Control and inclusivity: Secondary Dutch school teachers’ attitudes towards classroom multilingualism

This paper discusses Dutch secondary education language teachers’ attitudes towards multilingualism with a particular focus on the concepts of classroom control and inclusivity. The Netherlands is composed of regions with various degrees of multilingualism: areas traditionally perceived as monolingual, an officially bilingual province and linguistically diverse cosmopolitan urban centres. By means of a qualitative analysis of ten semi-structured interviews with language teachers working in the different regions, this research examines the type of discourse used to describe multilingualism and the potential implementation of multilingual practices in the classroom. With the use of methods from Critical Discourse Analysis, a patchwork of ideologies reveals how attitudes about non-official varieties and languages deemed ‘too different’ from the expected standard language are expressed. The analysis shows that teachers in areas with little migration-induced multilingualism emphasise in particular their hypothetical difficulty when dealing with an aspect of the pupils’ competence that they cannot control. The interview data also sheds light on the topic of linguistic inclusivity which encompasses not just the acknowledgement of the pupils’ backgrounds but also the teachers who fear feeling left out by a multilingualism that goes beyond what they are familiar with.