Abstract Summary
Language maps help to elicit teachers’ and children’s multilingual journeys in order to acknowledge and make visible their complex language trajectories. Language maps, introduced in a teacher training programme, provided the teachers with a unique multimodal creative tool to uncover their own and their children’s invisible multilingual journeys.
Abstract :
Emerging multilingualism is a never-ending, eventful journey that teachers and researchers seldom have the opportunity to witness fully. Teaching multilingual children and researching multilingualism is mostly reduced to an academic year at school or a time-bound research project. As a result, linguistic histories are neglected, incidental or excluded from the learning and research process. As these multilingual historical voices are silenced, we fail to give due weight to the knowledge and experience of children and teachers developing their identity in complex multilingual spaces. Yet, eliciting these lived experiences, perceptions and interpretations enhance and deepen our knowledge and understanding of multilingual practices, and the accompanying emotions and reflections.
In this session, I will describe the use of language maps in a teacher education programme, followed by the teachers’ use of the same resource in class with their students. I will explore the impact of including plurilingual practices in teacher education on classroom practice and the benefits and challenges of multimodal spaciotemporal language narratives in researching multilingualism as subjectively lived.
This study indicates that using language maps as both a concrete and a semiotic exercise, is effective in making visible children and teachers’ multiple and erratic language trajectories. Language maps are constitutive of multimodal identity journeys that attest to the unique biographical trajectories of individuals. They highlight the geography of multilingualism through the symbolic meaning of the journey, and unpack the multilayering and simultaneity of students’ everyday language practices and experiences. They connect local and transnational contexts, temporal and spatial distance, which converge in the here and now, the interaction of a classroom, through the descriptive and narrative potential of the image. Overall, language maps provide an alternative visual and creative approach to exploring multilingual repertoires and identities and allow teachers and children to acknowledge and accept a multilingual expanded identity.
