When a student comes to school
speaking a language other than the dominant school language, that's part of
his or her identity, that's part of who they have been up to this point in time.
Some students come to school speaking multiple languages. Many students may
have been in refugee camps in different countries. They may have been in schools in
different countries. They've learned multiple languages and when that kind of
linguistic capital is not acknowledged within the school, it's shutting off a
lot of their accomplishments as not being relevant and that communicates a
message to the student that what they are is a second language learner of
Swedish or English - an incompetent speaker of those languages in the early
stages. Some of who can't understand the textbooks at the grade level and
so that's the process of negotiating identities that if the teacher is not
aware of the importance of language for the way students feel about themselves, it
can have a very negative effect on the extent which students will be willing to
engage academically and so rather than seeing students as multilingual students
who have a variety of linguistic accomplishments, who have maybe had a
wide range of experiences, who have got to Sweden or got to Canada based on
their extraordinary intelligence, their initiative, their ability to survive and
their resilience. We see students sometimes only as somebody who needs
help, somebody who is deficient in the language of instruction and when we put
students into that identity cocoon, we risk diminishing them in terms of who
they are and who they can be and so we know also that those teacher
expectations can get internalised by the students and many of them will say "Well.
You know I'm not that bright. I'm not ever going to make it to high school. I'm
not going to make it to college or university. Why bother making the effort?
I'll go out and try to become a mechanic or do something relatively low-level in
terms of professional qualifications within the society." And so when teachers
understand more about the crucial role that language and language learning
plays in students' sense of self and in their academic aspirations, then I think
they can look at ways of communicating to students that their multilingualism
or their knowledge of their home language is an important intellectual
accomplishment. It's something that they should cherish, that they should continue
to develop. It's important also to communicate this message to parents
because parents don't know this and so when we look at the role of language,
the role that language plays in identity, there's all kinds of
implications for how we interact with students and how we organize the
curriculum and this is not just at the level of the individual teacher, it's at
the level of the school. Does the school have a policy in relation to
students' multilingualism? Is the implicit policy communicated to students that
they should leave their languages, their cultures at the schoolhouse door? That
they're not really relevant in this school environment? That's incredibly
diminishing of communities and individual students and schools that
take a much more positive orientation to students' multilingualism, bring it into
class and encourage students to carry out work in their home languages as well
as in English or Swedish or whatever the school language might be, for example,
through writing dual language books, tend to succeed much better because students
are feeling acknowledged for their accomplishments. They adopt a much more
positive attitude towards their home language. They're more curious about
their parents' cultural background and their experiences and these
schools are vibrant places and teachers are happier in these schools.
