This paper explores the positioning of home and school-learned languages in a highly linguistically diverse primary school in Brussels, Belgium. It focuses on teachers’ decisions as they adopt a Functional Multilingual Learning approach which recognises pupils’ full linguistic repertoire as a didactic resources for learning.
Teachers are increasingly being called on to use their pupils’ plurilingual repertoires as didactic resources for learning (Garcia & Kleyn, 2016). However, little is known about effective pedagogical mechanisms for the linguistically diverse mainstream classroom, nor about how teachers structure and organise multilingual activities to address the wide diversity of linguistic profiles present in the class. This paper explores the pedagogical approach of Functional Multilingual Learning (Sierens & Van Avermaet, 2014) which recognises pupils' plurilingual repertoires and enables the use of multiple linguistic pathways to reinforce learning and affirm linguistic identity. The study followed four upper primary teachers over 9 months in a highly linguistically diverse school in a socio-economically deprived area of the French/Dutch speaking city of Brussels, Belgium. Arising from a process-orientated longitudinal study within a linguistic ethnographic framework, the paper explores the decision-making processes involved in the teachers’ initial steps into plurilingual practice. It addresses the questions: How did multilingual activities position home and school-learned languages as school-situated resources? What were factors influencing the teachers' decisions when creating such tasks? Analysis shows that the multilingual tasks and classroom practices devised by the teachers positioned pupils’ home languages variously as linguistic, creative, academic or social resources. Pedagogical decisions were influenced by factors including the teachers’ growing knowledge of pupils’ linguistic repertoires; understanding and acceptance of translanguaging practices; personal theories of learning; views on the impact of multilingualism on the school and wider community; as well as an overriding concern for inclusivity. Dutch (taught as a foreign language) was initially eclipsed or considered as an afterthought but emerged as an important resource for monolingual pupils to participate in a meaningful way. This study sheds light on teachers' negotiation of the interface between individual and community plurilingual repertoires and the place occupied by home and school-learned languages in plurilingual practice.
