterogeneous populations increasingly define school systems at the same time that developing the ability to communicate cross-culturally is becoming essential for internationalized economies. While these trends seem complimentary, they often appear in paradoxical opposition as represented in the content and execution of nationwide education policies. Given the differing geopolitical contexts within which school systems function, wide variation exists with regard to how policymakers address the challenges of providing language education, including how they frame goals and design programs to align with those goals. Here we present a cross-continental examination of this variation, which reveals parallel tensions among aims for integrating immigrant populations, closing historic achievement gaps, fostering intercultural understanding, and developing multilingual competencies. To consider implications of such paradoxes and parallels in policy foundations, we compare language education in the US and in the EU, focusing on the Netherlands as an illustrative case study.
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