Sven Sierens

Trends in pre-school enrolment in Turkey: unequal access and differential consequences

In this study, a historical and international analysis of early childhood education in Turkey is made. More specifically, we explore the trend in pre-school enrolment, compare Turkeys enrolment rate with other countries, study whether access to pre-school is related to social class and gender, and investigate the impact of pre-school attendance on later academic performance. We use data from the PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) 2012 study and World Bank EdStats. The results indicate that Turkeys pre-school enrolment has strongly increased over the years. However, compared with other (newly) industrialised countries, Turkey has a very low pre-school enrolment rate. Regression analyses revealed that pupils from wealthy families are much more likely to attend pre-school than pupils from poor families, while no difference was found between girls and boys. Importantly, pre-school attendance was related to higher academic achievement, even though pupils from wealthy families benefited more than middle-class and poor pupils.

Bilingual Education in Migrant Languages in Western Europe

This review focuses on bilingual education (BE) in migrant languages in Western Europe. In the Early Developments section, we will argue that educational arrangements targeting migrant languages initially arose from bottom-up initiatives for immigrant children. In the Major Contributions section, we will discuss the pioneering role of both the local and supranational levels in developing migrant language programs and policies in mainstream schooling and promoting multilingualism as civic ideology. Although these initiatives focused on mother tongue instruction (MTI), BE came forward as an alternative approach, reaching a peak in the late 1970s/early 1980s and resulting in a limited number of local experiments in transitional BE. However, national states in Western Europe have been reluctant to include migrant languages in their language-in-education policies. BE in migrant languages has nowhere been able to establish itself as a fully valued teaching model. Notwithstanding this, two-way immersion models offering migrant languages are currently successful in Germany – as is pointed out in the Work in Progress section. Although practical problems can partially explain the difficult introduction of bilingual approaches in education for immigrants, the principal obstacle is the monolingual ideology that underlies educational and social integration policies and practices across Europe. A return to assimilation has resulted in dwindling official support of MTI/BE in many Western European countries in the past decade (Problems and Difficulties). In the final section, we will outline some Future Directions, of which the challenge of linguistic superdiversity of school populations for received language-in-education approaches is most important.

Introduction: The Multilingual Edge of Education

In this volume, we raise the need to invest in new educational perspectives in which multilingualism is valorized and used strategically in settings and contexts of instruction and learning. While the title of the book, ‘The multilingual edge of education’, undeniably alludes to the way in which the multilingual repertoires of pupils in mainstream classrooms are often perceived as an insurmountable problem, it equally underlines more current perspectives in which multilingualism is viewed as possessing cutting-edge potential for transforming linguistically heterogeneous classrooms into more inhabitable, more equitable and more efficiently organized spaces for teaching and learning. Is the multilingual edge an abyss, or do we look to multilingualism for giving learners the edge over the challenges faced by the educational contexts in which they participate today? The chapters in this book are written by an international group of contributors who present findings from empirical studies on different educational approaches which draw on students’ multilingual repertoires as a pedagogical resource for learning and teaching. The authors document a variety of classroom practices, while engaging with students’ and teachers’ experiential voices, local and national policy contexts and so on, so as to explore the potential of multilingualism as learning capital, which, once capitalized upon, can enrich and support educational processes in diverse sociolinguistic contexts.

Breaking Out of L2-Exclusive Pedagogies: Teachers Valorizing Immigrant Pupils’ Multilingual Repertoire in Urban Dutch-Medium Classrooms

This chapter explores the outcomes of an evaluation study into a local multilingual education initiative promoting a type of pedagogical translanguaging. It was conducted in urban elementary classrooms in a subnational context (Flanders, Belgium) where a monolingual language ideology prevails. The qualitative data from this study on teacher practice indicated tentative steps towards translanguaging, rather than a profound transformation of a monolingual into a multilingual learning environment. We observed the practices of both preschool and primary school teachers. While preschool teachers showed greater openness to inclusion of children’s first languages (L1’s) for their socioemotional benefits, primary school teachers showed more interest in L1’s as a cognitive resource and showed a greater tendency to restrict the emerging ‘multilingual spaces’ in classroom. An important lesson of the study is that pedagogical translanguaging faces both the persistent influence of the monolingual context, which is taken for granted, and a pedagogical ideology which highlights constant teacher control as a prerequisite for effective classroom and learning management.