Abstract
The shift of plurilingual and bilingual streams into mainstream education has highlighted the need for inclusive teaching practices to support learning in diverse contexts. While research evidences the need for improved methodological training, there is less focus on providing teachers with the training needed in a diverse classroom with pupils who require educational support, despite increasing numbers in schools. Teachers need to be aware that providing a constructive classroom climate is crucial in creating an inclusive classroom. Similarly, developing the social and emotional competences of pupils promotes prosocial skills such as supportive peer relationships and empathy, necessary traits in the diverse classroom. This chapter presents a theoretical perspective on the emotional, social, and psychological benefits of providing a supportive and inclusive classroom climate in plurilingual and bilingual education and discusses how pedagogical and metacognitive strategies, as promoted in CLIL, can be used as everyday strategies to scaffold learning in the inclusive classroom.
TopIntroduction. Why Aim For The Inclusive Plurilingual/Bilingual Classroom?
The last two decades have seen plurilingual and bilingual classrooms becoming part of mainstream education, highlighting the need for inclusive classrooms and teaching practices that support learning. Inclusive practices encompass the best teaching strategies for diverse learner profiles that can be used in mainstream schools (Hornby, 2014). In a similar vein, inclusive classrooms should cater for diversity through creating physical and psychological environments that are safe, challenging, and educative (Mitchell & Sunderland, 2020) for children with special educational needs and/or disabilities and/or those from minority and/or low-income families. Conversely, diversity in education is often confronted with significant barriers, resulting in the most vulnerable facing multiple disadvantages. As Ballard (1999) states, the more inclusive a classroom becomes, the more challenging it can be to manage the level of diversity and difference within it.
While bilingual education refers to the co-existence of two languages in the learning environment, plurilingual education refers to three or more. Depending on the educational system, one or more of these languages can be an additional (and often foreign), language or a second language. With both additive plurilingual and bilingual education becoming part of mainstream education in public and state schools, a highly diverse population can access this type of education for free for the first time, potentially transforming the experience into an inclusive and supportive school community for all (Collier & Thomas, 2004).
The neurological (Riehl, 2021), cognitive (Bialystok 2018) and social (Cenoz & Genesee, 1998) advantages derived from plurilingual, and bilingual education have been found to remediate the effects of poverty (Petitto, 2009), mental health deterioration and isolation (Kundu, 2019), academic under-achievement in children with special needs (Peng & Kievit, 2020) and from minority backgrounds (Castro & Prishker, 2019). As Bialystok (2018) states, bilingual education offers a net benefit for all children in the early school years with incontrovertible evidence that it provides the advantage of learning another language and possibly the cognitive benefits of bilingualism. These enhanced cognitive and social skills are evident after just one year in bilingual, as compared to monolingual, education (Chamorro and Janke, 2022), and the longer the time spent in bilingual education, the greater is the advantage (Bialystok & Barac, 2012). This is potentially further enhanced in plurilingual education (Peyer et al., 2010).
Despite the benefits, teachers and learners in plurilingual and bilingual education clearly face challenges. Learning complex content in the L2 or L3 presents an additional difficulty that is not present in monolingual classes and requires specialised teacher training and knowledge to ensure effective learning. Equally, the need for teacher awareness to provide a supportive learning environment and incorporate inclusive practices is even greater than in monolingual classrooms (Juan-Rubio & García-Conesa, 2022). This difficulty is further accentuated in plurilingual classrooms where three or more languages are present. Despite these additional challenges, there is a notable lack of inclusive teaching practices in multiple plurilingual and bilingual contexts (e.g., Bauer-Marschallinger et al., 2021; Cioè-Peña, 2017; Martínez Álvarez, 2020). In these classrooms, creating a supportive climate- conceptualised as teacher-student and peer relationships (Ingemarson et al., 2019)- is pivotal, with studies suggesting that the social climate of the classroom has a significant impact on pupil welfare, academic performance, and socioemotional adjustment (Mortimore, 2023b; Sher-Censor, 2019).
Key Terms in this Chapter
Social and Emotional Learning (SEL): Development of the skills needed for emotion management and regulation, empathy and prosocial behaviour, positive goals achievement, and the capacity to make responsible decisions.
Inclusive Teaching Practices: Teaching strategies that can be used in mainstream schools that are appropriate for diverse learner profiles.
Diverse Learner Profiles: Including, but not limited to children with special educational needs and/or disabilities and/or those from minority and/or low-income families.
Inclusive Classrooms: Classrooms that are perceived as supportive, safe, challenging, and which favour learning for pupils with diverse profiles.
Teacher Awareness: The conscious awareness of the educator towards the importance of supporting pupils’ social and emotional needs to enhance classroom learning environments.
Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL): CLIL refers to the methodological approach that has a two-way focus on content and language and integrates both. It is also used to refer to those methodologies that are recommended in the bilingual classroom.
Classroom Climate: The atmosphere that exists within the classroom, especially regarding those aspects of social and emotional involvement of student-student and teacher-student relationships.