If, when and how does multilingualism become a resource for multilingual teacher students?

Although pupils and teachers in Swedish primary schools, bring languages other than Swedish and English to the classroom, research is lacking about multilingualism in mainstream primary school settings. This article is based on a research project with an ethnographic approach. The project was, situated at two elementary schools with a high proportion of multilingual teachers and pupils and involved totally three classes in second and fourth grades. The study aims to illuminate and discuss language portraits (Busch, 2017, 2018) and their potential as pedagogical tools in teaching that may raise awareness of pupils' multilingual repertoires. Data consist of field notes from observations of the multilingual teachers' modeling of and reflective talks on the research-generated activity (language portraits). In these reflective talks the teachers exhibited good knowledge about their pupils' language repertoires. The teachers expressed surprise that some pupils filled in only one language in the portrait. Some pupils portrayed themselves as monolingual Swedish speakers, while others had Swedish as the only mother tongue but searched for additional languages. The teachers' reflections also comprised complex aspects of language envisioning, language identity, and multilingualism relating to their own experiences and emotional understanding. This use of language portraits may give more knowledge about identity constructions as well as they can show the complexity regarding multilingualism.