Teachers' language use and attitudes towards multilingual education in primary education

The exclusive use of the target language in the classroom has dominated language teaching in the past. However, the mixing of languages, often referred as translanguaging is frequently observed in multilingual classrooms. The aim of this paper is to examine teachers' linguistic choices in the classroom, and their attitudes towards the three languages in the educational context in the Valencian community. Data were collected in three schools adopting three different language models, namely those of an English-based, a Catalan-based, and a Spanish-based language model. Lo's (2015) observation scheme was used to analyse teachers' language use in thirty classroom sessions. In addition, thirty teachers, ten from each language model school, answered a questionnaire and participated in semi-structured interviews with the researcher. Findings from the study show that, although teachers believe that multilingualism is encouraged in education, they mainly rely on one language: English in the English model, Catalan in the Catalan model, and Spanish in the Spanish-based language model. Finally, the language model seems to play a role in teachers' attitudes towards their languages, and reveal the prestige of English as a lingua franca, the prestige of Spanish as a majority language, and the lack of prestige of Catalan as a minority language, especially for those who do not use Catalan in education.