Talige diversiteit en Nederlands in de lerarenopleidingen op Curaçao en Bonaire

Abstract

Abstract First-year students at the teacher training institutes for primary education and for secondary education in the subject of Dutch at the University of Curaçao generally speaking show low scores on Dutch language proficiency tests and poor study results. Bak-Piard et al. (2016) found that these poor results are related. In this contribution we will go into the language background of these first-year students and show that it is characterized by a large amount of diversity. This not only relates to the students’ first learned languages, but also to their earlier and actual home languages, their earlier and actual languages of instruction and the foreign languages they learned in the course of their educational career. This linguistic diversity, which is by no means an exception in the Caribbean, leads to a multitude of language practices that can be characterized as ‘polylingual languaging’, i.e. making meaning by using all the linguistic resources that these students possess in their rich linguistic repertoires. It goes without saying that such language practices can be easily at odds with schools’ linguistic normativity. The data that we present here give a clear insight in local linguistic diversity patterns and practices and provide a number of interesting building blocks for the development of an educational program for Dutch in the teacher training curriculum that fits the linguistic reality of the students and can contribute to improving their study results in the teacher training programs and making them better teachers in contexts of linguistic diversity in their future careers.