This study explores Namibian primary school teachers’ beliefs about schools’ language policy and the medium of instruction, as well as their classroom practices in the multilingual context. It describes and interprets the language policy’s development, the language ideologies underlying the policy, and teachers’ beliefs. It combines a historical–structural analysis of official language policy documents with data consisting of a questionnaire, analysed mostly quantitatively and teacher interviews, focus group discussions, and classroom observations submitted to qualitative content analysis. The chosen mixed method approach allowed the triangulation of different parts of data to obtain a comprehensive understanding of the research object.

The study is based on five original publications (Articles I–V). Article I contains a historical–structural analysis of the official language policy documents interpreting the current policy from a historical perspective. Articles II–V are based on collected data. Articles II and V focus on teachers’ beliefs, whereas Articles III and IV describe and analyse their classroom practices. Articles I and V also discuss the societal language ideologies underlying the policy and teachers’ beliefs.

The results indicate controversial language ideologies affecting the language policy and teachers’ beliefs. Teachers’ experiences as students, their interpretation of the official policy, and practical constraints impact their beliefs, thus impacting their classroom practices. The results reveal differences in teachers’ practices according to the school region’s degree of linguistic diversity, the subject taught, and differences between their self-reported and enacted practices. Teachers’ multilingual practices are rather unplanned and momentary and do not leverage multimodality.

The study’s results demonstrate a need to include multilingual teaching methods in initial and in-service teacher education, combined with opportunities for teachers and student teachers to reflect on their beliefs and the language ideological constructs behind them. Intervention studies on these matters would benefit developing multilingual pedagogical approaches.