Multilingual classrooms at times of superdiversity

About: The article was published on 2016-12-21 and is currently open access. It has received 10 citations till now. The article focuses on the topics: Superdiversity.

Summary

Introduction (532)

• That is, they were led by the politically driven, widespread metapragmatic judgment that bilingualism, as well as any form of hybridity in language use, should be regarded as an impediment hindering the educational careers of pupils from immigrant minority backgrounds, resulting in their lagging behind their monolingual peers.
• This contribution starts where the previous contribution of Bezemer & Kroon (2008) ended.
• From there, the authors will address a new phenomenon, that of superdiversity, and they will draw out the implications that superdiversity holds for education as well as for the ways educators seek to find solutions for combining superdiversity with the normativity that necessarily characterizes education.

Early developments and initial contributors (566)

• Once the authors examine the relationship between bilingualism -since that is the reduced and manageable form multilingualism is traditionally given in schools -and education, they see that it is complex.
• John Edwards' (2004) review of the field of bilingualism and his examination of the concerns listed above and of how they have played a role in establishing who is (and who is not) 'bilingual' is still one of the most authoritative publications in the field.
• Before Edwards, many engaged with the job of defining and measuring the degree of bilingualism that someone may hold.
• Bloomfield (1933) had already observed that bilingualism resulted from the addition of a 'perfectly learned' foreign language to one's.
• While research on cognitive development has given way to evidence supporting the inclusion of bilingualism in classrooms, it appears that regular education has nonetheless continued with a bleak view of all that surrounds hybrid forms of linguistic expression and language variation.

Major Contributions (1510)

• The study of language and education and more precisely of language as social practice in educational contexts is much indebted to the work of John Gumperz (1974) and Dell Hymes (1972) , who both studied language variation in and outside the classroom and engaged in public debates around bilingualism.
• Whereas Gumperz' earlier work was linked to the beginnings of sociolinguistics and particularly to the establishment of what became known as the 'ethnography of communication' (Gumperz 1972) , the later phase of his work became what is generally referred to as interactional sociolinguistics, and this took a critical stance toward other influential schools of linguistic thinking.
• Building on the Hymesian dichotomy of form and function, scholars started working on how people hold socio-culturally conditioned ideas about language, its usage and its effects within institutions (Silverstein 1979; Kroskrity, Schieffelin & Woolard 1992; Blommaert & Verschueren 1999; Kroskrity 2000) .
• This calls into question the presupposed stability of "-lingualism", as in "bi-" or "multi-", and gives priority to language being understood as a set of empirically observable practices in which "languages", "codes", "-lects" and "registers" emerge as the ideological byproduct.
• Notwithstanding Gumperz', Hymes' and Silverstein's efforts to bring new sociolinguistic tools for unraveling the intricacies of intercultural encounters taking place in, among others, educational settings, regular education often still denigrates language variation and hybridity, whether in spoken or written form.

Work in progress (703)

• It is through the work of Blommaert mainly that the term globalization has entered sociolinguistics.
• Globalization, according to Blommaert (2010: 13) , "is most commonly used as a shorthand for the intensified flows of capital, goods, people, images and discourses around the globe, driven by technological innovations, mainly in the field of media and information and communication technology, and resulting in new patterns of global activity, community organization and culture.".
• Taking Great Britain as an example, he shows that over the past decades the nature of immigration "has brought with it a transformative 'diversification of diversity' not just in terms of ethnicities and countries of origin, but also with respect to a variety of significant variables that affect where, how, and with whom people live" (Vertovec 2007: 1) .
• Work on superdiversity provides a refreshing perspective in that it offers a "new way of talking about diversity" (Fanshathe authors & Sriskandarajah 2010: 33) beyond the structures and constrictions brought by classic multiculturalism (Phillimore 2011) .
• Such binary constructs, in fact, too often assume a zero-sum game in which the migrants' stronger transnational patterns of association imply that the latter is only partially integrated in the local mainstream society at hand.

Problems and difficulties (545)

• The concept of superdiversity has consequences for their vision of language and language use, and thereby also for language learning and teaching.
• In all these cases, the almost sacrosanct norm of the school language is decisive for the evaluation of students' performance.
• In their everyday practice teachers need to face the challenge of deconstructing these ideologically shaped differences.
• This includes a change in teachers' knowledge, attitudes and practices regarding language and language teaching, in order to enable them to find a balance between the educational requirement of normativity and the societal reality of language diversity and polylingual languaging.
• Needless to say, all these changes would immediately affect existing nationally embedded, self-evident top-down realities and therefore will be difficult to accomplish.

