Language Passports: The Multilayered Linguistic Repertoires of Multilingual Pupils in Flanders, Belgium

Primary school children's conflicted emotions about using their heritage languages in multilingual classroom tasks

“…We do not want to draw strong generalizations from the self‐assessment findings indicating stronger and more positive emotional responses to the heritage language than to Dutch, as this result pattern is based on only four classes with a small number of students in each. However, the results confirm the findings of other studies looking at multilingualism in Flemish education (De Backer et al., 2019; Jordens et al., 2020). What we do find compelling is the observation that despite very positive appraisals of the heritage language (all mean values >4, with 5 being the maximum), many students appeared reluctant to use it in class when given the opportunity to do so in a multilingual task.…”

“…While there have been studies into multilingualism and linguistically responsive teaching in Flemish schools (e.g., Rosiers et al, 2018;Slembrouck & Rosiers, 2018), these studies have not looked at the emotional attachment of heritage language learners to their heritage languages. One exception is the Multilingualism As a Reality in Schools (MARS) study that aimed at capturing 100 multilingual primary and secondary school students' dynamic language repertoire use in the form of a nuanced and extensive language passport (De Backer et al, 2019). De Backer et al (2019 concluded that while students mainly use the language of instruction for calculating and thinking, for more emotional functions such as getting angry, dreaming, or telling secrets, the majority of students used their heritage languages more than the language of instruction.…”

“…In Flemish primary education, little awareness is being raised about these factors or students’ experiences related to multilingualism in general (De Backer et al., 2019; Frijns et al., 2018). Instead, we can conclude that the Dutch‐only policy, which explicitly asks multilingual students to concentrate on the language of schooling and, at least implicitly but also often explicitly, represents the heritage language as a barrier to school success (Agirdag, 2009), seems to have been internalized by students.…”

“…Instead of the language silhouette task, the language passport developed by De Backer et al. (2019) could have provided a more fine‐grained idea of heritage language learners’ complex language behavior. The somewhat outdated Radio Tika task could be replaced by a social media task or another more familiar and less formal task that resonates more with the lived experiences of present‐day students.…”

Identifying space for mainstreaming multilingual pedagogies in European initial teacher education policies

“…Between 2003 and 2015, the share of students who had either migrated or had at least one parent who had crossed an international border to settle elsewhere grew by seven percentage points across EU countries (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2019). Therefore, educators meet children and youth who make creative use of increasingly complex and fluid linguistic repertoires as they navigate through the various environments of their everyday lives (Crul, 2016;De Backer et al, 2019;Sierens and Van Avermaet, 2017;Spotti and Kroon, 2017). European key policy documents state that education plays a central role in educating the youth and contributing to sustainable social cohesion (Lähdesmäki et al,2020).…”