“Unusual and a little embarrassing to use one’s mother tongue in class”. Teachers’ reflections on students’ ambivalence towards the use of multilingualism in teaching and learning

Abstract

This study deals with teachers' experiences with and reflections on students' ambivalence towards the use of multiple languages in education in Norway. The article is based on logs from 13 teachers who participated in a further education program in second language pedagogy in the academic year 2021/2022. The logs describe teaching activities that involved using the students' entire language repertoire in the learning process. Many of the teachers found that several of the pupils reacted ambivalently to this. The vast majority were positive, but some did not want to use their first language(s) at all; some found it embarrassing, and others were of the opinion that the different languages they knew should be kept separate. The article’s starting point is this ambivalence. More specifically, it examines how teachers interpret the reticence and what pedagogical implications they believe it should have. Based on descriptions of experiences with actual teaching activities and classroom practices, and the students' reactions to these, the article sheds light on the specific challenges teachers may face in increasingly linguistically complex classrooms, how they can be understood, and how they can be accommodated pedagogically. The analysis shows that the teachers attribute their students' ambivalence to their differentiation between home language and school language, their sense of inadequacy in their first language(s), and their distinction between oral and written usage of first/different languages. In terms of pedagogical approaches, teachers point to the importance of good relationships, both between teachers and students and between students, and that explicit training and/or modeling of multilingual strategies may be appropriate. On this basis, we argue that student-centeredness is crucial in multilingual pedagogical work.