Plurilingual education in diglossic contexts: Primary school teachers’ voices on the Galician plurilingual education policy

Abstract

Language education policy is at the heart of current discussions on Europe’s integration strategy, which sees in language a powerful tool to continue tightly interweaving the threads that make up the European fabric. Plurilingual education policies are now flourishing across the continent to address the dual objective of incentivizing foreign language learning while protecting and promoting linguistic diversity. This is however a rather complex matter given the diverse multilingual realities present in the region. The Galician plurilingual education policy provides an interesting case to examine how this two-fold European goal is reconciled at the local level in a diglossic multilingual context. A qualitative case study of Galician primary school teachers’ perceptions and experiences with the plurilingual education policy has been carried out in order to explore the policy from the local stakeholders’ perspective. Data was obtained from a total of twenty-seven participants and then examined through qualitative content analysis. A critical language education framework has been used to assess the results from a more situated and context-sensitive approach, and to evaluate the implications that implementing such a policy might entail for the Galician sociolinguistic landscape. The results highlight how teachers’ perceptions of the policy respond mainly to personal linguistic ideologies, rather than to the comparative dimensions identified in the study. Teachers’ experiences with the policy’s implementation process are however heavily influenced by school habitat and education model. Key findings also point to the linguistic domination dynamics the plurilingual policy reinforces, and to the detrimental effect that its ‘aseptic’ distribution of the vehicular use of each language might have for the region’s minority language. Policy recommendations include a reformulation of the concept of ‘plurilingualism’ based on notions of linguistic complementarity and sociolinguistic considerations, and a more active involvement of teachers in the policy’s decision-making process.