Page 9 - Linguistically Diverse Educational Contexts

LINGUISTICALLY DIVERSE EDUCATIONAL CONTEXTS
Introduction
Due to demographic changes and global realities, language and culture seem to play an increasingly important role in contemporary education as they are directly linked to teaching and learning. Teachers need adequate preparation to work with students of different religions, races, ethnicities, and languages. However, despite the new educational reality, authors of foreign/second language teacher textbooks devote little space to issues of diversity and critical perspectives in language teaching. Questions of equality and social justice, which are at the core of education, are also virtually absent from training programmes for language teachers. Moreover, methodological textbooks promote so-called good practices or a series of teaching techniques which encourage copying, and by doing so, limit the teacher's creativity as a person who learns together with students. These issues are present both in Poland and Europe as a whole.
The students I have had the opportunity to work with over the years have always had high aspirations and a desire to become reflective foreign language teachers with a humanistic worldview. However, when they actually begin their teaching careers, first by getting teaching practice at schools and then progressing to working in an educational institution, they become gradually frustrated with the educational practice environment around them. Young teachers have not only pupils with different dysfunctions or disabilities in their classes, but also students from abroad and are trained to teach students who share the same L1.
In order to meet the expectations of my students, I try to talk to them about alternative options that exist in language education in addition to teaching the language itself, and I advise them to focus their work on the process of meaning making in a foreign language, based on students' psycho-physical needs, experiences, and prior knowledge. I also encourage them to include learners in the process of formative assessment, to jointly set learning paths with them, and to generally provide the optimal conditions for each student to make progress at his/her level of language proficiency.
In the case of migrant pupils, there is a conviction among teachers and school directors that these pupils must first master the Polish language before they can be taught using it, so they are provided special classes in this area. In contrast, pupils who are Polish citizens but who were born abroad and have low literacy skills in Polish, are immediately integrated into regular classes that are delivered in Polish, even though both groups essentially come from cultural and linguistic backgrounds outside of Poland. Unfortunately, it is often believed that knowledge of another language, especially one with a low social status, is detrimental to learning in the second language. It is often considered that such students' mother tongue and culture are an obstacle to mastering Polish and rapid assimilation into the dominant culture and reality. As a result, attempts are made to eliminate this language instead of supporting its development, not to mention the fact that these pupils are not encouraged to use their mother tongue during lessons which are held in Polish. This situation is a clear sign to them that their language is inferior and not welcome. At the school classroom level, the key mechanism of linguistic discrimination is the misrecognition of pupils' linguistic competence and cultural resources (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990). Structural discrimination in schools, on the other hand, manifests itself through mechanisms such as institutional practices or the legal-socioeconomic system, as well as verbal and