Exploring teachers’ multilingual beliefs and practices in Argentina: insights from Ungspråk-TEACH

Teachers play a crucial role in facilitating the multilingual turn in language education. While numerous studies have examined teachers’ multilingual beliefs and practices across multiple contexts, research in Argentina remains limited, despite its multilingual landscape. This study explores teachers’ beliefs regarding multilingualism and multilingual pedagogy within the Argentine educational context, along with their self-reported multilingual practices. It focuses specifically on the teaching of Italian, a language with deep historical and socio-cultural roots in the country. Data were collected from 117 Italian language teachers using the newly developed Ungspråk-TEACH questionnaire. Descriptive statistical analysis revealed a gap between teachers’ ideological support for multilingualism and their actual implementation of multilingual pedagogy. Inferential statistical analysis using independent-samples t-tests showed significant mean differences in teachers’ multilingual beliefs and practices by prior training in language teaching, teaching experience, and teachers’ identification of students as multilingual. The study concludes with pedagogical implications for language teacher education.