Protecting and stimulating plurilingual identities in learners in Europe via inclusive policies and classroom practices

The linguistic capital of Europe forms an important part of the EU-identity, yet there are a number of challenges that threaten this capital. In this project, the focus will be on problems that affect and can be effected by education only.

The rise of English as lingua franca caused other languages to be pushed to the sidelines, leading to situations where pupils are less or even not motivated to learn other languages besides English even if it concerns an official national language of their country.

Although multilingual programs like Content and Language Integrated Learning can affect these attitudes, the large majority of these kind of programs also use English as target language, which does not increase the proficiency in other (foreign) languages.

A second threat to the linguistic capital has to do with the protection of heritage languages, where we see that the linguistic capital of EU-citizens more and more includes non-EU languages.

In schools, homelanguages are often rejected and usage of them is sometimes even punished, leading pupils who are ashamed of their linguistic capital and have a lower sense of belonging.

The increasing popularity of new technologies like ChatGPT and machine translation also threatens to acquisition of languages, as pupils do not feel the need to learn languages any more. At the same time, these new technologies offer many opportunities for teachers in their classrooms.

All these treats can be managed via good evidence-based policies at different governance levels and by ensuring teachers receive sufficient training and inspiration on how to accept and stimulate the linguistic capital of pupils.

This will be done in this project via intense collaboration with stakeholders at different levels, to ensure that sustainable guidelines, policies and practices can be implemented.