Full text

Tilburg University
Multilingual classrooms at times of superdiversity
Spotti, Max; Kroon, Sjaak
Published in:
Encyclopedia of Language and Education
DOI:
10.1007/978-3-319-02322-9_21-1
Publication date:
2016
Document Version
Early version, also known as pre-print
Link to publication in Tilburg University Research Portal
Citation for published version (APA):
Spotti, M., & Kroon, S. (2016). Multilingual classrooms at times of superdiversity. In S. Wortham (Ed.),
Encyclopedia of Language and Education: Discourse and Education
(Vol. 3). Springer.
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02322-9_21-1
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Download date: 10. aug.. 2022

Multilingual Classrooms in times of Superdiversity
Massimiliano Spotti & Sjaak Kroon
Department of Culture Studies, Tilburg University
Abstract (154)
The present chapter addresses multilingual classrooms and superdiversity. More specifically, we deal
with the consequences that a revised understanding of language – based on the concept of language
repertoires – has for language education as well as for educators caught in the transition between
diversity and superdiversity. After having shown that dealing with multilingualism in regular classrooms,
at least in Western Europe, has been a matter of concern for teachers and learners’ educational
pathways for decades, we move on to review the founding fathers of sociolinguistics and analyze how
their seminal work has been used recently to re-evaluate the concept of sociolinguistic repertoires. We
then discuss how this concept highlights the fact that education professionals appear to suffer from a
‘trained blindness,’ mostly focusing on attainment targets and normativity, rather than paying attention
to the actual ways in which students use ‘language’ across formal, non-formal and informal institutional
spaces.
Introduction (532)
Dealing with multilingualism in regular classrooms has been a point of concern for teachers right from
the start of compulsory education, at least in Western Europe, when children speaking non-standard
varieties of the official language (i.e. dialects) came to inhabit classrooms where they were confronted
with teachers using the standard variety as a language of instruction (cf. Cheshire et al. 1989). When
mainstream educational institutions opened their doors to children that belonged to what were, back
then, newer immigrant minority communities, they were immediately confronted with the languages of
their newly admitted students and with an array of correlates like limited proficiency in the school
language, the presence of ethnic minority languages in schools, low school achievement, discrimination,
prejudice, societal disadvantage, remedy measures, and the presence of non-indigenous varieties of the
official language (cf. Jaspaert & Kroon 1991). This situation gave rise to a plethora of educational
reactions that often were not based on the results of adequate empirical research. One telling example
comes from the early language compensation programs in the USA that were deemed to fail as a
consequence of their limited understanding of the variability of language as a human resource and an

instrument of teaching and learning (cf. Kroon & Vallen 1997). Other examples include the variety of
approaches to transitional bilingual education that became an instrument for the production of
monolingual children in multilingual classrooms (cf. Van Avermaet & Sierens 2013). One of the main
presuppositions of these and similar approaches to language variation in educational contexts was their
reliance on a monoglot ideology. That is, they were led by the politically driven, widespread
metapragmatic judgment that bilingualism, as well as any form of hybridity in language use, should be
regarded as an impediment hindering the educational careers of pupils from immigrant minority
backgrounds, resulting in their lagging behind their monolingual peers.
Over the decades, however, it has become clear that multilingualism in education and society
should instead be considered as a resource, a positive asset for learning and development (Kroon &
Vallen 2006). As a consequence of ongoing migration, multilingualism has become a much more
multifaceted phenomenon than it was in the early years of bilingual education: dozens of languages
have become part and parcel of urban classrooms in the last decades of the 20
th
century and teachers
had to deal with these languages in their regular teaching (cf. the case studies in Gogolin & Kroon 2000
and Bezemer et al. 2005). This contribution starts where the previous contribution of Bezemer & Kroon
(2008) ended. That is, it is based on research in regular multilingual and multicultural classrooms. We
will show how the monoglot ideology mentioned above has moved from bilingualism and the challenge
brought by bilingualism to education, to multilingualism. From there, we will address a new
phenomenon, that of superdiversity, and we will draw out the implications that superdiversity holds for
education as well as for the ways educators seek to find solutions for combining superdiversity with the
normativity that necessarily characterizes (language) education.
Early developments and initial contributors (566)
Our working definition of bilingualism, or rather multilingualism, is one that sees two or more languages
or varieties being involved in a communicative exchange in a sociocultural space. Once we examine the
relationship between bilingualism – since that is the reduced and manageable form multilingualism is
traditionally given in schools – and education, we see that it is complex. In recent decades, we have
been confronted with the fact that there are several concerns about bilingualism and the educational
wellbeing of pupils. These address its additive or subtractive as well as its balanced or unbalanced
nature and the possible lagging behind of bilingual pupils’ educational achievement in comparison to
their monolingual peers. The common assumption was, and partly still is, that exposure to and
engagement in language variation is potentially damaging for pupils’ development. John Edwards’

