Schola Europaea: Schooling Europeans? – a Preliminary Research Report

This presentation explores the creation of identities, values and the social production of citizens in a Type II Schola Europaea institution. Existing only for a few years, the multilingual and multicultural Type II Schola Europaea institutions are the latest development in the ‘Europeanization’ of public education and they represent a new object of study. To date, no research has been conducted in this area from the perspective of applied linguistics, nor has any study focused on the ‘outcomes’ produced by Schola Europaea institutions, such as the ways pupils in these schools express their social and political identities in their language use. Thus, the relevance of this research is that it provides new empirical information about the politics of identity construction, the dissemination of values and the potential of these unique institutions to create ‘European citizens’.

In my talk I focus on pupils’ patterns of identification and their system of values as are represented in their language use with special attention to pupils’ expressions of their relationship to the EU (European identity creation) and the values connected to the creation of social and political identities. The linguistic investigation is performed by corpus-driven systemic-functional analysis of Transitivity processes and Appraisal. Based on Halliday’s system of transitivity (Halliday and Matthiesen, 2014) and Martin & White’s appraisal theory (Martin & White, 2005) the corpus-driven systemic-functional analytic approach is proven to be a highly effective instrument in exposing patterns of identification, values and self-positioning (cf. Krizsán, 2011). The findings show that particular instrumental values related to the EU seem to be internalized by the pupils while intrinsic values, such as multilingualism seem to be implanted.