The Luxembourgish education system is often portrayed as a model multilingual education system in the European context. Indeed, its language regime is multilingual, including Luxembourg’s three officially recognised... [ view full abstract ]
The Luxembourgish education system is often portrayed as a model multilingual education system in the European context. Indeed, its language regime is multilingual, including Luxembourg’s three officially recognised languages. With German being the language of instruction, French being taught as a 'foreign' language, and Luxembourgish also occupying an important role, language education policies in primary schools are multilingual, yet rigid. This highly specific language regime favours students with a Germanic (i.e. Luxembourgish) language background, which is problematic given the diversity of primary school populations: the national average of non-national students currently exceeds fifty percent, and statistics collected on students’ ‘mother tongue’ in 2014/15 found that 62.4% of students in primary school have a ‘mother tongue’ other than Luxembourgish. In fact, many of these students have a Romance language speaking home environment. With these numbers ever increasing due to continuous immigration, it is important to analyse how students, who do not speak Luxembourgish in the home, experience this German-dominant education system, in which there is little or no place for their own linguistic resources.
Drawing on constructionist frameworks of language practices (cf. García and Li Wei 2014) and identity (cf. Pavlenko and Blackledge 2004), this paper explores students’ narratives of their linguistic repertoires and lived experiences of language. The paper analyses data collected between September 2017 and May 2018 with primary school students aged between nine and twelve years. The multimodal, biographical approach includes language portraits (cf. Busch 2016) and in-depth qualitative interviews. Data is contextualised by classroom observations, focusing on students’ positioning towards policies, teaching methods, and other factors. Exploring how young people negotiate language policies and practices, and how they narrate this within wider understandings of self and identity, this paper contributes to broader research on experiences of language policy by young people with a migration background.
Busch, B. (2016) Methodology in Biographical Approaches in Applied Linguistics. Working Papers in Urban Language and Literacies, 187.
García, O. and Li Wei (2014) Translanguaging: Language, Bilingualism and Education. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.
Pavlenko, A. and Blackledge, A. (2004) Negotiation of Identities in Multilingual Contexts. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
