Localising international schools in multilingual Switzerland: from parental strategies to institutional dual-language programmes

ABSTRACT

This article aims to complexify the linguistic dimension of international schooling in light of the increasing diversification of the field but also as a result of the ‘banalisation’ of English and the growing ‘added’ value of multilingual competence in the knowledge economy. Drawing on data from focus groups with mobile families and institutional documents from an international school in Switzerland, we claim that the value of English-medium education to facilitate worldwide mobility is simultaneously conceived by parents as an obstacle for their children’s acquisition of certain linguistic capitals in the locality. This engenders constant family (re-)evaluations of school choice and the development of strategies for children to acquire locally-available linguistic competences. The Swiss context activates the multilingual imagination of global middle-class families who demand that the school help their children maximise their chances of local linguistic capitalisation. In our case study, the current educational shift responds to parental desires for elite multilingualism with French and materialises in an optional dual-language programme to attract an increasing number of Swiss and established transnational families in a competitive eduscape.

KEYWORDS:

• International schooling
• English-medium education
• Swiss eduscape
• multilingual education
• parental school choice

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the schools and the families that participated in our study. We are also indebted to Anita Auer and Vaud Multilingue for their institutional and financial support at the University of Lausanne. Finally, we are grateful to Zorana Sokolovska for her very insightful comments on a previous version of this article. Our understanding of family language policy and discourses of English has been inspired by our participation in the ENIFALPO (English immersion as family language policy: Strategies, mobilities and investments) research project (grant ref. PID2019-106710GB-I00) funded by MICIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s) .

Notes

1 For more information, visit www.ibo.org

2 The English translation of the Federal Constitution of the Swiss Confederation can be accessed here: https://www.fedlex.admin.ch/eli/cc/1999/404/en

3 Data extracted from the website: https://www.teacherhorizons.com/schools?view=map&countries=Switzerland

4 See https://ibo.org/jobs-and-careers/working-for-a-better-world/international-presence/geneva/

5 All the names used in this article are pseudonyms.

6 In addition to using pseudonyms, we have decided not to share specific details about the focus school and we have masked its specific location.

7 Check https://americananthro.org/about/policies/statement-on-ethics/

8 The University of Lausanne did not legally require research consent for this study, which falls outside the application of the Federal Act on Research Involving Human Beings (2011).

9 We have documented similar programmes in Basel and Zürich.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Université de Lausanne and Movetia.