The multilingualism of pupils runs counter to nation-state organised and monolingually oriented education systems. The nation-state education system's one legitimate language has various functions. It is (1) a criterion for access to educational institutions. In Germany, for example, school entrance examinations, which actually assess children's cognitive development, children are mainly measured against a linguistic norm (Gomolla 2006), (2) language is also a medium of knowledge transfer and evaluation in classroom. In this context, certain forms of language, e.g. the academic register of German, are implicitly assumed, but not explicitly taught at school (Feilke 2012, Morek/Heller 2012). The degree to which children are equipped with the necessary linguistic means becomes a criterion for recommendation for certain types of school, and thus (3) becomes the basis for selection processes, which ultimately (4) determines pupils' level of inclusion and educational success (Gomolla/Radtke 2009; Fürstenau 2017).
These social factors cause not only home language maintenance and development, but also educational disadvantages for all those children who deviate from the dominant monolingual norm. At the same time, monolingual notions of normality shape teachers' expectations of
self-efficacy: they perceive linguistic heterogeneity as deviation from the norm and dealing with linguistically heterogeneous groups as challenging. It is therefore important to examine teachers' language-related notions of normality (Huxel 2018, Panagiotopoulou/Putjata 2020).
Why do we speak of language-related notions of normality? In our presentation, we will present this concept (1.) starting from an international project where the theoretical framework (2) is based on the concepts "attitudes", "beliefs" and "knowledge" (Fives/Bühl 2016). The data was gathered through semi-structured interviews with 36 primary school teachers and analyzed using the software Atlas.ti with appraisal (Martin/White 2002). In the methodology part (3), we will show how the method of appraisal helped us to sharpen our focus and (4.) arrive at the concept of language-related notions of normality.
At the end of the presentation we will discuss following questions: (Content:) Which beliefs about multilingualism in school can be identified in the statements of teachers? (Methodology:) Are there any distinctive argumentative patterns? (Theoretical:) To what extent are existing ideologies on multilingualism reflected in teachers' statements?
