Linguistic policy in Greece and teacher’s training in question

Abstract

After the 1980s, Greece, as a member state of the European Union (EU), entered in a series of educational reforms that compiled to the EU’s agenda on societal modernization and fiscal economy. In relation to language, the reforms dealt with the teaching of standardized Greek as a mother tongue, as a second/foreign language, of traditional foreign languages (e.g., English, French, German), and recently, of immigrant languages. Gradually, the official language curriculum is transformed in a multilingual and multimodal one, calling the student to learn and the teacher to teach multiliteracy, within a multilingual and multicultural context. The paper discusses Greece’s language policies in parallel to the indigenous curriculum as a minority curriculum that is based on two contrastive concepts: the societal (hence, educational) multiculturalism, and the monolingual homogeneity of its corresponding community.