Scoping review on primary school teachers’ beliefs on multilingualism in classroom teaching

The purpose of this study is to provide an overview on the current state of research on primary school teachers' beliefs concerning multilingualism; 1,785 articles were detected and 31 of these articles were included in the corpus. We employed a scoping review methodology to explore primary school teachers' beliefs on multilingualism. Nearly half of the corpus studies were published in the last three years, and more than half of the included studies were carried out using qualitative research methods. The results show that the researchers did not meet on common ground regarding the concept of beliefs and handled the concept of beliefs on multilingualism diversely. The findings from the analyzed studies show that the teachers' beliefs on multilingualism can be grouped in three different categories as rejecting, moderate, and supporting beliefs. The analysis results highlight the currently prominent role of research on teachers' beliefs on multilingualism. Also, the high amount of qualitative research conducted on the topic suggests that continuing along the lines of qualitative approaches to encounter the challenge of social desirability in researching teacher beliefs can be beneficial. Based on the results of this review, the authors suggest a characterisation of the term 'teacher beliefs'.