Child language brokering in schools: Why does it matter?

Abstract

This paper will report on the planning of a small-scale project that is now in progress, which aims to lay the foundation for developing a Guide to Good Practice for the use of Child Language Brokering (CLB) in school settings. This project will investigate the perspectives on CLB of teachers in schools in multilingual areas and young adults who acted as language brokers in the course of their own school career, triangulating the responses of the two groups so as to bring distinctive and complementary perspectives to the topic. In addition to laying the foundation for the development of guidelines for schools, the research team hopes to lay the basis for further work on theorising the social and cultural significance of Child Language Brokering. The study will involve (i) an on-line survey of teachers in primary and secondary schools and of ex-CLBs and (ii) an interview study exploring detailed questions in depth with a small number of selected respondents.