Book Description

"This book shows that teachers at monolingual schools respond ambivalently to their linguistically diverse groups of pupils. It does so to reveal practices which often fall off the scientific radar: language-in-education research is mainly interested in describing teachers with a critical or conservative view of monolingual school policies. These teacher types are useful for advocating multilingual education policies, but they leave much ordinary, inconsistent, behaviour unaccounted for. The interest in critical and conservative teachers equally encourages us to praise or blame teachers, while it invites incompatible explanations: critical teachers have somehow escaped a monolingual ideology that their conservative colleagues are completely deceived by. Based on linguistic-ethnographic research in five Dutch-medium schools in Brussels, Belgium, this book seeks to explain how teachers who severely impose monolingual policies also adhere to an egalitarian pedagogy; why teachers who criticise monolingual policies also maintain and justify them; and why teachers who recognise pupils' primary varieties in class also prohibit these varieties on various occasions. The book suggests moreover that ideology can account for teachers' habitual as well as critical activity, by viewing ideologies as contradictory; so, when people internalise ideologies, they adopt contrary opinions which allow them to think. The book argues that this capacity is crucial for attending to the multiple, competing, goals that classroom interaction presents; that it typically invites inconsistent, albeit rational, behaviour; and that if this inconsistency is common and chronic, researchers on language-in-education need to improve their radar and develop a different kind of dialogue with teachers"--