Conference Agenda

As the linguistic landscape in European schools has changed due to migration, the teaching of languages associated with migration is often considered a threat to integration and national unity (Extra, 2017; Salö, Ganuza, Hedman & Karrebæk, 2018). Despite this hostile discourse, many students are still given the opportunity to study their heritage language (HL) as part of mainstream education in several European countries (Gogolin, 2021; Pfaff, Dollnick & Herkenrath, 2017; Salö et al., 2018; Woerfel, Küppers & Schroeder, 2020). Such educational provisions are nevertheless under constant pressure, as politicians and the public question its legitimacy (Salö et al., 2018; Soukah, 2022), and have also been practically abolished in countries, such as Denmark, Norway and the Netherlands. As a consequence, parents, migrant organisations, and religious communities set up supplementary schools to teach the HL language of their community (Simon, 2018). In the paper at hand, I investigate how Arabic literacy education as part of two Arabic HL settings in Norway and Sweden, respectively served as sites for transculturation of Arabic literacy in the two European countries.

Although movements across borders may contribute to decontextualise certain literacy practices, new practices will naturally emerge through processes of transculturation (Ortiz, 1940; Pratt, 1991). Writing from the Cuban context, where Indigenous, European, African, and Asian cultures clashed and interacted over several centuries, the sociologist Fernando Ortiz (1940) proposed transculturación as a concept to capture the result of this cultural interaction. Ortiz (1940, p. 93) proposed the term as a replacement for the concept acculturation, which he found to be imprecise and insufficient to describe the Cuban context. Although transculturation entails a loss of the previous cultures, it also hails the birth of a new culture, which transcends the previous (Ortiz, 1940, p. 96). As a result of migration over the past few decades, Europe is currently constituted of superdiverse societies (Vertovec, 2007), and processes of transculturation are visible all around us. When Pratt uses the term transculturation, she delineates this concept as the process whereby ‘members of subordinated or marginal groups select and invent from materials transmitted by a dominant or metropolitan culture’ (Pratt, 1991, p. 36). As Pratt (1991, p. 36) asserts, transculturation is a phenomenon of the contact zone.

Students in the Arab diaspora taking part in Arabic heritage language education are situated in-between the cultural, linguistic, political, and religious communities of the Arab world, and their current surroundings. Although Arabic might be considered a language with low prestige in their current setting, the language holds high prestige in the Arab world (Versteegh, 2014). Hence, heritage language education can be described as a contact zone, which Pratt (1991, p. 34) defines as ‘social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power’. In Scandinavia, speakers of Arabic constitute a small minority of the population and Arabic provides limited opportunities in Scandinavian societies. This situation contributes to the asymmetrical relations of power between speakers of Arabic and the society at large. In criticising stable and monolithic conceptualisations of ‘speech communities’, Pratt (1991, p. 37) argues that ‘the idea of the contact zone is intended in part to contrast with ideas of community that underlie much of the thinking about language, communication, and culture that gets done in the academy’. The contact zone is instead a place of encounter and diffusion.

In German schools there is a big amount of different languages which are used, spoken, written and taught in different contexts within different schooling, teaching and social practices. School does not only include “only” German, which is given credit to even in teacher education (for example in NRW, Mercator 2009).

We want to present results of our research on how teenagers report and see their language usage within their school practices. In addition to the concept of “language(s) of schooling” (Boeckmann et al 2013), we consider the whole range of school practices and languages, including their translanguaging practices. By the latter concept we mean “[…] the deployment of a speaker’s full linguistic repertoire without regard for watchful adherence to the socially and politically defined boundaries of named (and usually national and state) languages“ (Otheguy, García & Reid 2015: 281).

Our research aims to provide an insight into how teenagers used their language repertoire, including their heritage Russian, at school (inclusive remote learning) during, shortly after and after all of the lockdown, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, in Germany. In order to do so, we will address the following questions.

1. WITH WHOM is WHICH language used in school context, HOW and HOW OFTEN / FOR HOW LONG in order to reach WHICH purpose? School context here means during time of schooling and at the place of schooling.

1. Which SITUATIONS are described by the students, in which it becomes clear that they - or others around them - use translanguaging?

1. What are the significant CHANGES in their use of languages during the German “Lockdown” compared to the time after Lockdown?

Furthermore, using our qualitative interviews we can answer the question of WHAT circumstances or what situations lead to most usage of the heritage language.

Summarized, what we focus on in our research is the full repertoire languages in the day-to-day life of the teenagers. Compared to the model of Hägi-Mead et al (2021) this positions our research not only in the field of “Language systems & Learning Language(s)”, but also in the outspread field of “Language(s) and society”.

Research on multilingual teenagers and their own language agency is scarce. There are results from studies looking at children, at home in the family (eg Crump 2016) but also in kindergarten & first years at school (eg Rydenvald 2018). There are studies looking at the family situation (eg Smith-Chris 2019) or the situation in and with the society (eg Kimura 2015), but rarely are teenagers themselves the subject researched. This presentation with focus on this specific group of people is not common in the HL research, which is why we aim to close this gap a little with our specific research design and focus.