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Article published In:
Multilingual education or How to learn to teach multilingual learning
Edited by Eva Vetter and Nikolay Slavkov
[AILA Review 35:1] 2022
► pp. 60–88

Plurilingual practice in language teacher education

An exploratory study of project design and ideological change

| Lancaster University
| University of Education Schwäbisch Gmünd

Despite decades of research supporting the pedagogic value of learners’ plurilingual resources to their linguistic and academic development, pre-service teachers frequently arrive at university inculcated in ‘target language only’ practices underpinned by monoglossic ideologies. The challenge for teacher education is to productively disrupt quotidian beliefs about language beliefs and prompt reconsideration of future classroom practices. Drawing on the work of the Douglas Fir Group (2016), this paper explores the identities, beliefs and values of two student-teachers as they emerged over the length of an innovative English-German pedagogic project on plurilingualism. The project involved German student-teachers developing a language portrait project for Grade 6 students; student-teachers using project data for undergraduate assignments; and English MA students interviewing young learners about their language portraits via videoconference. The videoconference provided young learners further opportunities to use their plurilingual resources and MA students with data for assignments on identity and investment. Working with DFG’s framework (2016), we examine the interplay of the meso- and macro-dimensions of the larger project’s design and the sometimes contradictory indexing of values and identities within and across activities. Analysis reveals that design choices sometimes unintentionally reinforced linguistic ideologies inconsistent with the project’s objectives, though these conflicts also led student-teachers to unexpected insights. We close with personal reflections on the implications of the first iteration of this design-based research project for the advancement of plurilingual pedagogies in teacher education.

Keywords: plurilingualism, classroom interventions, language teacher education, teacher beliefs, reflective practice, language education
Article outline
  • Plurilingualism in theory and practice
    • Plurilingualism and plurilingual pedagogies
    • Designing for Plurilingualism in Student-Teacher Education
  • Methodology
    • Pilot study objectives
    • Project participants
    • Project design
  • Findings and discussion
    • Anastasia and the project’s first phase
    • My parents demotivated me
    • Please just try to engage with me in English
    • The students got to know each other
    • Anastasia and the plurilingual project
    • Josh and the project’s second phase
    • Think through the worst possible consequences of its application
    • Participants lose sight of a more holistic perspective
    • The role of teacher’s guidance
    • Josh and the plurilingual project
  • Conclusion
  • Aknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 27 September 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/aila.22007.pot
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