Students' use of their plurilingual resources in Australian schools

Abstract

Research involving the plurilingualism of young people has begun to focus upon how we must re-conceptualise language learning to acknowledge the language resources of children with plurilingual experiences. This is particularly important in countries like Australia with a traditionally monolingual mindset embedded in policy, education, and the views of much of the community. Growing arguments posit that it is more important to focus on the resourceful use of language than attempts to measure skill, competence, or fluency in one language. In this paper, the movement between languages of children with a range of linguistic repertoires is explored in the Australian context. Data are taken from student and teacher interviews and focus groups with parents across five different primary schools, each with a bilingual education programme. The paper argues that bilingual programmes aimed at monolingual background students can have benefits for more than one kind of plurilingual student. It was found that plurilingual children drew on their home language(s) as a resource in school contexts where other languages were used, showed an increased enjoyment of learning, and developed learning strategies which built on their plurilingual experiences. Additionally, the data showed how teachers in these contexts worked towards expanding their own linguistic repertoires.

Keywords:

• Plurilingualism
• language resources
• bilingual programmes
• primary school

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge the schools, students, teachers, and parents who participated in this research and permitted me to enter their schools and their lives to better understand their educational environments. I would also like to acknowledge the input of Professor Lesley Harbon to the project which provided the second set of data for this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.