Exploiting foreign language student-teachers’ visual language biographies to challenge the monolingual mind-set in foreign language education

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article takes the plurilingual repertoires of foreign language teachers – and thus the teachers’ linguistic diversity – as a starting point for exploratory research into the potential of visual methods in teacher education for changing mind-sets. Describing and reflecting on the ubiquitous manifestation of a monolingual habitus in foreign language (teacher) education, we consider ways to offer linguistically responsive foreign language teacher education aiming at challenging that ethos. Reporting on a project based on the production of drawings, we present and compare the linguistic biographies of future French and Spanish teachers, using multimodal analysis. The analysis seeks to uncover whether target language (French and Spanish) and migrant background influence the visual representation of the plurilingual repertoire and of the process of becoming plurilingual. As no significant differences are observed, demonstrating the pervasiveness of the monolingual mind-set in foreign language learning and teacher education, I propose some ways forward in response to the identified language learning ideologies.