ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Educ.
Sec. Language, Culture and Diversity
Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/feduc.2025.1627726
The complexity and contradictory nature of beliefs in dealing with multilingualismpositionings of primary school teachers between support, ambivalence and rejection
Provisionally accepted
- 1Chemnitz University of Technology, Chemnitz, Germany
- 2Julius-Maximilians-University of Würzburg, Würzburg, Germany
- 3University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, Eichstätt, Germany
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The DFG-funded [anonymised] study ("Primary Teachers' Beliefs Regarding Multilingualism") describes the complexity and contradictions of primary school teachers' beliefs. The aim is to empirically envision the whole range of beliefs held by primary school teachers. As part of the [anonymised] vignette study, qualitative, vignette-based interviews in the style of brief teaching case studies were conducted with 43 primary school teachers. In order to unveil the teachers' beliefs, the study identified positioning statements that are precise statements independent of the situation and indicate the teachers' beliefs. Using a basic coding for the positioning statements, in the first step of the analysis, text passages containing beliefs were identified, and a category system was developed inductively and deductively, presented in this article. The results show a high degree of variation in the beliefs of primary school teachers, ranging from strongly affirmative to strongly resistant beliefs. In addition, the teachers show ambivalence in dealing with multilingualism in class as well as in their reflections on their own positioning. The qualitativeempirical approach presented here makes it possible to visualise the theoretically assumed complexity and hierarchisation within the teachers' belief systems.
Keywords: Multilingualism, beliefs, Primary teachers, teacher professionalism, qualitative research
Received: 13 May 2025; Accepted: 21 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Lange, Pohlmann-Rother, Plohmer and Müller. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Sarah Désirée Lange, Chemnitz University of Technology, Chemnitz, Germany
Anna Plohmer, Chemnitz University of Technology, Chemnitz, Germany
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