Plantillas de agente y perfiles de agente

According to Blommaert & Van Avermaet (2008), there is often a distinction made between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ multilingualism. Status languages are commonly appreciated in society, while minority languages are seen as to be of less value. The status of languages is associated with perceptions people have of the different languages and language varieties. Therefore, the influence of language status on school results will only be shortly discussed in this section and more thoroughly in one of the next sections on the influence of perceptions. In what follows, we will discuss the influence of different kinds of languages on the school results of pupils. We will start with a brief discussion of the use of dialects, followed by a focus on minority languages.

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Dialect and ‘Tussentaal’ (intermediate language)

The concern that there will always be a battle between the languages legitimated by the school and the home varieties of the pupils remains valid and has been documented in many studies (Duff 2002; Heller 1996; Martin-Jones & Heller 1996). Language, being associated with ethnic and national values but also being a vehicle for gaining power and social mobility, is not easily negotiated. Language legislation and policy in a national context typically safeguards the rights of the majority or of the group(s) in power, and this usually means promoting one linguistic variety as a national standard and leaving the quest for a multilingual society and multilingual education a step behind (Ioannidou, 2009).

Multilingualism is often seen as a threat to the survival of both the national language and the nation (Ioannidou, 2009). The suppression of natural multi-accentuality (Volosinov, 1973 in Ioannidou, 2009) ‘creates a value system where certain varieties are legitimate and powerful while others are weaker and often stigmatized’ (Ioannidou, 2009, p. 265). In turn, there are serious educational implications for pupils’ language attitudes, their self-perceptions and ultimately their educational achievement. The focus on ‘correctness’ often results in teachers evaluating non-standard speakers less positively (Edwards, 1983 in Ioannidou, 2009). This has of course implications for these pupils’ academic achievement. Language and identity are so intertwined that attacking the way someone speaksis often perceived as an attack on the person’s values (Ioannidou, 2009).

In the 1970s there was a public concern in The Netherlands about dialect use, in many ways similar to the current debate on home language use. The heads of the schools believed that speaking dialect at home had a negative influence on school achievement (Segers, Stijnen, Vallen & van den Broeck, 2006). In PISA, for example, Flemish dialects are internationally still being considered as languages which are different from the test languages. In fact, the digital reading achievement of pupils who speak a Flemish dialect (537.3 (4.9)) does not differ from Flemish pupils who report to use the same language at home as the testing language (475.1 (7.1)) (De Backer, De Meyer, Dewulf & Warlop, 2013). In 1971, one of the findings of the educational research conducted by the municipality Kerkrade in the Netherlands was that principals of their municipality believed that speaking dialect at home had a detrimental effect on school achievement (Segers et al., 2006). This opinion is still widely-held. The then Flemish minister of education stressed in his Talenbeleidsnota ‘De lat hoog voor talen in iedere school’ 2007 the importance of acquiring the school language or Standard Dutch for success in education. He also referred to dialect and ‘tussentaal’ (intermediate language) as being counterproductive to school success. According to Vandenbroucke (2007), pupils who speak dialect or ‘tussentaal’ (intermediate language) at home lacki opportunitiy (“kansarm” is the term used in Dutch) in the same way as minority pupils (Delarue, 2011).

Minority languages

The situation for minority languages is comparable to the one for dialect and intermediate language. According to Jaspaert & Van den Branden (2011) the general media and public audience believe that children with a mother tongue other than Dutch score worse on reading tests than children raised in Dutch. Based on the PISA 2006 data, they state that children with Turkish and Arabic as their mother tongue do score lower, but that home language offers at best only a partial explanation. The effect of

Meertaligheid Als Realiteit op School (MARS)

Onderzoek in opdracht van het Vlaams Ministerie van Onderwijs en Vorming 148

mother tongue needs to be interpreted together with the pupils’ socioeconomic background (Jaspaert & Van den Branden, 2011). In their own test, Jaspaert and Van den Branden (2011) noted a much smaller effect than the impact of mother tongue in the PISA data and their own sample included a sample that corresponded more closely with the real proportion on non-Dutch-speaking pupils in vocational tracks than the PISA sample.

