How Multilingual Teaching Strategies in the English Language Classroom Affect the Perception of Multilingual Competences and Learning Outcomes (in Pupils)

Abstract

This thesis explores how to use more of the total language competence in English language teaching to enhance learning. It is an interventionist quasi-experimental study, with a between and within groups pretest, a between-test and posttest design. This means that the groups participating were tested for how they responded to different teaching methods over time, using tests to compare within each group and between the groups. The intervention was tested on two groups, one from an international school and one from a Norwegian standard state school. Two teaching sessions were conducted in each group, the first one using a monolingual approach with only English being used for communication and work. The second session employed the use of multilingual teaching strategies, and let the pupils draw on all their linguistic knowledge both when communicating and solving tasks, and some tasks required the use of several languages. The overall goal was to see whether the pupils valued their multilingual background in English language learning, and whether they experienced a perceived increase in their learning outcomes when they were allowed to make use of their complete language competence while working with an advanced text in English. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with the teachers of the pupils after the teaching sessions to add in-depth understanding of the results. The study is underpowered and thus cannot be used to generalise the findings to the larger population. However, strengths like a naturalistic setting and the comparison between two unique groups in a specific teaching context give valuable insight into certain parts of the SLA field. Overall, the results indicate that the pupils have a positive attitude towards working with multilingual teaching strategies, but there was no significant difference between responses when monolingual and multilingual teaching strategies were employed. What was found was a statistically significant difference between the groups for both the pretest and posttest results. As such, when creating a teaching scheme for multilingual teaching strategies, it is important to test it carefully and tailor it to the specific group to maximise the potential for pupils to perceive their languages as valuable and to increase learning outcomes when working with multilingual language learning methods, non-dependent on the type of school the pupils belong to.