(2004) review of the field of bilingualism and his examination of the concerns listed above and of how
they have played a role in establishing who is (and who is not) ‘bilingual’ is still one of the most
authoritative publications in the field. His account, anchored in a structuralist understanding of
language, shows that much of the concern with bilingualism had to do with generating workable
definitions of who is and who is not a bilingual language user and with what a bilingual can and cannot
do.
Before Edwards, many engaged with the job of defining and measuring the degree of
bilingualism that someone may hold. For instance, Bloomfield (1933) had already observed that
bilingualism resulted from the addition of a ‘perfectly learned’ foreign language to one’s. Weinreich
(1953) defined bilingualism in a somewhat vaguer fashion. He saw it as a loose alternation of two
codes. Dispute over these various definitions ignited a debate on whether someone either could or
could not be categorized as bilingual and also raised a question about the degree of competence and
performance someone has to have at both individual as well as societal levels in order to be a bilingual.
From there, research on bilingualism and education has progressed along two major pathways (cf.
Hamers & Blanc 2000 for a comprehensive review). The first engages with the effects of bilingualism for
the individual in different domains, while the second engages with the development of meta-linguistic
awareness and knowledge in bilingual education and the positive effects bilingualism can have on
children’s cognitive development.
While research on cognitive development has given way to evidence supporting the inclusion of
bilingualism in classrooms, it appears that regular education has nonetheless continued with a bleak
view of all that surrounds hybrid forms of linguistic expression and language variation. In fact, there is
evidence that bilingualism in education seem to be profitable for students’ careers. Such approaches
are mainly situated in “experimental” educational contexts (that encourage bilingualism). Positive
developments around bilingualism and bilingual education (Cummins 2000) were and still are
encountering barriers in regular education, where the shaping of pupils’ identities as citizens of a
fatherland and speakers of a mother tongue are still seen as part and parcel of a national project (Kroon
2003). We therefore need to reconsider the concept of bilingualism (and multilingualism) as a personal
as well as classroom phenomenon.
Major Contributions (1510)
The study of language and education and more precisely of language as social practice in educational
contexts is much indebted to the work of John Gumperz (1974) and Dell Hymes (1972), who both

studied language variation in and outside the classroom and engaged in public debates around
bilingualism. It is thanks to Gumperz’ work on linguistic relativity, and his later work on crosstalk, that
sociolinguistics has managed to gain ground in mapping the infrastructure of spoken language in
intercultural encounters. On his account, despite the fact that a named language was a category for
those who studied language, it had not normally been so for those who were the object of that study,
that is, for users of that language. Gumperz focused on communicative practices, functions and
repertories in spoken interactions. For him, an approach to the study of language became an approach
in which the central question is not how (meta-)linguistic knowledge is structured, but a study in which
the core notions are interpretation, understanding and meaning-making in interaction and social
communication among language users. Gumperz (1982) developed a sociolinguistic analysis that
focused on how interpretation is intertwined with understanding and through that with the
construction of shared common ground. Whereas Gumperz’ earlier work was linked to the beginnings
of sociolinguistics and particularly to the establishment of what became known as the ‘ethnography of
communication’ (Gumperz 1972), the later phase of his work became what is generally referred to as
interactional sociolinguistics, and this took a critical stance toward other influential schools of linguistic
thinking. The Gumperzian approach to the study of language and society can be summed up as a focus
on social interaction through language.
Gumperz’ conceptual, intellectual and empirical work should be considered alongside another
giant of contemporary sociolinguistics, Dell Hymes. For Hymes, language is formed in, by, and for social,
cultural, and political contexts –– injustice and social hierarchy on the one hand, and human agency and
creativity on the other. There is, for Hymes, nothing "mechanical" about the production and
reproduction of texts, cultures or institutions, education being one domain in which he studied this
process (cf. Cazden, John & Hymes 1972). What were traditionally understood by structural linguists as
different languages could be different language varieties, and what an analysis of language features
could do would be to designate or highlight lexical or phonological styles that made up varieties of the
same language. Hymes followed a linguistic anthropological tradition, the foundations and assumptions
of which have developed in parallel with mainstream sociolinguistics in the Labovian-Fishmanian
tradition. In this linguistic anthropological tradition, a gradual deconstruction of the notion of
“language” itself happened: “language” as a unified (Chomskyan) concept was “chopped up” and
reconfigured, as it were, into a far more layered and fragmented concept of “communication”, with
forms and functions broader than just the transmission of denotational meaning (e.g. Hymes 1996).
Hymes, with his strenuous effort to eradicate inequality in education, elaborated the concept of voice

Frequently asked questions

Q1. What have the authors contributed in "Multilingual classrooms in times of superdiversity" ?

