Do as I say, not as I do?: plurilingual beliefs and practices of L1 and FL teachers

Abstract

[Abstract] Although plurilingualism in education has been promoted in Europe at the legislative level by the CEFRCV (Council of Europe), it is known that language choice and language interaction may depend on several variables (Calafato, R. (2020). Evaluating teacher multilingualism across contexts and multiple languages: Validation and insights. Heliyon, 6(8), e04471. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2020.e04471 such as contextual factors. In bilingual regions, variables such as the sociolinguistic context may influence teachers’ cognition (Borg, S. (2003). Teacher cognition in language teaching: A review of research on what language teachers think, know, believe, and do. Language Teaching, 36(2), 81–109. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0261444803001903 and teaching practices. Likewise, studies on language teachers’ beliefs focus on FL teachers, while very few address L1 teachers (Vikøy, A., & Haukås, Å. (2021). Norwegian L1 teachers’ beliefs about a multilingual approach in increasingly diverse classrooms. International Journal of Multilingualism, 20(3), 912–931. https://doi.org/10.1080/14790718.2021.1961779. Therefore, the aim of this study is to analyse secondary school language teachers’ (L1 and FL: N = 188) beliefs and their stated teaching practices concerning plurilingualism in a bilingual region. To do so, this study follows a mixed-method exploratory approach. Overall positive beliefs and perceptions in regard to plurilingualism and pluriculturalism have been reported by participants. However, plurilingual practices such as other language usage (apart from the TL) and activities that encompass several languages are introduced to a modest extent, which seems to address several challenges reported by teachers related to language compartmentalisation (FL teachers) and sociolinguistic issues (L1 teachers). The results indicate that positive plurilingual beliefs do not explicitly extrapolate to plurilingual practice and contextual factors play a significant role in its possible implementation.