Soft power: teachers’ friendly implementation of a severe monolingual policy

Dutch-medium schools in Brussels traditionally cater to a Dutch-speaking minority, but they have recently seen a massive influx of pupils with a limited competence in Dutch. In order to face the resulting pedagogical and ideological challenges, many of these schools have intensified their efforts to remain Dutch enclaves in a predominantly Francophone city. In this article we discuss one Dutch-medium secondary school that positions itself as fairly severe in this regard. We will demonstrate, however, that teachers were generally drawn to a more friendly interpretation of their language policy... Mehr ...