Opening up towards children’s languages: Enhancing teachers’ tolerant practices towards multilingualism
Abstract
Mainstream teachers struggle with linguistic diversity, often leading to restricting multilingualism. Scientific research, however, recommends including pupils’ home languages in school. Various qualitative studies have evaluated implementations in schools and indicated possibilities for improving teachers’ attitudes towards multilingualism. This paper evaluates an experimental implementation targeting an increase in tolerance towards multilingualism. The implementation was facilitated by external school coaches and consisted of 3 experimental tools affecting the school. Data originated from 62 Flemish primary schools (of which half were experimental schools) that participated in 3 survey waves (2012 and 2014; 763 teachers completed both waves). We used multilevel regression. We concluded that the implementation leads to higher rates of tolerance. The fulfilment of the basic conditions needed for a successful change was important, and the linguistic diversity of the pupil population and the investment by external school coaches did not affect the tolerant practices of teachers towards multilingualism.
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The 45 papers showed great variation when it comes to design and sample size, ranging from single case studies including two teachers in two school settings to large scale PD interventions including more than 500 teachers in over 60 schools.
“the 45 papers showed great variation when it comes to design and sample size, ranging from single case studies including two teachers in two school settings (i.e., Brown, Babiak, Weber, & Yoon, 2016) to large scale PD interventions including more than 500 teachers in over 60 schools (i.e., Van der Wildt et al., 2017).”
From Increasing teachers’ intercultural competences in teacher preparation programs and through professional development: A review (2021) · cites this paper as Van der Wildt et al., 2017
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- Authors
- Van Der Wildt, A., Van Avermaet, P., & Van Houtte, M.
- Affiliations
- Department of Sociology, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium
- Department of Linguistics, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium
- Venue
- School Effectiveness and School Improvement
- Publisher
- Informa UK Limited
- Published
- 2016-11-21
- Volume
- 28
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 136-152
- ISSN
- 0924-3453 (ISSN-L)
- 1744-5124
- OpenAlex
- W2551355423
- Cited by
- 18
- References
- 59
- Citations by year
- 2026: 1 · 2025: 1 · 2024: 1 · 2023: 2 · 2022: 2 · 2021: 5 · 2020: 4 · 2019: 2
- FWCI
- 2.92
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- School Effectiveness and School Improvement (publishedVersion)
- Ghent University Academic Bibliography (Ghent University) (publishedVersion)
- Ghent University Academic Bibliography (Ghent University) (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- Agency for Innovation by Science and Technology (110008)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Linguistics and Language › Multilingual Education and Policy
- Social Sciences › Education › Teacher Education and Leadership Studies
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Literature and Literary Theory › Second Language Learning and Teaching
- Keywords
- multilingualism, teacher attitudes, linguistic diversity, school coaches, implementation evaluation, elementary school, teacher practices, Flemish schools
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