Teaching 'foreign pupils' Czech : Linguistic integration between official language policy and local policing practices
Abstract
This paper investigates how instruction of Czech for so-called 'foreign pupils' is organized in two elementary schools in Prague. The number of 'foreign pupils' in Czech schools, same as the overall number of foreigners in the country, has more than doubled between 2000 and 2017 (Czech Statistical Office 2017).
However, it was only in 2017 that Czech policy makers started considering a 'systematic instruction' of Czech for 'foreign pupils' (Government 2017) to consolidate the existing haphazard policy on linguistic integration. The aim of the paper is to contribute to the study of how growing linguistic diversity is dealt with in post-socialist Central Europe (cf.
Sloboda 2016) and to the debate on how official language policies (or their lack) relate to local policing practices (cf. Blommaert 2013).
The paper is based on observations and narrative interviews with school headmasters. The data suggest that both schools have long history of educating 'foreign pupils' and that two distinct language policies evolved from patterns of policing practices in each of them.
We argue that educators developed those practices 'in-situ' independently of the official language policies.