Immigrant minority languages and multilingual education in Europe: a literature review

ABSTRACT

Immigrant minority (IM) languages have a significant presence in certain European regions. Nonetheless, these languages are not usually included in the school curriculum. This paper aims to analyse the studies published between 2010 and 2020 considering IM languages in multilingual European education contexts. The method included a search of academic papers published in the databases ERIC, Web of Science and Scopus, which yielded 42 studies. The studies were analysed by considering (1) the demographic characteristics of the countries where the studies were conducted, (2) the sociolinguistic or psycholinguistic focus of the papers in relation to the European country, and (3) the characteristics of the bi-multilingual education programme including IM languages. The results indicate that (1) the demographic characteristics of the country are not strictly related to the number of studies published, (2) most studies have a sociolinguistic approach even though many studies analyse both sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic factors, and (3) only seven multilingual education programmes including IM languages were described in these papers. We conclude that there is a lack of research focusing on IM languages in educational settings and discuss how addressing these gaps could create opportunities for building equitable multilingual communities in Europe.

KEYWORDS:

• Immigrant minority language
• multilingual education
• Europe
• review

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 For instance, although education programs since Early Childhood Education programs in Flanders might be focused on reducing minority and majority language students participation and achievement gaps (Sierens et al., 2020), these programs often do not include IM languages.

2 Some exceptions guided by computer-based learning can be found in the study by Van Laere et al. (2016).

3 In this paper the population of the country is considered in relation to the population of the countries in Europe. The countries with more than 38 million inhabitants are considered large, those with a population ranging between 10–38 million inhabitants are considered medium-sized, and finally, those with less than 10 million inhabitants are considered small.