‘They don’t have that feeling’: The attribution of linguistic resources to multilingual students in a primary school

This article explores the attribution of linguistic resources to multilingual students in a primary school in the Netherlands. Drawing on an ethnographic study of a regular, multicultural classroom, it describes patterns of attribution emerging from observations of classroom activities and interviews with the teacher. Its focus is on the discrepancies between linguistic resources implied in classroom activities and those attributed to the students in the teacher's retrospective accounts of those activities. It shows how mistakes in the construction of sentences made by individual students are attributed to a lack of a certain ‘feeling’ for word order and overgeneralized to account for all ‘foreign children’. A review of the students’ mistakes puts the lack of a feeling for ‘how we say that in the Netherlands’ into perspective. Two questions are addressed in discussing these outcomes. First, what discourses may have informed the observed patterns of attribution? Second, is it feasible or indeed necessary for language teaching in multilingual contexts to make accurate attributions?