Multilingual Classrooms at Times of Superdiversity

Abstract

In the present contribution we deal with multilingual classrooms and superdiversity. More specifically we deal with the consequences that a revised understanding of language -- based on the concept of language repertoires -- has for language education as well as for educators caught in the transition between diversity and superdiversity. After highlighting that dealing with multilingualism in regular school classrooms, at least in Western Europe, has been a matter of concern for teachers and learners' educational pathways for decades, we move on to dealing with the founding fathers of sociolinguistics and what their seminal work has brought to the recent reevaluation of the concept of sociolinguistic repertoires. We then discuss how this concept highlights the fact that regular education professionals appear to suffer from a ``trained blindness'' mostly focusing on attainment targets and normativity, rather than paying attention to the actual way in which students ``Language'' across formal, nonformal, and informal institutional spaces.