| Goals | The aim of this AILA Research Network is to bring together researchers, practitioners, teacher educators, policy makers and language learners active in various geographical, cultural, and institutional settings who would like to share their experience with and local insights into inclusive foreign language education.
Our starting point is Halliday’s (1999, p.269) assertion that since all educational learning is mediated through language, either as “a medium of learning” or as “the substance of what is being learned”, language is a key-competence in all education. Therefore, learners with language learning difficulties are at risk of exclusion from education. However, educational research into inclusion tends to underestimate the pivotal role that linguistic competence plays in education. As a network, we thus wish to focus on the question how to create inclusive language learning environments, i.e., how to reduce “barriers to learning and participation” (Booth & Ainscow, 2002, p.3), seek equity, and make engagement in foreign language education accessible to all students. We adopt the broad view of inclusion, which focuses on all students, including marginalized groups, and is thus not limited to those with disabilities (Thomas, 2013). We assume that learner diversity should be viewed as an asset in the foreign language classroom and perceive it as an umbrella term that encompasses a range of differences observed at school, e.g., neurodiversity, cultural and linguistic variation, multilingualism, specific learning differences. |
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| Who |
The conveners of this ReN are: Dr. Joanna Pfingsthorn, University of Bremen, Germany Dr. Julia Weltgen, University of Bremen, Germany Prof. Michele Daloiso, University of Parma, Italy Prof. Mª Elena Gómez Parra, University of Córdoba, Spain Dr. Anna Klimas, University of Wrocław, Poland Dr. Małgorzata Baran-Łucarz, University of Wrocław, Poland
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| Why | Differences in the perception of inclusion have been linked to the experience that individuals have had with the notion, e.g., to the extent to which inclusive education has been practiced in their cultural context or to the question individuals shared classes with students who had cognitive and physical disabilities in homogeneous groupings when they were at school (Loreman, Forlin & Sharma, 2007). This finding is consistent with other observations in the field of educational science, which demonstrate that institutionalized education generally tends to be stable and robust in terms of its organization and structure (Tyack & Tobin, 1994). Factors such as teachers’ gender, years of experience or education can prove insignificant when teachers adjust to their new environments and feel that they must adopt the existing curricula and practices. Assuming that various educational systems around the world have established their robust local traditions and structures in the course of their histories, including their own approaches to inclusive (foreign language) education, it is plausible that foreign language teachers involved in these systems experience their workings in idiosyncratic ways. Any attempt to understand these mechanisms should thus include multiple perspectives observed within these separate local/cultural teaching contexts. This suggest that classroom choices, teacher beliefs and psychological constructs that are associated with them need to be examined from a cross-cultural perspective and highlights the necessity to find platforms that enable and encourage informed and research-based dialogue in an international context. |
References:
Blume, C., Gerlach, D., Roters, B., & Schmidt, T. (2019). The ABCs of Inclusive English Teacher Education: A Quantitative and Qualitative Study Examining the Attitudes, Beliefs and (Reflective) Competence of Pre-Service Foreign Language Teachers. TESL-EJ, 22(4). http://www.tesl-ej.org/wordpress/issues/volume22/ej88/ej88a6/
Booth, T. & Ainscow, M., (2002) Index for INCLUSION: Developing Learning and Participation in Schools. Centre for Studies on Inclusive Education, United Kingdom.
Council of Europe. (2001). Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, teaching, assessment. Cambridge, U.K: Press Syndicate
de Boer, A., Pijl, S. A. & Minnaert, A. (2011) Regular primary schoolteachers’ attitudes towards inclusive education: a review of the literature, International Journal of Inclusive Education, 15:3, 331-353, DOI: 10.1080/13603110903030089
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European Agency for Special Needs and Inclusive Education. 2014a. Five Key Messages for Inclusive Education. Putting Theory into Practice. [city: Odense]: European Agency for Special Needs and Inclusive Education.
Halliday, M. A. K. (1999) ‘The notion of “context” in language education’. In M. Ghadessy (ed.) Text and Context in Functional Linguistics (Amsterdam: Benjamins), pp. 1–24.
Haug, P. (2017). Understanding inclusive education: ideals and reality. Scandinavian Journal of Disability Research, 19(3), pp.206–217. DOI: http://doi.org/10.1080/15017419.2016.1224778
Hélot, C. & Ó Laoire, M. (2011). Language Policy for the Multilingual Classroom: Pedagogy of the Possible, Bristol, Blue Ridge Summit: Multilingual Matters. https://doi.org/10.21832/9781847693686
Marshall, S. (2020). Understanding plurilingualism and developing pedagogy: teaching in linguistically diverse classes across the disciplines at a Canadian university. Language, Culture and Curriculum, 33, DOI: 10.1080/07908318.2019.1676768
Loreman, T., Forlin, C. & Sharma, U. (2007). An International Comparison of Pre-service Teacher Attitudes towards Inclusive Education. Disabilities Studies Quarterly, 27, 4.
Thomas, G. (2013). A Review of Thinking and Research about Inclusive Education Policy, with Suggestions for a New Kind of Inclusive Thinking. British Educational Research Journal, 39 (3), 473–490.
Tyack, D. & Tobin, W. (1994). The “Grammar” of Schooling: Why has it been so hard to change? American Educational Research Journal, 31(3), 453-479.
Wen, Z., Biedron, A. & Skehan, P. (2017). Foreign language aptitude theory: Yesterday, today and tomorrow. Language Teaching, 50 (1), 1-31.