While bilingual education programmes in European mainstream languages are becoming increasingly popular in France, the bilingualism of migrant children remains overlooked and is believed by many to delay the acquisition of French. An institutionalised language hierarchy lies all too often unchallenged within the French education system and linguistic policies for primary schools, while trying to develop foreign language learning from the earliest age, fail to deal with the question of minority languages. This study presents a language awareness project in a small primary school in the Mulhouse area of Alsace as an example of how languages of unequal status can be placed on an equal footing in a school context, how children can be educated to linguistic and cultural variety and teachers made aware of the linguistic and cultural wealth present in their classes and their community. Finally, we shall argue that language awareness programmes do not have to compete with early foreign language teaching, but can be implemented in a complementary way, to educate children about language, languages and cultures, thus valuing differences as a source of learning, helping to foster tolerance and fight racism and extending teachers' knowledge and understanding of multilingual and multicultural issues.

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This paper will present an analysis of the notion of cultural and linguistic diversity in the new curriculum for primary schools in France (MEN, 2003). First, it will explain how this notion is linked both to a wider choice of languages and to the teaching of one foreign or regional language only. We shall argue that, despite the wide theoretical choice of languages and the purported ministerial objective of 'familiarisation' with linguistic and cultural diversity, the notion of diversity is envisaged mainly as a policy to counterbalance the hegemony of English. The second part of the paper will report on a language and cultural awareness project in a primary school in Alsace, where a variety of languages and cultures of different status have been presented to pupils. In contrast to the objectives of foreign language teaching (FLT), the project focused on raising the profile of minority languages, acknowledging the educational potential of home bilingualism, educating children about language, languages, and the relativity of cultural practices, with the ultimate aim of fostering tolerance. Our analysis shows that, despite the reluctance of most French schools to move away from a monolingual habitus, some teachers are able to go beyond the top-down policies inscribed in the new curriculum. The teachers in the Didenheim project were not afraid to tackle the growing multilingualism within their classrooms and have been able to break down ideological barriers by using the linguistic and cultural diversity of their pupils as a resource for learning.

The aim of this chapter is to propose a first empirical study of the Linguistic Landscape of the city of the French city of Strasbourg. We have chosen to explore the notion of multilingualism in this specific urban space using two approaches: 1) Linguistic Landscape (Landry & Bourhis, 1997) and 2) Urban Sociolinguistics (Calvet, 1994; Bulot & Messaoudi, 2003). We know that the linguistic diversity in cities is forever changing, and the city of Strasbourg, although officially monolingual, is no exception and cannot be impervious to the process of language contact. Indeed, as in most cities in the world, different linguistic varieties, either endogenous or exogenous, coexist in this given space. In the present study, we attempt to explore this aspect of multilingualism as it manifests itself through examples of "urban writing", and to analyse the relationships of power both at the social and symbolic level between the different languages displayed. Like other researchers before us (Shohamy & Gorter, 2009: 3) we assume that language in the environment is not arbitrary and random; "rather there is a goal to understand the system, the messages it delivers or could deliver, about societies, people, the economy, policy, class, identities, multilingualism, multimodalities, forms of representation and additional phenomena".