• Overview
• Research Platforms
• Thematic Area A: Language, Identity and Culture
• Thematic Area B: Language Policy and Planning
• Thematic Area C: Multilingualism and Education
• European Level
• National Level
• Regional Level
• Thematic Area D: Language and Economy
• Communication, Management, Infrastructure, Training and Gender

Language use and language values in minority school settings

(WP9a, 2008–2010)

Summary Results

Speakers of English Sound Nice and Successful

English enjoys a high prestige among the Hungarian-speaking minority students in Romania, Serbia and Slovakia as well as among the German-speaking minority students in Romania. English also has a high value in foreign language teaching, where teachers try to use only English in the classroom.
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Rationale

WP9 aims to take explore the notion of multi-competence from sociolinguistic and educational perspectives, focusing on language choice and language use in minority school settings, and specifically in the English as a Foreign Language classroom. The team of researchers of the WP will closely cooperate with WP8 throughout the 18 months: it will use the theoretical work already developed by WP8 in months 1-18, coordinate its use of methodologies, and, hopefully, provide further insights into the theoretical development of the concept of multicompetence from the perspective of the established minority settings studied in WP9. The similar foci of the two WPs will also allow for a comparison of two kinds of minority populations: the migrant populations studied by WP8 and the established minorities investigated by WP9.

The theoretical focus of the WP is multicompetence, an extended and integrated linguistic repertoire and the ability to use the appropriate linguistic variety for the appropriate occasion. Similarly to WP8, our aim is to investigate, but in established minority language settings: (a) the way students use their minority vs. majority vs. the foreign language in an integrated multilingual repertoire, (b) the values and attitudes they hold towards these varieties, and (c) the way these varieties and, more generally, multilingualism are incorporated and promoted in the current educational context in which they are situated. Language attitudes will be investigated in the theoretical framework of perceptual dialectology and folk linguistics and with the matched guise technique.

Objective

The objective of this WP is to analyze in a comprehensive and multi-faceted way the use of languages (minority vs. the majority vs. the foreign language; or mother tongue vs. environmental language vs. a European lingua franca; international language; or first language vs. second language vs. additional/third language) in the foreign language classroom in a minority setting. Our aim is to examine (a) language choice and language use in the EFL and minority language classroom, and the juxtaposition of official educational policies vs. everyday realities, as well as (b) language attitudes towards and as a secondary focus (c) language ideologies about these languages as these are manifested in the minority educational context mostly in a synchronic and also in a diachronic perspective. Our goal is to see what the use of these languages will reveal about the relationship of the speakers to the languages involved, since evidence from elsewhere suggests that the intersection of language and school tends to be a special focal point for the expression of ideologies and attitudes vis-à-vis languages, monolingualism, bilingualism and multilingualism as well as for the (re)production of language competence in different varieties, which is especially important for minority communities.

Description of work

We plan to focus our investigations on the schools and EFL and minority language classrooms in minority situations in Italy (Ladin–German–Italian trilingualism in the legally recognized Ladin minority in South Tyrol vs. Ladin–Italian bilingualism in the legally not recognized Ladin minority in Belluno province), Hungary (the Serbian and Romanian minorities), Romania (the Hungarian and German minorities), Serbia (Hungarian minority) and Slovakia (the Hungarian minority). We plan to work in three 6 month phases: during months 19-24 desk research will be in focus in order to get informed about the focal aspects of the communities targeted and the methodologies planned to use. During months 25-30 the bulk of fieldwork will be carried out via ethnographic data collection (class observations, recordings, interviews with teachers and students) and sociolinguistic data collection (questionnaires, interviews, statistics). In the last phase, months 31-36, the analysis of data will be completed.

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Contacts WP 9a