Pre-Primary and Primary School teachers’ beliefs towards multilingualism in Hegoalde

Abstract

Multilingualism is an important matter in our country. One of the main concerns of society and especially of the educational community is to guarantee the transmission of Basque and the teaching quality of the other curricular languages. The main objective of this study is to discover Pre-Primary and Primary school teachers’ beliefs about multilingualism in Hegoalde (Basque Country). In fact, doing research about teachers’ beliefs means gaining better understanding of their judgments and teaching practices. In order to know about these beliefs, an online questionnaire was designed to collect the quantitative data from 418 inservice teachers. The results reflect the positive beliefs teachers hold about multilingualism and that they consider multilinguals better language learners, rejecting any belief that may consider multilingualism problematic. Nonetheless, Pre-Primary and Primary school teachers hold a deep rooted belief: the sooner you start learning the language, the better.