Exploring language education in Scotland: a multilingual aspiration within a monolingual perspective.

Scotland attempts to dispel the hegemonic myth of a ‘monolingual country’. Its policies on regional languages, modern foreign languages and the heritage languages of migrants have created opportunities, but also imbalances and questions of equity in the Scottish language habitus. The aim of this paper is to explore the educational habitus in contemporary Scotland as articulated in two mechanisms. These are: efforts to promote linguistic vitality and language revitalization with the development of new curricula and pedagogies; and the working of governing mechanisms and policy instruments, particularly the 1+ 2 Language Strategy. Each mechanism presents ways in which efforts for multilingualism end up promoting monolingual hegemony as the default position of individual speakers and the state. This paper shows how some monolingual practices and ideologies in language teaching, language teacher training, language curricula and language teaching methodologies are strengthened through superficial policies. These monolingual practices and assumptions are also displayed, illustrated and rehearsed, through socio-political means, inside and outside education. The paper concludes that efforts to “overcome” monolingualism, wherever they are, encounter the social proliferation of conservative ideological reinforcement and those recuperation practices which we meet and recognise in the Scottish language ecology.