Culture, language, and multilingual education:

Abstract

INTRODUCTION. In a multilingual classroom, teachers play an essential role in encouraging and fostering a multilingual attitude and behavior at the school, as their actions can considerably influence their students. This study is intended to explore the teachers’ attitudes towards multilingual policy and multilingual pedagogy. Therefore, theories on language educational policy and multilingual pedagogy and practices are discussed as guidance. METHODS. The study used a survey research design, and the questionnaires were sent online to gather the data. The participants were 100 foreign language teachers who teach at high schools in an Indonesian province. They were asked to voluntarily respond to three main themes: Multilingual education knowledge, language education policy in Indonesia, and multilingual classroom practices in the questionnaire in the questionnaire. T-test and MANOVA were employed to investigate the difference between variables. RESULTS. The descriptive and inferential analyses revealed that the attitudes towards multilingual pedagogy implemented in Indonesia were almost uniform across different foreign language teachers having a positive attitude. Out of 18 statements, the high mean scores are related to the belief that learning another language could foster openness to other people’s language and culture and learning different languages can build students’ ability to use languages within a context. DISCUSSION. Taking for granted that participants have different ages, teaching experience, gender, and foreign language, there is no significant difference in their attitude towards multilingual education and practices. Most of the participants of this study believe that multilingual education contributes to some benefit for their students. Yet, the results also show that participants also view that the government has neither provided nor accommodated proper support for multilingual education.