Joint Seminar l The ideological and ontological beliefs of EAL educators

Educators’ attitudes to their students’ linguistic resources and needs can reinforce and perpetuate social injustice, especially for marginalised populations such as migrant children in English as an Additional Language (EAL) contexts. The educators’ attitudes will be influenced at a fundamental level by the linguistic and social ideologies to which they (more or less consciously) subscribe. Most work on teacher beliefs has concerned their beliefs about learners/learning and teachers/teaching, rather than the language resources and practices developed through learning and teaching, and through which learning and teaching are mediated. Moreover, data on, and discussion of, teachers’ ideological beliefs do not figure centrally in the teacher belief literature. Work on teacher ontologies of English—the ways they conceptualise the language—is almost completely lacking.

In this paper we propose that careful analysis of the sets of ontological beliefs concerning English and other languages that can be inferred from educators’ attitudinal discourse can shed light on how ideological beliefs which reinforce and perpetuate social injustices prosper in the educational system. Analysis of interview data from educators working with EAL students at seven primary schools in the north of England suggests a pervasive hegemonic ideological stance, consistent with the ‘monolingual habitus’, in which English is commonly positioned as ‘language itself’ and other languages are associated with different levels of cultural capital.  From these beliefs we use an ontological framework to infer shared conceptualizations of English and other languages, and of nation and national identity, separately from the values associated with them. We address how the ontological analysis can potentially be used in teacher development programmes to allow educators to understand and reassess their own ideologies and professional practices, challenging and more effectively resisting unfair and harmful narratives from above.

The replay of this webinar is available on the Department's YouTube channel from this link.