Why teachers shouldn’t be afraid of other languages being spoken in the classroom
Clare Cunningham, York St John University More than 20% of all primary school and 16% of secondary school children in the UK speak languages other than English. And there are now more than 360 languages spoken in British classrooms. But more often than not, in mainstream schools in the UK, the “home languages” of children can be sidelined at best, and prohibited at worst. English is the language of the classroom – this is despite the fact that the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child is clear that children from linguistic minorities should not be “denied the right” to use their own languages. In my recent research , I found there was often a lot of fear associated with the use of “home” languages among the typically white, monolingual demographic of the teaching profession. In my study , which looks at educator’s attitudes towards multilingualism, one teacher I spoke with explained how she likes children to respond to the register in whatever lan...