DEALING WITH MULTILINGUALISM IN A DUTCH PRIMARY SCHOOL: AN ETHNOGRAPHIC STUDY OF THE PRACTICE OF TEACHING SPELLING TO FIRST AND SECOND LANGUAGE LEARNERS

Abstract

Contemporary primary school populations in the Netherlands represent a wealth of languages, ethnicities, and cultures. In 1999, 14.7% of the total population of 1.54 million pupils were registered as minority pupils (Statistics Netherlands, 2001). Most of these are of Turkish (23.7%) and Moroccan (20.4%) origin, speaking Turkish, Arabic, and/or Berber at home apart from or instead of Dutch (Extra et al., 2001). As in many other Western European countries, a significant difference can be observed between the school achievements of pupils belonging to a cultural-linguistic minority and the pupils belonging to the majority group (Walraven & Broekhof, 1998). Turkish and Moroccan pupils, for instance, lag behind a bit less than half a learning year in arithmetic and more than two learning years in Dutch language proficiency by the end of primary school (Tesser & Iedema, 2001). Besides sociolinguistic background, socio-economic, cultural, and school factors account for the underachievement of language minority pupils.

Citation

Bezemer, J. (2003), "DEALING WITH MULTILINGUALISM IN A DUTCH PRIMARY SCHOOL: AN ETHNOGRAPHIC STUDY OF THE PRACTICE OF TEACHING SPELLING TO FIRST AND SECOND LANGUAGE LEARNERS", walford, G. (Ed.) Investigating Educational Policy Through Ethnography (Studies in Educational Ethnography, Vol. 8), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 169-192. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1529-210X(03)08009-4