Multilingualism in mainstream language education in Norway: Perceptions and operationalizations

Abstract

The present PhD-study has examined perceptions and operationalizations of multilingualism in mainstream language classrooms in Norway. It has investigated how students and teachers at the upper secondary schoollevel, and teacher educators at the university level perceive multilingualism, both through operationalizations from The Common European Framework of References (CEFR) and through representations of multilingualism in the curriculum reform (LK20). The PhD-study is article-based and consists of three published articles and an extended abstract. The extended abstract provides a background for the studies and contains a conceptual framework, a literature review, a description of research design and methodology, some ethical deliberations and a discussion of the results.

In Study 1 (Article 1), a classroom-based intervention approach was explored in a class of 19 students and their teacher of German and English, involving the use of four specific operationalizations of multilingualism from CEFR (Council of Europe, 2018, pp. 157-160), one of which was the “capacity to use knowledge of familiar languages to understand new languages, looking for cognates and internationalisms”. The students were ultimately asked to use some of these operationalizations in a text comprehension task at the end of the intervention. The main aim of the study was to explore how multilingualism can be operationalized and to examine the teacher’s and the students’ perceptions of the usefulness of the operationalizations. The findings indicated that the operationalizations were perceived as useful by both the students and the teacher, but more useful for German (L3) than for English (L2). The operationalizations were viewed as beneficial for text comprehension and metacognition; but the teacher found it challenging to acquire knowledge of and about all the students’ first languages.

In Study 2 (Article 2), four teachers and four teacher educators were recruited in order to interview them on their perceptions of multilingualism and the usefulness of the intervention carried out in Study 1, in order to provide richer descriptions on the question of possible uses of multilingualism in the classroom. In addition to the question on the usefulness of the lesson plan, I probed into the informants’ understanding of the multilingual construct generally with a view to deepen and broaden the perspective on what multilingualism may mean in a Norwegian language teaching and learning context. As a major finding in Study 2 showed that the research participants had experienced a “shift” in their thinking towards multilingualism and found the newly issued LK20 curriculum to provide ample opportunities for the promotion and operationalization of multilingualism, it was a natural step to move on to a document analysis of LK20 and scrutinize the documents behind the curriculum reform in Article 3.

Therefore, in Study 3 (Article 3) my co-author Heike Speitz and I conducted a document analysis of LK20 to analyze which aspects of multilingualism that were represented in the Core curriculum and in the subject curricula of English, Foreign languages and Norwegian in LK20, and we also carried out two focus groups with three teachers in each, to test how these aspects of multilingualism in LK20 were perceived by teachers of English, Foreign languages and Norwegian. The findings indicated that there is a gap between the intentions of the ideological curriculum and the perceived and experiential curricula of teachers and students, as when LK20 states that “All pupils shall experience that being proficient in a number of languages is a resource, both in school and society at large”, the teachers report that this normative assumption may place too much responsibility on different stakeholders such as students, as some are reluctant to display their multilingual repertoires in class. Multilingualism is also conceptualized in a different way in the three language subject curricula of English, Foreign Languages and Norwegian, and lacks clear operationalizations, which may explain why teachers report that, despite being positive towards linguistic diversity, they are insecure concerning the operationalization of multilingualism in their classrooms

To sum up, the three articles provide empirical evidence of how teachers and students perceive and make sense of multilingualism in a foreign language education setting. The three studies all concentrate on ways in which teachers, teacher educators and students understand, or find it challenging to understand, the multilingual construct. The studies also contribute empirical knowledge relating on the fact that even though the teachers are positive towards multilingualism as a concept, the teachers lack support and competence to implement it in their classrooms. The study also indicated that both present and future teachers need more support in implementing a multilingual pedagogy in the future.