Some ‘circulating’ doxic ideas about multilingualism in French-speaking schools

Abstract

Despite the inclusive nature of recent educational reforms in French-speaking Belgium, few teachers implement multilingual approaches in their classrooms. On the contrary, the education system perpetuates a monolingual doxa by ignoring the home languages of newcomer or immigrant pupils, or even by prohibiting the use of these languages in school. We propose a discursive analysis of some ‘circulating’ doxic ideas (Charaudeau 1997; Paveau 1999) in the school environment: multilingualism is often associated with images of mixing, confusion or degeneration; didactic gestures are based on stereotyped student figures (so-called ‘vulnerable’, ‘eager’ students) which reproduce a homogeneous and (de)classifying discourse; the deficient vision of the pupils’ language skills serves the argumentation in a doxic causality where the explanation of cause (such as the pupils’ bilingualism) to effect (their poor school performance) is based on authoritative discourses with evidential value. The data analyzed are based on semi-structured interviews and informal exchanges with secondary school teachers in French-speaking Belgium.