No abstract

Functional Multilingual Learning (FML) aims to leverage pupils' full language repertoire in a strategic and transversal way across the curriculum in order to enhance access to conceptual understanding and improve skills in the language of schooling (Sierens and Van Avermaet 2014). This linguistic-ethnographic study explores the pedagogical decisions of four teachers in a French-speaking primary school in Brussels, Belgium as they create 'meaningful multilingual tasks' for their linguistically diverse classrooms. Findings indicate that tasks serving symbolic and linguistic functions were the easiest for teachers to conceptualise, and that class-level learning objectives often took precedence over individual objectives. Multilingual scaffolding only occurred in classrooms already functioning extensively within a socio-constructivist paradigm and needed to be supported by a free classroom language policy to be the most effective. Whole-class tasks generated a new sense of linguistic capital but entailed a reframing of the notion of inclusion as they sometimes generated feelings of linguistic insecurity or resulted in limited participation.

This chapter adopts the lens of social cohesion to explore the practices and perspectives of primary school pupils in Brussels, Belgium, when they were allowed to use their home languages in the classroom for the first time. Drawing on ethnographic data, the authors document how the pupils and teachers negotiated and navigated new sociolinguistic norms, generating novel forms of inclusive practice that reached across difference. Nonetheless, the introduction of a multilingual approach also destabilised feelings of class cohesion as the perceived benefits were unevenly spread across the group. The data highlights the complex terrain of multilingual insults, which fuelled pupil scepticism about an open language policy in the playground. This suggests that plurilingual classroom cohesion is best supported by approaches which openly embrace the potentially disruptive elements of a multilingual community, thereby enabling meaningful social learning.