Page 11 - Linguistically Diverse Educational Contexts

first day at school, he entered the classroom for the first lesson and said, informally, “Hi” to the teacher before sitting down. The teacher, upset by the pupil's disrespect, reprimanded him. The teacher did not enquire as to the reason for such a greeting. Let us remember that this was a new pupil in the school. Although his appearance was not different from that of the other pupils, and his origin, name, and surname were Polish, but he was born and raised in Germany, where the acceptable form of greeting with teachers in his school was the word Hallo. This behaviour of the teacher may result from his own limited educational experience. He himself is the product of a certain educational system. Daniel Tatum's metaphor of living in a place full of smog may help us to understand this phenomenon. Tatum describes the smog in the air as follows: "Sometimes it is so thick that it is visible, other times it is less visible, but always, day in and day out, we breathe it in. None of us would want to portray ourselves as smog-breathers because most of us don't want to be described as prejudiced, but if we live in a place full of smog, how can we avoid inhaling it?" (Tatum, 2017). Smog is part of the sociopolitical context; you cannot pretend it does not exist, so my aim is not to condemn anyone but to start a discussion, to create space for teacher reflection that would lead to changes in schools, which in turn would have a positive impact on student (language) education. This discussion would address issues of inequality and the promotion of access to equal educational opportunities, multilingual education (the inclusion of different languages in education), and intercultural education for all. I write more about these issues in Chapter 1, where I also discuss the matters related to bilingualism and plurilingualism.
The concept of bilingual education, which is so popular in many countries in Europe and throughout the world, evokes positive associations as long as one of the languages is not the language of low social status. In order to illustrate this thought, I will give an example from Spain, specifically from the University of Alcala near Madrid, where I had the pleasure of meeting and working for a short while with Professor Anna Halbach. As part of her research on bilingualism, conducted with her research team and primary schools interested in participating in the research project (first grades of primary school), educational programmes for bilingual classes in Spanish and English, Spanish and Polish, and Spanish and Turkish were created. Parents were only willing to enrol their children in classes with Spanish and English, even though there were no native speakers of this language among the children. Unfortunately, this state of affairs comes as no great surprise. Both in Poland and in Spain, as well as in many other European countries, bilingual education functions mainly as a prestigious form of education, which is not aimed at providing linguistic support for incoming pupils, nor at creating authentic learning situations, although it could have such a function. In classes where there were pupils whose mother tongue language was different, Spanish pupils would have the unique opportunity to learn the second language naturally, involuntarily, and become bilingual, which, as we know, has cognitive benefits2. Kormi-Nouri (2010) stresses that positive effects in cognitive functioning are due to social and emotional benefits when the language spoken at home is used at school and is respected by society. The benefits of such an exchange would therefore be mutual and beneficial to society.
Taking a closer look at the Polish education system, one can see that in there is both a monolingual and monocultural language education programme, where the languages exist side by side and do not interact. Plurilingualism is officially declared in Europe, but in practice this idea is replaced by the dominance of an unofficial monolingual paradigm in which English is privileged (Kotarba- Kańczugowska, 2015, p. 15). Currently, the Council of Europe recommends that plurilingualism should
2 Peal & Lambert (1962); Bialystok (2005); Kharkhurin (2007); Craik et al. (2010). vi