Pedagogies and Practices in Multilingual Classrooms: Singularities in Pluralities

Abstract

Bilingual classrooms most often have strict language arrangements about when and who should speak what language to whom. This practice responds to diglossic arrangements and models of bilingualism developed in the 20th century. However, in the 21st century, heteroglossic bilingual conceptualizations are needed in which the complex discursive practices of multilingual students, their translanguagings, are used in sense-making and in tending to the singularities in the pluralities that make up multilingual classrooms today. Examining the case of a network of U.S. secondary schools for newcomer immigrants, the International High Schools, this article looks at how students' plurilingual abilities are built through seven principles that support dynamic plurilingual practices in instruction-heterogeneity, collaboration, learner-centeredness, language and content integration, language use from students up, experiential learning, and local autonomy and responsibility. As a result, students become not only more knowledgeable and academically successful but also more confident users of academic English, better at translanguaging, and more plurilingual-proficient. The article presents translanguaging in education as the constant adaptation of linguistic resources in the service of meaning-making and in tending to the singularities in the pluralities that make up multilingual classrooms today.THE LITERATURE ON BILINGUALISM IN education-whether the education of language majorities or language minorities-has most often treated language groups as if they were static, homogeneous, and monolithic. Thus, models and pedagogies of second-language education and bilingual education developed in the 20th century generally treat groups as if they were monolingual and acquiring an additional language in a stepwise fashion. These programs group stu-

T(w)o and fro: using the L1 as a language teaching tool in the CLIL classroom

“…Given our increasingly multilingual classrooms, the link between various models of language immersion (Cenoz, Genesee and Gorter 2013;Gallagher and Leahy 2014;Hornberger and Skilton-Sylvester 2003) and other language learning contexts (Coyle, Hood and Marsh 2010;Dalton-Puffer 2011;García and Sylvan 2011) has been highlighted more and more frequently. Coyle, Hood and Marsh (2010: 159) state: 'It is now becoming clear that there is commonality of teaching approaches, strategies and tasks which emphasise scaffolded learning and in particular language as a learning tool across first, second, new and other language contexts ' [italics in original].…”

“…The term, originally coined in the Welsh bilingual education context as a pedagogic technique involving the deliberate alternation between languages for input and output purposes (Lewis, Jones and Baker 2012), has been expanded to include the 'multiple discourse practices in which bilinguals engage in order to make sense of their bilingual worlds' (García 2009: 45 [italics in original]). It includes codeswitching and translation but is not limited to these (García and Sylvan 2011). García (2009: 298) advocates an approach in bilingual settings which involves 'flexible multiplicity' practices which include: responsible codeswitching both ways; preview/view/review; translanguaging; co-languaging; and crosslinguistic contrastive analysis.…”

Language Use in a Multilingual Class: a Study of the Relation Between Bilingual Students’ Languages and Their Meaning-Making in Science

“…Like Dewey (1934Dewey ( /1980 and Wittgenstein (1953Wittgenstein ( /2012, García and Sylvan (2011) view language as an activity produced by social relations, rather than a simple system of structures giving us a set of skills. According to García (2009García ( , 2011, bilingual students' language use and learning have been examined from a linear or monolingual perspective.…”

“…According to García (2009García ( , 2011, bilingual students' language use and learning have been examined from a linear or monolingual perspective. Being bilingual has been regarded as having two different language repertoires, kept more or less apart (García 2009(García , 2011García and Sylvan 2011). The difference between bilingual and monolingual students has been reduced to the fact that bilinguals speak an additional language.…”

Children’s drawings as part of School Language Profiles: Heteroglossic realities in families and schools

“…Parents show interest in the linguistic repertoires of even very young children in terms of emotional development but also in terms of social value, (imagined) employability, and future perspectives. Schools as places of multilingual encounter have been the focus of a fair amount of recent studiesrelevant authors from the North American and Canadian context include Hornberger (2009), García and Sylvan (2011), and Dagenais et al (2009) and also in Europe, the topic is at the heart of several recent publications (i. e., Auger 2010;Ziegler 2013;Purkarthofer 2016).…”