Session 6F

While the numbers of linguistically diverse students have been on the rise in Norway, teachers' preparedness and competence to work in multilingual classrooms have been reported as insufficient (Haukås, 2016; Sevinç et al., 2022). Given that teacher beliefs exert a profound influence on the pedagogical practices and that there is no straightforward correspondence between teacher beliefs and practices (Borg, 2015), this study aims to explore Norwegian teachers' beliefs about multilingualism and their self-reported practices in multilingual classrooms. Three research questions are addressed: (1) What are Norwegian teachers' beliefs about classroom multilingualism and their own pedagogical practices? (2) To what extent do the teachers' beliefs about classroom multilingualism influence their pedagogical practices? (3) How do the teachers justify their beliefs and implemented practices? Data were collected through a digital survey including 50 Likert-scale items and an open-ended question and were analyzed quantitively and qualitatively. Descriptive statistics of 181 responses revealed three orientations regarding teachers' beliefs about students' home languages (HLs): (1) endorsement of students' HLs as an asset, (2) concerns about students' use of HLs, and (3) resistance to students' use of HLs. Three tendencies of teachers' implemented practices were also unpacked by descriptive statistics: (1) leveraging multilingual resources, (2) limiting multilingual practices, and (3) resisting multilingual pedagogies. Furthermore, Spearman bivariate correlation test disclosed that teachers' beliefs had a positive significance among their implemented practices (p< 0.05) and exerted a middle to large impact (0.3

The increasing popularity of anti-immigrant, anti-EU, neo-nationalist movements and discourses throughout Europe can be seen as a response to superdiverse, complex migration/globalization processes challenging the ideology of the 'nation-state' as a culturally and linguistically homogeneous entity (Blommaert & Verschueren, 1991). Although popular media coverage and sociopolitical scholarly literature exists (Eger & Valdez, 2015), a substantial gap remains in applied linguistics and language education (McIntosh, 2020). This is despite the fact that (neo-)nationalism is considered "an integral and inevitable, if sometimes invisible, part of language teaching, learning, and use" (Motha, 2020: 96). 
This contribution presents data from a qualitative, comparative study conducted in Switzerland in 2020, where, according to McIntosh (2020: 3), language policy seeks to guarantee equal linguistic diversity among its national languages although "striking a balance between these languages remains challenging." This challenge was confirmed in the analysis of 94 questionnaires and 38 in-depth interviews conducted with students and teachers at secondary schools and policy makers in three different national language regions/cantons – Zurich (German), Fribourg (French), and Grisons (Romansh) on the basis of a policy reform which has split the educational landscape into two camps: those 'prioritizing' English over a second national language and those adhering to the 'traditional' curriculum in which a second national language is introduced before English. 
Embedded in a phenomenological research design focusing on everyday perspectives and underlying ideologies, the analysis revealed how participants experience (their) language (repertoire), increasing de facto multilingualism in a de jure quadrilingual landscape, and how they (de)construct and (de)legitimize language hierarchies. Results showed that they were impacted by opposing societal forces of globalization and tradition mobilized through different languages positioned on a continuum of romantic and rationalist ideals (Geeraerts, 2003). A better understanding and critical discussion in the field is needed to "meet the...needs of additional language users, their education, their multilingual and multiliterate development, social integration, and performance across diverse globalized, technologized, and transnational contexts" (DFG, 2016: 24). Finally, this presentation aims to contribute to an equitable promotion of nation-conscious applied linguistics practice (Motha, 2020).


Blommaert, J. & Verschueren, J. (1991). The pragmatics of minority politics in Belgium. Language in Society 20(4), 503-531. 
Eger, M. A. & Valdez, S. (2015). Neo-nationalism in Western Europe. European Sociological Review 31(1), 115-130. 
Geeraerts, D. (2003). Cultural models of linguistic standardization. In R. Dirven, R. Frank, & M. Pütz (Eds.), Cognitive models in language and thought. Ideology, metaphors and meanings (pp. 25-68). De Gruyter.
McIntosh, K. (2020). Introduction: Re-thinking applied linguistics and language teaching in the face of neo-nationalism. In, K. McIntosh (Ed.), Applied linguistics and language teaching in the neo-nationalist era (pp. 1-13). Palgrave Macmillan. 
Motha, S. (2020). Afterword: Towards a nation-conscious applied linguistics practice. In, K. McIntosh (Ed.), Applied linguistics and language teaching in the neo-nationalist era (pp. 295-309). Palgrave Macmillan. 
The Douglas Fir Group (DFG) (2016). A transdisciplinary framework for SLA in a multilingual world. The Modern Language Journal 100, 19-47.

