Plurilingual Learners and Schooling

Abstract

In an increasingly globalized world, the number of youth being schooled in a language other than their home language is rapidly expanding, at the same time as school policies and curriculum are narrowing in what has been called a “neoliberal” trend in education. In contrast, this chapter provides a sociocultural perspective on schooling, premised on a view of education as a social, humanistic endeavor in which people navigate new languages, knowledge, and understandings together through linguistically- and culturally-mediated communications and contexts. Advocating for an asset-based view of plurilingual learners, it offers an “ecology of schooling” lens, in which languages, literacies, and cultures are fully entangled with policies, program design, school environments, pedagogies, and social relations between educators, students, and families. It identifies and addresses a range of interdependent issues and factors which, taken together, impact language learning and academic achievement of students who are in the process of learning the language of schooling, and suggests linguistically and culturally responsive approaches and practices.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 8 citations exist upstream.