Abstract
This chapter investigates how students of different nationalities manage language and multimodal resources in an English Language Teaching (ELT) classroom. The students are 13–14 years of age, and attend the European School of Luxembourg, an international place of education. The European School of Luxembourg primarily enrols children of parents working in European institutions, but also accepts other European and non-European children whose parents work in Luxembourg. European schools’ principles are based on the European Union’s perspective on education, which values the home country, the home language, and the languages of the European region (Ziegler et al. 2013) – this is in line with the European Union motto: ‘United in diversity’. According to these principles, the European School is a multilingual place of education in a unique social-geographical space that empowers individual plurilingual practices (Ziegler 2011). It is worth nothing that Luxembourg has three official languages (Luxembourgish, German, and French), and 44.5 per cent of the population is of other nationalities besides Luxembourgish (Statec 2013). The findings of this chapter reveal how multiple languages can coexist in an ELT classroom situated in a European international space.
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Notes
Our translation: ‘parlé’: talk, conversation; ‘graphique’: graphic, written.
‘Il arrive qu’une recherché lexicale serve non pas à trouver le mot qui convient, celui qu’on va inscrire, mais à marquer une place dans une structure en cours de construction.’
Audio files of Extracts 2, 3 and 4 can be accessed at http://dica-lab.org/. Extract 2 was first published in Ziegler et al. (2013).
Further reading
Zarate, G., Lévy, D., and Kramsch, C. (eds). (2011). Handbook of Multilingualism and Multiculturalism. Paris: Editions des archives contemporaines.
Talking about the theory of language education is not a simple task and it requires intense discussion across languages and across research fields. This publication does just that. The book contains 90 researchers from 68 institutions talking about multicultural and multilingual issues.
Ziegler, G., Sert, O., and Durus, N. (2012). Student-initiated use of multilingual resources in English-language classroom interaction: Next-turn management. Classroom Discourse, 3(2): 187–204.
Understanding the situated nature of language learning in the international sphere requires detailed analysis. The article brings a fine-grained analysis of the English classroom in trilingual Luxembourg by illustrating with empirical data some of the options teachers have in dealing with multilingual resources.
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© 2015 Gudrun Ziegler, Natalia Durus, Olcay Sert, and Neiloufar Family
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Ziegler, G., Durus, N., Sert, O., Neiloufar (2015). Analysing ELT in the European Arena: Multilingual Practices. In: Jenks, C.J., Seedhouse, P. (eds) International Perspectives on ELT Classroom Interaction. International Perspectives on English Language Teaching. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137340733_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137340733_11
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-46490-6
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-34073-3
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