The paper will present a Language Awareness Program (Garcìa, 2015) developed by the University for Foreigners of Siena (Siena) and linked to the National Plan for Teacher Education and Training (Minister of Education, 2016). The program addresses in-service primary school teachers working in multilingual areas who are willing to be involved in micro-level language policy actions (Chua & Baldauf, 2011). The Program includes seminars and a Transformative Research Action project (García & Kleyn, 2016). Teachers are guided in the autonomous implementation of different ethnographic instruments to monitor their multilingual classes: children language portraits (Bush, 2012), language background self-rating scales (Extra & Yagmur, 2004), linguistic schoolscape observational schemes (Gorter, 2015) and other tools to assess multilingual students. The paper will analyse teacher’s attitudes regarding the Program and how their language awareness and teaching practices have changed after the Program. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews, analysed with Nvivo 11 (Charmaz, 2006). Results support the idea that including Transformative Research Action in a teacher’s training plan make teachers able to become successful “language ethnographers”. Providing teachers with sociolinguistic tools to analyse multilingual classrooms raises their awareness of linguistic diversity and represents a significant step to re-thinkik language attitudes in schools and society.
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