Education stakeholders’ linguistic diversity and its potential for pluralistic approaches in language education

The linguistic and cultural diversity of today’s classrooms necessitates viewing plurilingualism as both an educational resource and an objective. Pluralistic approaches to teaching are considered important tools in this regard. This study explored, from a Norwegian perspective, the linguistic potential of three main stakeholder groups in the education context – teachers, parents, and especially pupils – to contribute to one such pluralistic approach, Awakening to Languages (AtL). We gathered questionnaire data on (1) the plurilingual resources and language use of elementary school pupils and their parents, and (2) the plurilingual resources and self-reported proficiency of the pupils’ teachers. A detailed analysis of the frequency with which languages other than the school and majority-culture language were used in different contexts, within and outside the family, showed that elementary school pupils and their families live in complex plurilingual realities, even though the degree of plurilingualism varied among contexts of use as well as among schools. Additionally, our results revealed a wide spectrum of languages used by the pupils and their families. Teachers’ plurilingualism, in contrast, was far more limited. We discuss the implications of our results for a pluralistic approach such as AtL and identify several challenges to its successful implementation.