The English Pronunciation Teaching in Europe Survey : Factors Inside and Outside the Classroom

This paper presents a subset of findings from a European-wide, on-line survey of English pronunciation teaching practices (EPTiES). Quantitative and qualitative data from seven countries (Finland, France, Germany, Macedonia, Poland, Spain and Switzerland) are presented, focusing on teachers' comments about the training they received to teach English pronunciation, about what they do inside the classroom and about what happens outside the classroom in terms of students' exposure to English. The results of EPTiES and of follow-up interviews reveal interesting phenomena across Europe. Most of the teacher-respondents were non-native speakers of English and felt they had little or no training in how to teach pronunciation, which raises the question of how teachers are coping with this key aspect of language teaching. Differences between countries are explored, especially via replies to open-ended questions and relevant contextual factors (e.g. language policy) allowing a more nuanced picture to emerge for each country. Suggestions are made for improving teacher training and for further research.peerReviewe

Translanguaging as Playful Subversion of a Monolingual Norm in the Classroom

A large part of the literature on translanguaging as a pedagogical theory has explored how an inclusive multilingual pedagogy can support students from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds to actively participate in the classroom. While much of this literature approaches classroom translanguaging as an instructional strategy designed to promote multilingual interactional practices, we analyse how multilingual practices can also take place as subversive language play in an educational context that is driven by a monolingual norm. Our data are video-recorded lessons from secondary-level Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) classrooms in Finland in which students whose L1 is Finnish are taught History through English. In bilingual educational programmes such as CLIL and immersion, it is not uncommon that teachers normatively assign L2 as the medium of interaction in whole-class talk and that students who share an L1 use it in peer interaction. We investigate how one student’s translanguaging takes place as a reaction to the teacher’s enforcement of the L2-only norm and is treated as ‘language mixing’ by other classroom participants. Drawing on conversation analytic methods, we describe the sequential unfolding and the normative context of the focal student’s translanguaging, as well as the practices of categorisation with which other students respond to his talk. We suggest that situations of normative conflict provide empirical materials to tease apart some differences between translanguaging and code-switching as social phenomena. Further, we argue that the meaning of translanguaging to participants cannot be established without considering its relation to locally upheld norms around language choice, which function as resources for the construction of language play, subversive identities and displays of (non-)investment in education in the present data.peerReviewe