How does a plurilingual approach to teacher education affect student teachers’ approach to the inclusion of Scandinavian languages in the Danish primary school L1 subject?

In this presentation we discuss the effect on student teachers’ approach to teaching Scandinavian languages in the Danish L1-subject (an intercomprehension design, cf. Candelier et al., p. 6) when they themselves acquire this content via a multi-phased didactic development process focused on a plurilingual and explorative approach to languages.

The didactic development process is characterised by a focus on the transitions from teacher education to primary school and designed in a waterfall model where the plurilingual content id directed firstly at teacher educators who then transform this content into plurilingual teaching in teacher education. The participating student teachers then transpose this content into teaching plans focusing on Scandinavian languages in primary school. This process allows the teacher students to experience a close relation between the academic content acquired in teacher education and their own teaching experiences. In this presentation, we explore how the participation in this development process focusing on plurilingual teaching of Scandinavian languages and an explorative approach to languages affects students’ conceptualisations of and approaches to the inclusion of Scandinavian languages.

Based on qualitative data from student evaluations, focus group interviews, teacher interviews and student conversations, we focus on the disruptions and opportunities experienced in relation to the plurilingual, resource-oriented approach to language teaching, especially with a view to the inclusion of Scandinavian languages in Danish L1.

The presentation takes as its point of departure a broad concept of plurilingual and pluralistic approaches, ranging from monolingual teaching enabling the recognition of students’ other languages, to the fully-fledged pluralistic approach consistently drawing on a range of languages by the use of intercomprehension, integrated didactics or the éveil aux langues-approach (Daryai-Hansen & Albrechtsen 2018; Daryai-Hansen, Drachmann & Sigsgaard 2019). This continuum also includes translanguaging pedagogy (García-Mateus & Palmer 2017) and the inclusion of Scandinavian languages in Danish L1-teaching (an intercomprehension approach) which is an interesting starting point because these languages are closely related and thus easily accessible and already included in the Danish L1-curriculum.