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Due to increased migration and mobility world-wide, educational settings are changing, with classrooms characterized by considerable diversity in students’ linguistic backgrounds. This heterogeneity poses a challenge to education and in particular to inclusive education – that is, the aim of offering quality education for all while also respecting diversity and different needs and abilities, characteristics and learning expectations (see Kugelmass, 2006). Pre-primary and primary teachers’ attitudes, beliefs and knowledge (ABK) on multilingualism are critical factors to achieving inclusive education. Teacher cognition (Borg, 2003, 2006) addresses the interplay between teachers’ ABK and the pedagogical and language developing practices in schools and classrooms. Four major factors have been identified to interactively shape and be shaped by teacher cognition: teachers’ own schooling experience, teacher education, contextual factors such as the organization of education, and classroom practices (Borg, 2003).

The present study addresses multilingualism, teacher cognition and inclusive education in Sweden, with an aim to empirically investigate attitudes, beliefs and knowledge of pre-primary and primary teachers. We employ a mixed-methods approach (semi-structured interviews and large-scale online survey), studying what shapes attitudes, beliefs and knowledge on multilingualism and which factors correlate with these.

In our presentation, we will offer an overview of our larger ongoing project, before moving to preliminary results from the first interviews. We are currently interviewing pre-primary and primary teachers, aiming for participants from varied school demographics. Our focus is on their experiences with multilingualism in the classroom as well as their insights from their own backgrounds and teacher training. Our results are expected to generate new understandings of teachers’ perceptions of classroom diversity and of children who speak languages in addition to Swedish, as well as how these perceptions are shaped and how they influence classroom practices. Thus, our study will contribute to the theoretical perspectives of teacher cognition and inclusive education.

References

Borg, S. (2003). Teacher cognition in language teaching: A review of research on what language teachers think, know, believe, and do. Language Teaching, 36: 81–109.

Kugelmass, J.W. (2006). Sustaining cultures of inclusion: the value and limitations of cultural analyses. European Journal of Psychology of Education XXI(3): 279–292.