How language education finds it difficult to go along with critical approaches: a school case from Scotland

The chapter examines the interplay of teacher beliefs and practices for modern foreign language teaching in a Scottish primary school and the borders created by language policy. It looks at the Scottish language policy, the “1+2 Approach,” and discusses the ways that this language policy recreates existing language borders and boundaries. It also demonstrates how primary school teachers use their own linguistic and communicative repertoires and critical pedagogical approaches to teach a modern foreign language (French) in their efforts to enhance their pupils’ multilingual mechanisms, but, at the end, they do not overcome language borders and demarcation. First, the “1+2 Approach” is explored as a mechanism which itself creates borders and boundaries. After examination of the policy, data is presented from a linguistic ethnographic project. Using Nexus Analysis as a scalar ethnographic tool for educational linguistics (Hult, 2017), teachers’ opinions and perceptions of their own competencies and skills, pedagogic knowledge, and policy interpretations are analyzed and explored. Although teachers appear to acknowledge their diverse, multilingual, and multicultural classes, they also appear to hesitate to take on modern foreign languages inputs as they rehearse their own conceptualizations of language teaching and often conflicting policy mantras. Monolingual practices and ideologies in language teaching, in language teacher training, in language curricula, and in language teaching methodologies are strengthened, and thereby thoroughly permeate educational practice, despite the fact that teachers are aware of critical language approaches. Interviews with teachers demonstrate that languages are still conceived as separate, labeled, and territorialized entities and not as open, dynamic systems where new meanings and grammars emerge. Finally, some recommendations are also suggested for language teacher education and further research and exploration of language policies.