22 Teachers’ beliefs and attitudes towards home languages maintenance and their effects

摘要: Research dating back to the 1960s (Rosenthal and Jacobsen 1968) has highlighted the impact that teachers’ beliefs and attitudes have on their actions in the classroom, on their interactions with their students and on the extent to which they support students in their learning (see Ashton 2015 for a complete historical review). These beliefs play a role in facilitating or hindering practices “by serving to filter, frame and guide experience, decisions and actions”(Gill and Fives 2015: 1). While this is true with regard to teaching practices in general, much attention has also been given to the role that teachers’ beliefs about children’s home languages play in classrooms and how these may affect their emergent bilingual and bilingual learners. Beliefs about children’s home languages that are not informed by research may compromise teachers’ effectiveness with their linguistically diverse students in several ways, including …