Delivering Multilingual Schools – Emergence and Development of Language Beliefs in Immigrant Teachers

Abstract

“How Come We Don’t Deliver?” asks Elana Shohamy in the title of her paper on imagined multilingual schools and tackles the striking issue in education: the need for a paradigm shift towards a multilingual approach. This paper focuses on the role of immigrant teachers in this process. Based on the sociolinguistic framework of linguistic markets and the pedagogical framework of professionalization, it presents a qualitative study on teachers’ language beliefs. Using linguistic biographies, this study reconstructs how beliefs towards multilingualism emerge and develop under different educational settings. The findings indicate significant deviations in the perception of multilingualism and showcase deep insights into the development of these perceptions over time. The results reveal the importance of socio-political setting and contribute to a reflected understanding of linguistic diversity management in multilingual education and the need for teacher professionalization