Appreciating the layered and manifest linguistic complexity in mono-multi-lingual STEM classrooms: challenges and prospects

Abstract

This chapter interrogates the layered linguistic complexity in mono- and multilingual contexts generally, and in STEM multilingual contexts specifically. Although the yearbook is about STEM multilingual contexts, understanding the multifarious linguistic challenges within monolingual contexts, with their ‘supposed’ linguistic homogeneity, buttresses an appreciation of linguistic challenges in multilin- gual contexts, generally conceived as linguistically diverse. In monolingual contexts, heterogeneity and linguistic complexity are occasioned by social class engendered vocabulary knowledge gap; emergence of language varieties (lingua fracas) deviant from the standard variety; intra-lingual divergence between conversational and academic language; and the oral–literate language dichotomy/continuum. Multilingual contexts add more languages into the mix, with their nuanced intra- and inter-lingual diversities. Their linguistic and orthographic distance compro- mise the deployment of diverse linguistic resources in the classroom. STEM subjects add another linguistic layer by their unique disciplinary symbolic language, unique semantics to familiar words, unique syntactic patterns, and unique technical vocabulary. The chapter problematises the research–policy–practice dissonance that further complexifies instruction within the STEM multilingual contexts. The chapter argues that, notwithstanding the challenges associated with STEM education in multilingual contexts, there are prospects for viewing learners’ divergent linguistic repertoires as resources to be capitalised on, and not problems to be shunned and eschewed