Teachers’ perceptions and ‘invisible’ uses of plurilingual pedagogy in UAE K-12 schools

Abstract

Plurilingual pedagogies determine that the totality of the students’ linguistic and cultural repertoires should be brought into the teaching and learning process. Despite the still prevailing monolingual norm in educational institutions of today, more and more reports on student and teacher recognition of plurilingual approaches as a valuable resource for learning start to emerge. As one of the most multicultural and multilingual countries in the world, the UAE offers a plethora of curricula where the languages of instruction vary, thus appearing as the ideal setting to explore affordances and challenges of plurilingual pedagogies. Therefore, the goal of this study was to understand UAE K-12 teachers’ perceptions and potential uses of plurilingual instruction in their mostly bi- or multilingual classrooms. The results seem to indicate that the majority of the teachers surveyed acknowledged the value of other languages, apart from the language of instruction, as support for learning in diverse contexts, choosing to discretely challenge the monolingual stance preferred by their school policies by instinctively implementing plurilingual practices in their teaching.

Keywords Language policy, Multilingualism, Plurilingual pedagogies, Plurilingualism, Teacher voices