Perceptions towards Multilingual Practices in Teacher Education

Abstract

Higher Education (HE) in Europe has been attributed an important role in fostering multilingualism and therefore, universities in Europe have developed policies (Extra & Yagmur, 2012; Fortanet-Gómez, 2013; Pavón, Lancaster & Bretones, 2019) and reflected on practices that could promote multilingualism in the last few years. In that line, approaches such as CLIL or EMI have also become common practices in some contexts. However, most of the experiences carried out in HE have proved not to be sufficient (Fortanet-Gómez, 2013) to reach the aims and thus, further research is needed (Dafouz & Smit, 2014). Focusing on Teacher Education, the intent of this chapter is to examine critically the practices carried out in Teacher Education at the Faculty of Humanities and Education of Mondragon University. The study was carried out by means of focus groups with student teachers and semi-structured interviews with teacher educator to analyse the existing perceptions towards multilingual practices at the Faculty of Humanities and Education from an ecological perspective (van Lier, 1998, 2004). Results show that the practices conducted are perceived as meaningful by the participants as a way to foster multilingualism. Moreover, results of this study call for a new step towards Pluriliteracies Teacher for Learning Approach to develop a more holistic and ecological perspective. However, conducting similar research studies in other contexts is needed due to the fact that to our knowledge, very few research studies have been carried out in HE to examine critically the practices carried out.