Development multilingual literacies in Sweden and Australia - diversity as a resource

Teachers around the world are increasingly aware of the linguistic diversity represented in their classrooms and are looking for educational approaches which develop knowledge of both subject matter and language, particularly for students who are still in the process of developing literacies in majority languages. In my PhD, a linguistic ethnographic project, I investigated opportunities for and challenges to developing multilingual literacies in three forms of education in Sweden and Australia. In this presentation, the main results of this study will be in focus, illustrated by examples from the data, including extracts from classroom observations of mother tongue instruction and multilingual study guidance, interviews with teachers, students and school leaders, and photographs.

The theoretical and methodological approaches to the project will be briefly summarized to provide context. Opportunities for the development of multilingual literacies are created when equal access to spaces for developing literacies in immigrant languages exists, and when language ideologies that recognize and build on students. heteroglossic linguistic repertoires inform the organization of education and classroom practices. Challenges are created when monoglossic ideologies restrict access to diverse forms of language education and constrain multilingual classroom interactions. Organization of language education and development of classroom strategies which build on the linguistic realities of multilingual students and help them develop the genres they need, can help them become resourceful language users (Pennycook, 2012) and provide teachers with the tools they need to facilitate this.

Reference

Pennycook, A. (2012). What might translingual education look like? Babel, 47(1), 4–13.