Abstract Summary
This paper presents examples of plurilingual teaching from a research-practice partnership investigating how to raise critical multilingual language awareness through collaborative multilingual project-based learning. Through linguistic and cultural collaboration, students develop critical and creative plurilingual competence as both speakers and listeners in multilingual interactions both within the classroom and beyond.
Abstract :
In the context of transnational mobility, linguistic diversity has become a defining feature of classrooms. How can schools leverage students’ diverse communicative repertoires to build all students’ critical multilingual language awareness and social understanding of difference? In this paper, we discuss an on-going Research-Practice Partnership (Coburn & Penuel, 2016) with a US Midwest school district through which a team of university-based researchers have been partnering with elementary teachers, students and families to investigate teaching for critical multilingual language awareness (Garcia, 2017; Hélot, Frijns, Gorp & Sierens, 2018) in order to raise teachers’ and students’ explicit understanding of how languages work and to deepen their content area knowledge while also fostering social inclusion and advocacy, particularly for culturally and linguistically minoritized students and families.
We conceptualize teaching for CMLA by drawing on James and Garrett’s (1992) original five domains of language awareness: cognitive, affective, performance, social and power. CMLA puts power at the center of all discussions of and about language(s) because language(s) and language learning is always as much about language as it is about power (Ortega, 2011). By adopting a linguistically expansive approach to teaching and learning, our collaborative research demonstrates that by engaging students from different linguistic, cultural and social backgrounds in working collaboratively on creative and critical multilingual content-based projects, they can all develop their plurilingual competence both as speakers and listeners in dynamic multilingual interactions and they become invested in supporting one another to accomplish academic work that they could not do alone. We discuss several examples from practice in order to argue that given the diversification of school populations today, classrooms are, in fact, privileged spaces in which to engage children in multilingual project-based learning and inquiry as the context of the shared project by design draws students into authentic linguistic and cultural collaboration.
