Exploring bilingualism in a monolingual school system: insights from Turkish and native students from Belgian schools

TLDR

Bilingualism is generally linked to educational benefits, yet bilingual minority students in Belgium face pressure from schools to abandon their mother tongues. The study aimed to explore how Turkish‑bilingual and native‑monolingual students in Flemish secondary schools assess their languages, experience the imposition of Dutch monolingualism, and respond to its dominance. Researchers conducted qualitative interviews with these students to gather their perspectives. Students viewed their mother tongues as obstacles to academic and career success, were unaware of bilingualism’s benefits, largely endorsed speaking only one language, and reported that monolingualism was enforced through encouragement, punishment for speaking mother tongues, and exclusion of foreign languages from school culture.

Abstract

A growing body of empirical studies indicates the educational benefits of bilingualism. Despite this tendency, bilingual minority students are being pressured by school authorities to shed their mother tongues. We conducted qualitative interviews with Turkish‐bilingual and native‐monolingual students in Flemish (Belgium) secondary schools to investigate how students evaluate their languages, how Dutch monolingualism is imposed, and how students respond to the dominance of monolingualism. Our results indicate that the mother tongues of bilingual students are mainly perceived as a barrier to educational and occupational success, while the benefits of bilingualism are unknown. Thus, both Turkish‐bilingual and native‐monolingual students approved of speaking one language. We also found that monolingualism was strongly imposed on students by explicit encouragement, formal punishment when bilinguals speak their mother tongue, and exclusion of foreign languages from the cultural repertoire of the school. These results are discussed as they relate to policy‐makers, scholars of bilingualism and institutional racism.