Migrant Languages in Education by Anna Malandrino

Author:Anna Malandrino
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783031157943
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

4.3.6 Path Dependence

Finally, some considerations about the path dependence criterion, which requires that a proposal does not strongly deviate from a previous policy path. As we have seen before, European countries have historically promoted the “one nation, one language” binomial association, thus mainly fostering the diffusion of the dominant language (Wright, 2011). As far as migrants are concerned, the priority has always been to integrate them by promoting their learning of the host country language, and numerous measures have been taken by European countries for this purpose. Where this priority was sided by other priorities, which was the case in Austria—first to prepare migrants for their return to the sending countries, and later based on other considerations related to the desirability of preserving migrants’ mother tongues—then migrant language education policies were introduced with acts that systematically established migrant language courses. When the assimilatory integration priority was not sided by other equally strong priorities, but “only” by a push by the academic and expert community to value migrant languages, then softer measures (in the form of guidelines) were adopted, with the exception of measures that targeted specific groups of migrant students (see the case of EU workers’ children).6 From a different perspective, path dependence is inversely proportional to the novelty of the focusing event: it is obvious that there will not be an established policy path in a certain field if the problem that is to be tackled is new. This consideration is in turn in line with a common critique of the use of path dependence as an explanatory concept in policy studies, which is that it tends to be more suitable to explain stability rather than change (Kay, 2005). However, we can note hints of the importance of path dependence in the adoption of the mother tongue curriculum in Austria. Here, the existence of mother tongue education practices due to the stipulation of bilateral agreements with Turkey and Yugoslavia in the 1970s has certainly contributed to a smoother process of adoption of the 1992 federal provisions. Another hint can be found in the preparatory works preceding the adoption of the Foschi law in 1986, where the adoption of the policy decisions concerning extra-European migrants’ mother tongue education is framed as an extension of the provisions adopted a few years earlier and targeting European Union migrant workers’ children.

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