The Use of Home Language(s) in Increasingly Linguistically-Diverse EAL Classrooms in Norway

Introduction

With classrooms becoming increasingly multilingual and multicultural, making appropriate use of the students’ home language(s) HL(s) has been one of the greatest challenges English as an additional language (EAL) teachers face (Flores & Aneja, 2017; Hall & Cook, 2012; Shin, Dixon & Choi, 2020). Current research encourages language teaching practices that enable multilingual students to draw on their entire linguistic repertoire(s) (Flores & Aneja, 2017; Lee & Levine, 2018) as they master proficiency in the target language (TL). The lack of empirical studies that would shed light on how teachers should foster bilingual approaches in increasingly linguistically diverse settings has left teachers confused as to whether they should use their students’ HL(s) in the classroom or not and for what purposes (Singleton & Aronin, 2019). In multilingual classrooms, research has shown that teachers often serve a critical role as agents of change that contribute toward enhanced student learning in multilingual classrooms (Manan, 2020; Yazan & Lindahl, 2020). Because the topic is still rather underexplored in Norwegian classrooms, it is pivotal to gain adequate understanding of multilingual approaches to additional language teaching that are currently employed. Thus far, studies investigating HL use in Norwegian EAL settings have primarily focused on eliciting teacher attitudes through questionnaires (Krulatz, Neokleous, & Henningsen, 2016; Neokleous & Krulatz, 2018). Recently, a study conducted by Neokleous & Ofte (2020) ventured into bringing classroom and interview data together in Norwegian EAL learning environments to unravel how in-service teachers perceive HL integration and compare this perception to their actual practice. The findings suggested that despite acknowledging the potential of the HL, the participants felt guilty about resorting to Norwegian, especially since some of the participants’ reported use did not always reflect their classroom behaviours.

The purpose of this chapter is to broaden the research lens on HL use in increasingly linguistically diverse Norwegian EAL classrooms by focusing on the perception of in- but also pre-service EAL teachers on HL use and the pivotal role they could serve in adopting a multilingual approach to teaching. Trying to elicit the views of in- and pre-service EAL teachers in Norway, the purpose of this chapter is to address the following questions: a) What do pre- and in-service EAL teachers think of the use of the HL in the classroom? b) When do teachers think the HL should be used? For what classroom purposes? c) How do in-service EAL teachers in multilingual environments address the presence of different HLs in the classroom? Do they make recourse to the students’ HLs? If so, when? d) In what ways could teacher-training programs prepare prospective teachers to work with multilingual students?

Before we proceed with a brief review of the literature, it is important to shed light on the terminology that the paper uses. Different terms have been adopted and are under scrutiny to describe the language that a person has been exposed to from birth. Hall and Cook (2012) opt for the term own-language(s) to identify the language students speak best in lieu of first language, mother tongue, and native language. As they elaborated, the terms first and native language are unsatisfactory as the common shared language in the classroom is often not the students’ first and/or native language. Furthermore, Hall and Cook (2012) argued that the term mother tongue is believed to contain emotive connotations that are best to be avoided. For the purpose of this study, the term home language is used to portray the language that is most commonly spoken by a person for their everyday interactions. The term does not necessarily illustrate the language students learned first but the first language out of the students’ entire linguistic repertoire that first comes to their minds. In addition, the term target language is used to indicate the language students learn in a classroom.