The Multilingual English-language Classroom: A Case Study

Aiming to identify ideological factors that potentially either promote or complicate the learning of English as a foreign language for learners with a multilingual background, this multimodal study examines attitudes to multilingualism, classroom interaction, classroom decorations, teaching practice and materials through a case study of a class and its teachers in an ethnically diverse public secondary school in Sweden. The study finds conflicting discourses, monolingual and monocultural, as well as multilingual and multicultural, about language, language learning and teaching. Interviews with teachers and students gave evidence of a generally open attitude to cultures and languages, but the language hierarchies at work in Swedish society could also be identified, notably in classroom interaction. Analysis of teaching materials and teaching practice revealed a lack of adaptation to multilingual students with multicultural backgrounds in that they were marked by a traditional teaching approach, based on a Swedishness norm, e.g. a contrastive Swedish-English grammar approach and a study of culture from a national, that is a dominant national Swedish perspective. In sum, although teachers voiced a concern about multilingual students, they did not have the theoretical knowledge or methodological means to include them. Based on findings in the empirical materials of the case, the article makes some pedagogical suggestions on how to better cater to the diverse needs of students in the linguistically and culturally diverse ESL classroom.