Page 25 - Linguistically Diverse Educational Contexts

Education Development and the Ministry of National Education). The most numerous minority languages in Poland (2017) are Ukrainian, Belarusian, Latvian, German, Russian, Slovakian, Czech, and Hebrew. After the amendment of the law, these languages could be part of the mainstream curriculum in Polish schools. In view of the above, I believe that there is a need for a comprehensive, scientifically grounded conceptual framework explaining pedagogical thinking for planning different models of educational programmes that take into account the nature of minority cultural diversity and the diversity of students, which would provide greater conceptual clarity and lead to the implementation of new educational programmes in schools in Poland. A publication addressing the above issues could contribute to changing the way school programmes are implemented without requiring a systemic change to the core curriculum.
In 2017, in accordance with a regulation of the Polish Ministry of National Education22, the possibility of creating preparatory classes in schools to be attended by students who do not know Polish well enough to participate in lessons with other students fluent in the language emerged. The consent of the leading authority is sufficient to establish a preparatory class. The responsibility for these pupils is borne by the teachers, who often work with them without any previous preparation related to language acquisition or bilingual and plurilingual education. Nowadays, usually at the beginning of their educational journey, migrant pupils are separated from other pupils and placed in preparatory classes in order to learn Polish –before they start using it with native speakers in class23. In order to illustrate this situation, let us imagine a situation, slightly exaggerated for the purpose of the example, in which we would allow small children to communicate in Polish only among themselves, because they are not yet at such a level of language proficiency as to communicate with more competent speakers of the given language. Such a situation seems absurd, does it not? But couldn't the same be true of foreign language education, where we teach a language with an unwritten promise that once we learn it, we will be able to communicate in it – sometime in the future.
In order to create effective supportive education for foreign and minority students, teachers should have a basic knowledge of language acquisition, know how people learn languages, and learn how to develop students' literacy in their mother tongue. Teachers should also have knowledge of sociopolitical educational contexts, the ability to modify the curriculum for students whose first language is not the official language of the country, and pedagogical competence appropriate for culturally and linguistically heterogeneous groups (Nieto, 2017, p. 141). An interesting discovery was made by Fránquiz together with de la luz Reyes (1998), who conducted a study among teachers working with linguistically and culturally mixed groups. It turns out that a teacher does not need to know the mother tongue of his/her pupils in order to support them in their learning. Rather, they should simply encourage them to use their cultural and linguistic resources in lessons. Research on translanguaging supports this fact (Garcia, 2009). The use of different languages by learners promotes the clarification of new content or ideas that emerge during the course of the lesson. Translanguaging is the natural and intuitive use of different languages in complex, multilingual, and intercultural situations (see Galante, 2019), through which the voices of minority and migrant students can be released. It is a process in which all languages are used in a dynamic and functionally integrated way so as to organise and mediate understanding, speaking, literacy, and learning (Lewis et al., 2012). It is
22 Regulation of the Minister of National Education of 23 August 2017 on the education of persons who are not Polish citizens and persons who are Polish citizens who have received education in schools operating in the educational systems of other countries. Dz. U. 2017, item 1655.
23 Polish-speaking students.
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