Teachers’ perceptions and ‘invisible’ uses of plurilingual pedagogy in UAE K-12 schools

ABSTRACT

Plurilingual pedagogies determine that the totality of the students’ linguistic and cultural repertoires should be brought into the teaching and learning process. Despite the still prevailing monolingual norm in educational institutions of today, more and more reports on student and teacher recognition of plurilingual approaches as a valuable resource for learning start to emerge. As one of the most multicultural and multilingual countries in the world, the UAE offers a plethora of curricula where the languages of instruction vary, thus appearing as the ideal setting to explore affordances and challenges of plurilingual pedagogies. Therefore, the goal of this study was to understand UAE K-12 teachers’ perceptions and potential uses of plurilingual instruction in their mostly bi- or multilingual classrooms. The results seem to indicate that the majority of the teachers surveyed acknowledged the value of other languages, apart from the language of instruction, as support for learning in diverse contexts, choosing to discretely challenge the monolingual stance preferred by their school policies by instinctively implementing plurilingual practices in their teaching.

KEYWORDS:

• Plurilingual pedagogies
• teacher voices
• plurilingualism
• multilingualism
• language policy

Disclosure statement

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

Declaration

This research was conducted after Institutional Review Board approval (File # CAS – 21-01-002 – Abu Dhabi University).

Notes

1 Some applied linguists use the term ‘multilinguals’ as synonymous with ‘plurilinguals’, as is the case in this extract; however, our understanding is that these two terms are different. See next section for a clear understanding of the distinctions between the two terms which is an important underpinning of this research study. For more information on this topic, we recommend consulting Piccardo et al.’s (2022) introductory chapter.

2 For example, many expats residing in the UAE, while speaking English, incorporate many Arabic words in their speech, such as inshallah, khallas or yalla, given the exposure to and natural influence of this official language of the country.