Teachers' and pupils' strategies in dealing with monolingual, SLI-driven language-in-education policies in Flanders

Flanders is experiencing growing intra- and interlingual diversity, with both the emergence of Tussentaal (‘in-between-language’) as a cluster of intermediate varieties between the Flemish dialects and Standard Dutch, and an increasing number of immigrants and their respective languages in Flanders. The effects of both phenomena on the role of Standard Dutch in Flanders have been assessed differently by various researchers: for some, processes of destandardisation are at work (e.g. Grondelaers & van Hout 2011), while others trace processes of demotisation (e.g. Delarue 2013) or see the effects of a hyperstandardisation process (e.g. Van Hoof & Jaspers 2012). The Flemish language-in-education policy (e.g. Vandenbroucke 2007, Smet 2011) seems to be a derivative of the latter, as it deals with the (perceived) problems of substandardisation and multilingualism by imposing a strict monolingual policy, propagating Standard Dutch as the only acceptable language variety (Delarue & De Caluwe 2015) and thus demonstrating a strong and vital Standard Language Ideology (SLI). In most Flemish classrooms, however, a lot of Tussentaal features are used, both by teachers and pupils (Delarue 2013), causing tension between daily classroom reality and the ideal picture set by policy makers. This paper analyses the way(s) in which teachers and pupils cope with this tension, and the research methodologies which can be used to gain insight in their coping strategies. The research project of the first author studies the language use and the language ideologies of 82 teachers of Flemish primary and secondary schools. By combining participant observation, sociolinguistic interviews and questionnaires, the study seeks to map the ‘personal ideological frameworks’ of teachers, and uncover the capricious ways in which teachers respond to language-in-education policies. The second author of the paper uses sociolinguistic-ethnographic methods to gain insight into the language use, attitudes and ideologies of pupils in a secondary school in East-Flanders. The two research projects seem to yield similar (yet preliminary) results: both teachers and pupils are deeply influenced by the SLI, and stress the importance of Standard Dutch inside as well as outside of the classroom, but at the same time, they often have no problem admitting that they do not always use Standard Dutch in school contexts – using various strategies to explain why. This paradoxical view on the standard can be interpreted as an interplay between policy-supported processes of hyperstandardisation on the one hand and norm-relaxing processes of demotisation on the other. The results of the research projects presented here thus demonstrate that the use of qualitative/ethnographic methodologies can provide a deep understanding of the perceptions, thoughts and practices of teachers and pupils, and that the specific Flemish language situation can not be unambiguously identified as a typical example of destandardisation, hyperstandardisation or demotisation