Bridging the policy/practice gap: the discursive strategies of Flemish teachers

Teachers are at the core of language education policies (LEP), as they interpret, negotiate and resist language policies in their classrooms. They are not solely "servants of the system" (Shohamy, 2006, p. 76), but play a pivotal role in putting governmental language policy – which is often imposed top-down – into practice (Menken & García, 2010). In regions where the LEP remains strictly monolingual while classrooms increasingly become multilingual and superdiverse environments, it is difficult for teachers to stand their ground, as they need to come up to multiple, often contradictory, expectations. In Flanders, the northern, Dutch-speaking part of Belgium, the gap between monolingual policy and multilingual classrooms is incessantly widening. Flanders is experiencing growing intra- and interlingual diversity, with both the emerge of tussentaal (literally '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. Flemish LEP deals with these (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). In most Flemish classrooms, however, teachers use a significant number of non-standard features (Delarue 2013). This paper analyses the way(s) in which teachers cope with this tension between policy and practice, drawing on a thematic analysis of sociolinguistic interviews with 82 Flemish primary and secondary school teachers. During these interviews, Flemish teachers appear to be highly ambivalent when it comes to Standard Dutch. On an abstract level, almost all teachers stress the importance of Standard Dutch in educational settings. At the same time, however, they often have no problem admitting that they do not always use the standard in specific classroom settings, using various strategies to explain why. These strategies show that teachers try to bridge the policy/practice gap by performing multiple (discursive) teacher identities (e.g. authority, authenticity, professionalism)