After having shown that dealing with multilingualism in regular classrooms, at least in Western Europe, has been a matter of concern for teachers and learners ’ educational pathways for decades, the authors move on to review the founding fathers of sociolinguistics and analyze how their seminal work has been used recently to re-evaluate the concept of sociolinguistic repertoires. The authors then discuss how this concept highlights the fact that education professionals appear to suffer from a ‘ trained blindness, ’ mostly focusing on attainment targets and normativity, rather than paying attention to the actual ways in which students use ‘ language ’ across formal, non-formal and informal institutional spaces. This situation gave rise to a plethora of educational reactions that often were not based on the results of adequate empirical research. The authors will show how the monoglot ideology mentioned above has moved from bilingualism and the challenge brought by bilingualism to education, to multilingualism. Once the authors examine the relationship between bilingualism – since that is the reduced and manageable form multilingualism is traditionally given in schools – and education, they see that it is complex. John Edwards ’ ( 2004 ) review of the field of bilingualism and his examination of the concerns listed above and of how they have played a role in establishing who is ( and who is not ) ‘ bilingual ’ is still one of the most authoritative publications in the field. Positive developments around bilingualism and bilingual education ( Cummins 2000 ) were and still are encountering barriers in regular education, where the shaping of pupils ’ identities as citizens of a fatherland and speakers of a mother tongue are still seen as part and parcel of a national project ( Kroon 2003 ). The authors therefore need to reconsider the concept of bilingualism ( and multilingualism ) as a personal as well as classroom phenomenon. The study of language and education and more precisely of language as social practice in educational contexts is much indebted to the work of John Gumperz ( 1974 ) and Dell Hymes ( 1972 ), who both studied language variation in and outside the classroom and engaged in public debates around bilingualism. On his account, despite the fact that a named language was a category for those who studied language, it had not normally been so for those who were the object of that study, that is, for users of that language. For him, an approach to the study of language became an approach in which the central question is not how ( meta- ) linguistic knowledge is structured, but a study in which the core notions are interpretation, understanding and meaning-making in interaction and social communication among language users. The Gumperzian approach to the study of language and society can be summed up as a focus on social interaction through language. There is, for Hymes, nothing `` mechanical '' about the production and reproduction of texts, cultures or institutions, education being one domain in which he studied this process ( cf. Cazden, John & Hymes 1972 ). On this topic, a crucial advance in the field of sociolinguistics and education is the research on crossing and stylization in the everyday linguistic practices of youngsters in multi-ethnic Britain by Rampton ( 1999 ) – which has been followed by important work including Harris ’ ( 2002 ) research on language use and new ethnicities in secondary multicultural classrooms, examining the language use of post-diaspora London youth, and also other linguistic ethnography scholars outside the UK such as Jaspers ( 2005 ), Spotti ( 2007, 2008 ) and Van der Aa ( 2013 ). This new sociolinguistic research has shown that, while on the one hand variationist sociolinguistics, as Rampton ( 2011:2 ) points out, pays much attention to forms and ideologies, not much attention has been paid to situated interaction. A related advance in the study of multilingualism is the one brought into sociolinguistics by the Copenhagen group led by Jørgensen, with the concept of polylanguaging ( Jørgensen et al. 2011 ). While developed almost exclusively within the frame of a longitudinal project on urban multilingualism in Copenhagen multiethnic schools, polylanguaging emphasizes the multi-sensory, multi-modal, multi-semiotic and multi-lingual nature at play in the meaning-making process involved in communicative exchanges. Traditionally, this mobility was restricted to rather fixed groups of people emigrating from one country to another for reasons of poverty, unemployment, war, discrimination and the like, with the aim of improving their own or their children ’ s living conditions in their new country of residence. These variables co-condition integration outcomes along with factors surrounding migrants ’ human capital ( particularly educational background ), access to employment ( which may or may not be in immigrants ’ hands ), locality ( related especially to material conditions, but also to other immigrant and ethnic minority presence ), and the usually chequered responses by local authorities, services providers and local residents ( which often tend to function by way of assumptions based on previous experiences with migrants and ethnic minorities ). Teachers, whether in regular education or at work in the field of language qualifications aimed at certifying for the purposes of integration, have to be prepared to function in superdiverse contexts. The Amager project: A study of language and social life of minority children and youth. Göttingen: Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity. The common assumption was, and partly still is, that exposure to and engagement in language variation is potentially damaging for pupils ’ development. Research that combines attention to stylistic performances and ideological categories has been most promising.