Over the past two decades, early instructed foreign language learning (FLL) has become an integral part of primary school curricula across Europe (Edelenbos et al., 2006). The mix of pupils attending mainstream schools often spans a wide range of abilities, including gifted children and those with learning difficulties. Providing all of them with learning opportunities is both a requirement of educational policy (European Commission, 2004:21), and a major challenge for schools and educators (Bongartz & Rohde, 2015) who need to decide which students benefit from FLL under what conditions. 
This contribution takes a closer look at the development of FL skills in children with special needs (n=116) and their peers without special needs (n= 337). We discuss longitudinal data from 10–12-year-old students learning English as a first foreign language collected at two measurement times in spring 2018 (T1) and spring 2019 (T2). Our sample contains categories of special needs support available at Swiss state schools, namely: integrative remedial teaching, special schooling, additional instruction in the school language (here: German), support for gifted students, and (speech) therapy. These special educational measures can be accumulated according to individual learner needs, resulting in different levels of intensity in support.

Two questions are addressed in our talk:
1) how do English skills (measured with C-tests) develop in different learner categories between two measurement times?
2) is there a relationship between the intensity of special needs support and the development of English skills?

Descriptive statistics show that at group level, English skills improved in all categories between T1 and T2. The group of children with integrative remedial teaching/special schooling and the group receiving multiple measures attain lower test scores at T1 and slightly lower learning gains at T2 compared to the other categories. Students identified as "gifted learners" score highest at T1 and improve the most as a group. At the same time, English test scores considerably overlap between categories, i.e. many children with special needs score in the range of their peers without special needs, and vice versa. In order to answer research question 2, a regression analysis was conducted with English test scores as the dependent variable and the intensity of special needs support as the independent variable, controlling for teacher effects. The intensity level turns out to be a predictor of learning outcomes in English, suggesting a linear association between smaller learning gains and high intensity of special educational measures.
References:
Bongartz, C., & Rohde, A. (Hrsg.). (2015). Inklusion im Englischunterricht. Peter Lang.
Edelenbos, P., Johnstone, R., & Kubanek, A. (2006). The main pedagogical principles underlying the teaching of languages to very young learners. European Commission.
European Commission. (2004). Promoting language learning and linguistic diversity. Office for Official Publications of the European Communities.

With COVID-19 and the closing of language test centres, the last two years have seen a rapid increase in use of Duolingo English Test (DET) for university entrance purposes. As the ready-to-go option for prospective students to provide proof of English proficiency under lockdown conditions (Isbell & Kremmel, 2020), DET has become widely adopted by English-medium universities. It is, however, a relatively new test and only recently has sufficient data become available for external validation research. Such research is needed to inform DET score intepretations for consequential decision-making; our study is one of the first.
Unlike its more established market competitors (IELTS; TOEFL iBT), which report subscores for the four skills (reading, writing, speaking, listening) alongside overall scores, DET provides subscores for Literacy, Comprehension, Conversation and Production (introduced July 2020) together with overall scores. Proficiency is operationalized through a word/nonword vocabulary task (both spoken and written modality); c-test; dictation (sentence-level); reading aloud (sentence-level); and short written and oral responses to a prompt (50+ words; 30 seconds). These tasks generate relatively predictable responses and are automatically scored using machine algorithms.
From an SLA perspective, complex L2 skills (reading, writing, speaking, listening) are predicated on the underlying L2 knowledge, i.e. vocabulary (measured in DET through the word/nonword task) and the representations of structural patterns of L2 (phonological, lexical, syntactic; measured in DET though c-test, dictation and reading aloud). Linguistic knowledge, however, is only a prerequisite for complex language skills: a necessary but insufficient condition. It is, therefore, an empirical question, of both theoretical and practical significance, whether a test that primarily taps into implicit linguistic knowledge (as opposed to other aspects of communicative competence) could be a valid predictor of academic performance in an L2.
We addressed this question through investigating the predictive value of the DET overall scores and subscores in relation to university students' academic attainment, taking into account students' degree level, academic discipline and nationality. We performed a secondary data analysis of 1881 DET test-takers who commenced taught programs at a UK university in Autumn 2020 (1,389 postgraduate taught (PGT) and 492 undergraduate (UG) students), examining how well their DET scores predict course grades using bivariate regressions. The relationship between DET subscores and academic grades was investigated on a subset of 912 students with available subscores. Data from 3,087 students who had instead taken either IELTS (n = 2,651) or TOEFL iBT (n = 436) tests, were analysed for comparison.
Overall DET test scores and two subscores (Conversation, Comprehension) predicted PGT students' academic performance, suggesting that measures of implicit L2 knowledge (and not just of overt L2 skills) could be usefully deployed to gauge students' readiness to study in an L2. We also found, however, that students who demonstrated their readiness to study in English via DET achieved lower academic grades on average than students who met the entry requirements through IELTS and TOEFL iBT. We consider potential linguistic and non-linguistic causes behind this finding, including the idiosyncraticity of our study sample.