engleski

Time to reconsider one-language policy as an international schools’ language policy norm?

As a result of both globalization trends and insights into multiple benefits of bilingualism, the last decade has witnessed a rapid increase in the interest in multilingualism and multilingual education. International schools certainly present an extraordinary example of multilingual communities and multilingual education. However, do their school policies contribute to the creation of transglossic spaces? This article provides an insight into multilinguals’ teachers’, students’ and parents’ attitudes towards translanguaging in two international schools in Zagreb, an elementary one and a high school. By translanguaging we mean both a discursive norm in bilingual communities in which bilinguals engage in order to make sense of their bilingual worlds by using their holistic linguistic repertoire to communicate effectively, and a teaching approach. In order to see if the one-language policy should be reconsidered, we questioned the main school participants, teachers, students and their parents, if they use translanguaging even if this is not institutionally endorsed? More precisely, we asked parents, students and their teachers if they transgress language structures inside the school and if the students and their parents are open for a teaching approach which would purposefully neglect monolingualism as a norm and build on students’ entire linguistic repertoire. In the same vein we asked the teachers, if they, despite monolingual school policy, validate plurilingualism in their classrooms by exploiting their students’ entire linguistic repertoire, what possible advantages of such an approach they see, and, finally, what would encourage them to embrace translanguaging as a legitimate languaging practice and teaching approach.

bilingual education ; international schools ; translanguaging

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