Multilingual awareness and heritage language education: children's multimodal representations of their multilingualism

Abstract

In this article, we analyse visual narratives of multilingual children, in order to acknowledge their self-perception as multilingual selves. Through the analysis of drawings produced by children enrolled in Portuguese as heritage language (PHL) classes in Germany, we analyse how bi-/multilingual children perceive their multilingual repertoires and depict the relationship between the various multilingual and semiotic resources. The analysis describes five tendencies of representation of the multilingual self, covering diverse representations from juxtaposition to coordination of linguistic resources, and using several visual resources, such as flags and speech bubbles. The integrated analysis of children's linguistic and visual resources clarifies how they perceive their multilingualism and uncovers their multilingual awareness. We will (1) reflect on some pedagogical and political challenges that PHL classes in Germany face, regarding the enhancement of a deeper multilingual awareness; and (2) evaluate the data collection methodology, i.e. drawings as narratives about multilingualism or ‘multimodal translanguaging’, namely its validity and usefulness in order to understand children's perceptions about multilingualism and about their multilingual selves.

Keywords:

• multilingual awareness
• heritage language education
• language policy
• drawings (visual narratives)

Acknowledgements

This work is sponsored by FCT/MEC through Portuguese national funds (PIDDAC) and co-sponsored by FEDER through COMPETE - Programa Operacional Fatores de Competitividade within the PEst-C/CED/UI0194/2013 project. We would like to thank Camões, ICL and the Portuguese Embassy in Berlin for giving us all the support to develop this study. We would also like to express our gratitude to all the teachers, pupils and students who collaborated in this project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Note

Notes

1. Camões, Instituto da Cooperação e da Língua / Camões, Institute for Cooperation and Language, is the Portuguese institute responsible for the promotion of Portuguese language and culture abroad. It works under the direct supervision of the Portuguese Minister of Foreign Affairs (www.instituto-camoes.pt). The researcher (also the author) had access to the data through Camões, in the scope of the activities she carried out as coordinator of the Portuguese language education in Germany (between 2010 and 2013), at the Portuguese Embassy.

Additional information

Funding

This work is sponsored by FCT/MEC through Portuguese national funds (PIDDAC) and co-sponsored by FEDER through COMPETE - Programa Operacional Fatores de Competitividade within the [PEst-C/CED/UI0194/2013] project.

Notes on contributors

Sílvia Melo-Pfeifer

Silvia Melo-Pfeifer is currently a professor at the Department of Education of the University of Hamburg (Germany). She is also a member of CIDTFF (Research Centre ‘Didactics and Technology in Education of Trainers’) at the University of Aveiro (Portugal) and associated researcher at LIDILEM (University of Stendhal Grenoble 3, France). Her research interests include plurilingual and intercultural (online) interaction, images of languages, intercomprehension in Romance languages and heritage language education. She coordinated the educational department at the Portuguese Embassy in Berlin (Germany), between 2010 and 2013.