Culturally and linguistically diverse practices for teaching students of diverse backgrounds

This chapter analyses how linguistic diversity is handled in primary schools in the Basque educational system. The Basque curriculum for Basic Education establishes that pupils should be competent in Basque, Spanish and English, with a strong focus on Basque, a minoritised autochthonous language (Decree 77/2023). In this context, schools have to address the unequal relationship between the local languages, Spanish and Basque, outside of the classroom. We investigated the attitudes and declared practice of teachers in public primary schools in Álava (Basque Autonomous Community, Spain) who apply the Basque immersion model. Our main aim is to learn how they deal with the revitalization of the minority language and the linguistic diversity brought by migrant families. Results show that teachers do not see multilingualism as a threat, since 76.6% of them state that heritage languages are not a source of classroom difficulties for them. Teachers’ actual practices, instead, differ somewhat from these favourable attitudes towards pupils’ heritage languages, as their mother tongues are not regularly mentioned or treated in class. Thus, although Basque is considered a factor for social cohesion, future primary teacher training programmes should include more specific contents and resources to enrich both heritage languages and the revitalization of the local minority language (Dolz-Mestre, 2019).