09.00
-
14.00
Vestfold, Room A1-36
Gro Anita Myklevold is defending her thesis Multilingualism in mainstream language education in Norway: Perceptions and operationalizations (openarchive.usn.no) for the degree philosophiae doctor (PhD) at the University of South-Eastern Norway.
The doctoral work has been carried out at the PhD program in Cultural Studies at our Faculty of Humanities, Sports and Educational Science.
You are welcome to follow the trial lecture and the public defence.
Summary
Multilingualism, or ‘flerspråklighet’ in Norwegian, has been promoted as an important resource in language learning by scholars and in educational steering documents, such as in the 2020 national curriculum in Norway (LK20). However, former research has shown that teachers are insecure of what multilingualism means and of how it can be implemented in their classrooms. This PhD-study has therefore examined how a multilingual pedagogy can be carried out in mainstream language education in Norway, and provides empirical evidence of how teachers, teacher educators and students understand, or struggle to understand, multilingualism.
The main findings indicate that the participants are largely positive towards multilingualism as a concept and towards a multilingual pedagogy using the students’ previous language knowledge when they learn new languages. However, the teachers and teacher educators are insecure of how to implement multilingualism systematically in their classrooms, and some students are also reluctant to show their multilingual repertoires in class.
The PhD-study therefore finds a discrepancy between the ideology of the policy papers and the perceptions of the practice field, the former stating that all students shall experience that multilingualism is a resource and the latter encountering challenges when attempting to apply this in practice.
In the future, the study therefore suggests a closer university-school collaboration in order to develop bottom-up approaches to multilingual pedagogy based on the students’ and teachers’ own premises. More empirical research is also needed to investigate the opportunities and challenges regarding multilingualism in mainstream language education in Norway.