Abstract
This contribution has a focus on assessing both the home- and the school-language repertoires of multilingual school populations in a context of increasing cultural and linguistic diversity of societies and schools—due to processes of globalization and migration. Although an increasing number of school pupils make use of home languages that differ widely from the mainstream or “national” language, primary schools are rather reluctant to change their monolingual habitus. The status of community languages (a common concept in Australia and Canada) in mainstream education is very low, let alone the status of assessing community-language competences. Community languages are rarely part of mainstream education. If teaching takes place at all, this occurs commonly during out-of-school hours and on the initiative of concerned community members rather than educational authorities. Apart from English in non-English dominant countries, the mainstream language is commonly the only subject and medium of instruction. Educational responses and research focus on learning and teaching the mainstream language as a second language. Community languages are associated with language deficits and learning problems rather than with resources that could be exploited through education.
This chapter is reprinted with permission from: Guus Extra & Ton Vallen, “Assessing Multilingualism at School”; in Carol A. Chapelle, The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics, Hoboken: John Wiley and Sons, 2012, pp. 1–6.
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Extra, G., Vallen, T. (2021). Assessing Multilingualism at School. In: Spotti, M., Swanenberg, J., Blommaert, J. (eds) Language Policies and the Politics of Language Practices. Language Policy, vol 28. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88723-0_6
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