While both the classroom interaction and the languages used in this interaction can influence pupils’ opportunities for learning in school, these two dimensions have mostly been studied separately. For this study, analyses of video data of Dutch primary schools were used to describe a model in which both dimensions are included in order to come to a better understanding of multilingual whole class interaction.
Given the increasing linguistic diversity in school populations and the affective and cognitive advantages of using multilingual students' home languages in the classroom (Cummins, 2007; Van Praag et al., 2017), it is important to acknowledge and include these languages in education. A translanguaging approach, in which all languages are used fluidly and practices of multilingual speakers are seen as normal rather than deviant (García & Wei, 2015), has been found to improve pupils' skills in the school language and their understanding of content (Busse et al., 2020; Duarte, 2018). However, besides the languages used, the nature of classroom interaction also influences pupils' learning opportunities. In whole class interaction, the teacher often has a dominant role, limiting the initiative of pupils in taking turns as well as their opportunities to provide elaborate and complex answers (Howe & Abedin, 2013; Mercer & Dawes, 2014). If the classroom discourse is dialogic however, pupils are stimulated to discuss different ideas, provide arguments for their ideas and reach a joint conclusion (Alexander, 2008; Van der Veen et al., 2017). This type of classroom interaction can increase pupils' content and language learning (Rojas-Drummond, 2019).While these two dimensions, multilingual and discourse practices, have been studied separately, these studies have not taken into account the interrelatedness of the two dimensions. Besides this, both dimensions have mostly been studied from the teacher's perspective, not taking into account the role of the pupils in the multilingual practices and whole class interaction. The study presented here fills both these gaps by describing a heuristic model to better understand whole class interaction by using data from Dutch primary school teachers implementing multilingual activities. Video recordings of whole class conversations were analysed in terms of linguistic complexity, turn taking procedure and speech acts as well as languages used and translanguaging function. The results of these analyses contributed to the development of the model and confirmed the teacher-dominated whole class interaction. Other languages than the language of instruction were used only incidentally and with a symbolic function. The model proposed in this study describes both dimensions and their interrelatedness, demonstrating the importance of taking both multilingualism and interaction into account in teacher professionalisation as well as in future research.
