The roles of teachers and their collaboration in multilingual classes in three secondary schools in the United Kingdom are explored in this volume. It is an ethnographic study conducted inside the schools, based on observation and interviews. Creese provides a critical analysis of the relationship between language teachers and subject teachers. The insights of this work can be useful for many other multilingual schools in other contexts in which teachers work together in the same classroom and for schools with native language assistants or teachers for students with special needs who work in collaboration with subject teachers.
The three schools reported in this volume are in London. The data are based on the observation of classes as well as interviews with 26 teachers. The aim of the schools is to get students who do not have English as their first language ready for instruction through the medium of English. The schools are transitional and different from multilingual schools, which aim to develop their students' proficiency in more than one language.
The volume contains a general introduction, 10 chapters that each include an introduction and a chapter summary, and a final chapter of conclusions. In chapter 1, the author explains the theoretical framework to be used as a basis for her ethnographic research. The main approaches are ethnography of communication and interactional sociolinguistics, but the different chapters of the volume also discuss theories in areas such as semiotics, SLA, and discourse analysis.
In chapter 2, Creese discusses educational and language policies, particularly inclusion as a policy. She gives mainstreaming and partnership teaching as examples of inclusion policies and provides an overview of the different ideologies and methodologies for learners with English as an additional language in the United Kingdom.
In chapter 3, Creese analyzes data from the interviews with subject and language teachers. This chapter highlights the importance of the pedagogies of transmission and competitive education that are reflected in contradictions between intellectual and lived ideologies. Both subject teachers and language teachers also seem to acknowledge the higher status of the subject teacher.
Chapters 4 and 5 look at teacher interaction patterns in the classroom. These patterns are discussed in relation to the different roles of subject teachers and language teachers, in chapter 4, and societal discourses on education and diversity, in chapter 5. These chapters confirm the most important role of the subject teacher in support modes.
In chapters 6 and 7, ten different modes of collaboration between teachers are explained by means of vignettes, information from interviews, and observation of classroom interaction. The ten modes include support and partnership teaching, the advantages of which the author highlights.
In chapter 8, the author looks at the opportunities for content and language teaching in these classrooms. She reports that there were very few examples of a good integration of content and language. Chapter 9 focuses on Turkish-speaking bilingual teachers and attitudes toward Turkish. Chapter 10 looks at the way bilingual language teachers mediated between the school and the students in a situation of conflict.
This work analyzes the roles of subject and language teachers in multilingual schools and reports that, in most cases, language teachers have a lower status and work in a support mode rather than in a collaborative mode. Creese provides a very interesting typology of the different types of interactions between teachers that certainly contributes to the field and will probably be used in future research. The research study reported here is highly informative not only because of its findings but also because of the research methodology, which combines different types of data collection. Other strengths of the volume are the inclusion of different theoretical approaches and the structure and style of the volume. The author makes an effort to link different theoretical proposals to classroom research so as to go beyond the actual description of what is observed in the classroom. This is a very important step, although in some cases the discussion of the data does not refer back to the theoretical background.
The volume will be useful for researchers, policy makers, and teachers who work in situations with two teachers in the classroom, but it does have some limitations. It will be less valuable in bilingual and multilingual education than in transitional education because in those contexts, content is not used as a resource to teach language.
