Når minoritet blir majoritet. En kasusstudie av flerspråklighet og språklæring ved en skole med ett stort minoritetsspråk

This article reports from a case study investigating multilingual practices and attitudes towards multilingualism in a primary school where one and the same minority language is the native language of a large proportion of the pupils. The study’s material comprises teachers’ answers to qualitative questionnaires, group interviews with the same teachers, and fieldnotes from classroom observations. A thematic analysis of the primary material shows that monolingual attitudes and practices dominate, and that Norwegian is the privileged language. At the same time, the pupils’ self-initiated translanguaging is clearly present in the learning contexts. The fact that the students speak a language that the teachers themselves do not master, seems to be a challenge when it comes to loss of control. At the same time, teachers express a positive attitude towards the students’ multilingualism, which is especially evident in a clear focus on the cultural identity of the pupils. Due to the special multilingual situation, there is a good basis for pedagogic translanguaging and the development of the pupils’ meta-language competence. Thus, there is a didactic potential in utilising the pupils’ multilingual repertoire in their overall language development.