Exploring Culturally Responsive Pedagogy for Multilingual Education in Aotearoa New Zealand Language Classrooms: Perspectives of Teachers

Linguistic and cultural diversity and the dominance of English have shaped educational responses to languages and language-in-education policies in Aotearoa New Zealand (Qi GY (2021) Early Mandarin Chinese learning and language-in-education policy and planning in Oceania. In: Zein S, Coady MR (eds) Early language learning policy in the twenty-first century: an international perspective, Springer International Publishing. pp 85–107. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76251-3_4). Despite being seen as superdiverse (Harvey S (2013) Revisiting the idea of a national languages policy for New Zealand: how relevant are the issues today? The TESOLANZ J, 21, 1–13; Terruhn J, Spoonley P (2020) Multilingual realities/monolingual ideologies: connecting the dots between schools’ language practices and international student Well-being. Transit: J Transient Migr, 4(2), 183–201. https://doi.org/10.1386/tjtm_00021_1), Aotearoa New Zealand remains to acknowledge English as the language of economic well-being along with other ‘international languages’ (de Bres J (2015) The hierarchy of minority languages in New Zealand. J Multiling Multicult Deve, 36(7), 677–693. https://doi.org/10.1080/01434632.2015.1009465). Promoting ‘international languages’ in Learning Languages as an optional subject area in the New Zealand Curriculum has demonstrated goodwill, benefiting all students from learning another language (Ministry of Education (1993) The New Zealand curriculum framework: Te marautanga o Aotearoa. Learning Media). However, its aligned achievement standards emphasise second language communication and fail to embrace (super)diversity as a reality that has confronted teachers with pedagogical challenges. This chapter reports a study engaging language teachers interested in exploring pedagogical approaches to cater for (super)diversity in practice. Three secondary teachers of Japanese and Spanish languages joined me, the language teacher educator and researcher, in facilitating an online community of practice in 2021. The teachers perceived culturally responsive pedagogy (CRP) differently and as the potential for multilingualism/multiculturalism in second language classrooms. Their developing understandings of CRP according to local contexts are discussed, and a professional development model is developed to support future endeavours for language teacher development in the pluralistic society.