Another possible explanation for lower scores of minority children was found by Espinosa and Gutiérrez-Clellen (2013). Compared with other minority children of similar socioeconomic characteristics (National Center for Education Statistics 2007 in Espinosa & Gutiérrez-Clellen, 2013) the language needs of Latino language learners in the United States are not sufficiently addressed during the preschool years. Latino language learners frequently do not exhibit age-appropriate vocabulary or academic readiness in either their home language (Spanish) or English when they enter kindergarten (St. Pierre et al. 2001; U.S. Department of Health and Human Services et al. 2001, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services et al. 2003 in Espinosa & Gutiérrez-Clellen, 2013), and their unmet language needs are one of the primary causes of reading and academic delays during the school years (Carlo et al. 2004; Storch & Whitehurst 2002).

Scheele, Leseman and Mayo (2010) examined differences in mothers’ language choice between two different immigrant groups in the Netherlands. Moroccan-Dutch and Turkish-Dutch families of different SES did not differ significantly in their ethnic language input to their children or their children’s ethnic language vocabulary. However, SES affected the choice of language at home, with higher SES Moroccan-Dutch families using more Dutch and their children having larger Dutch vocabularies than the lower SES Moroccan-Dutch families. In contrast, there was no relationship between SES and Dutch input or vocabulary for the Turkish-Dutch group. The difference could be explained by the external language resources available to the Turkish group such as access to Turkish television channels (Scheele, Leseman & Mayo, 2010).

Yang and Lust (2007 in Mueller Gathercole et al., 2010) reported that children learning Korean and Chinese showed better performance on executive function tasks than those learning Spanish, regardless whether they are monolingual or bilingual. The authors also argued that their bilingual subjects may have been affected by the fact that they were tested in both languages, while the monolinguals were tested in only one language. The improvement may have been due to learning effects for the bilinguals, or, conversely, there may have been some switch costs involved in having to switch from one language to the other (Mueller Gathercole et al., 2010).

In sum, the literature reported here does not quite agree on whether some languages are disadvantaged compared to others. The possible disadvantages need to be placed in a broader picture, where other factors need to be considered. One of these possible factors, namely home literacy activities will be discussed in the following section. At the same time, it seems useful for researchers and policy-makers to make at distinction between languages so that these differences can be further explored and the relative impact of a wide variety of processes on the same mother tongue groups and between different mother tongue groups can be studied.

Meertaligheid Als Realiteit op School (MARS)

Onderzoek in opdracht van het Vlaams Ministerie van Onderwijs en Vorming 149

Er wordt vaak een onderscheid gemaakt tussen ‘goede’ en ‘slechte’ meertaligheid. Statustalen worden meer gewaardeerd in de samenleving, terwijl minderheidstalen beschouwd worden als minder waardevol. Dit hangt uiteraard samen met percepties en in één van de volgende secties gaan we dieper in op de percepties van leerlingen en leerkrachten. In de samenleving heerst vaak de bezorgdheid dat er een strijd zal zijn/blijven tussen de schooltaal en de thuistalen van leerlingen. In de jaren ’70 was er in Nederland de bezorgdheid dat het spreken van dialect thuis een negatieve invloed had op de schoolprestaties. Dat debat is vergelijkbaar met het hedendaagse debat over minderheidstalen. Uit de PISA-data blijkt bijvoorbeeld dat leerlingen die aangeven thuis dialect te spreken, niet minder presteren. Ook voor minderheidstalen gelooft men vaak dat deze zouden leiden tot mindere prestaties, maar er bestaat geen consensus in de literatuur of sommige talen benadeeld zijn ten opzichte van andere. Onderzoekers raden daarom aan om het effect van thuistaal onder andere in samenhang met sociaaleconomische achtergrond te beschouwen. Ook andere factoren hangen daarmee samen, zoals bijvoorbeeld geletterdheid en mediagebruik, wat we in het volgende deel bespreken.

8.3.4 The influence of home literacy activities and use of media