A Case-study of Pre-service vs In-service Teachers’ Openness toward Plurilingual Pedagogies in the UAE: for a Didactisation of Plurilingualism in Teacher Education

Plurilingual pedagogies call for an acknowledgment of an individual's full linguistic and cultural repertoire as a resource for learning. Though the monolingual stance appears to still be largely prevalent in classrooms across the world, plurilingual pedagogies seem to be slowly gaining the interest of some teachers in plurilingual settings as is the case of the UAE. In a recent study (Coelho, Khalil & Shankar, 2022) which analyzed UAE-based in-service teachers’ plurilingual ‘hidden’ practices in their K-12 classrooms, it became clear that teachers were already implementing plurilingualism-oriented strategies, even if in disguised ways so as not to go against the monolingual school policy, and their interest in continuing to do so was clear in the massive number of teachers who showed willingness to learn more about plurilingualism. Based on these results, another study was carried out in order to understand the perspectives of UAE pre-service teachers to compare them with their in-service counterparts. The results indicate that pre-service teachers are less open to the application of plurilingual approaches though very willing to learn more about them. This genuine interest in becoming more acquainted with such pedagogies calls for a revision of current teacher education programs that legitimize and didactisize plurilingual pedagogies.