Ruth Fielding

Students' Use of Their Plurilingual Resources in Australian Schools.

Abstract Research involving the plurilingualism of young people has begun to focus upon how we must re-conceptualise language learning to acknowledge the language resources of children with plurilingual experiences. This is particularly important in countries like Australia with a traditionally monolingual mindset embedded in policy, education, and the views of much of the community. Growing arguments posit that it is more important to focus on the resourceful use of language than attempts to measure skill, competence, or fluency in one language. In this paper, the movement between languages of children with a range of linguistic repertoires is explored in the Australian context. Data are taken from student and teacher interviews and focus groups with parents across five different primary schools, each with a bilingual education programme. The paper argues that bilingual programmes aimed at monolingual background students can have benefits for more than one kind of plurilingual student. It was found that plurilingual children drew on their home language(s) as a resource in school contexts where other languages were used, showed an increased enjoyment of learning, and developed learning strategies which built on their plurilingual experiences. Additionally, the data showed how teachers in these contexts worked towards expanding their own linguistic repertoires.

The Innovation and Challenge of a Content and Language Integrated Learning Approach to CFL in One Australian Primary School

This chapter offers an alternative lens through which to examine the teaching of Chinese language and culture in an Australian school. At this particular primary school in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, three subjects (Music, Science, Human Society and Its Environment) are taught through Chinese. Offering a languages program within a Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) program is relatively new in Australian schooling, thus the researchers were interested in examining implementation and related issues. In this chapter the CLIL teacher’s means of planning, designing, and implementing her teaching of Chinese is explored through her beliefs about teaching as well as her beliefs about languages. Examining the Chinese CLIL primary school model through teachers’ beliefs is not a common way of understanding how languages are taught. This research has found that at the core of the teacher’s core beliefs is an assumption that humans can cope with more than one language at a time, and that high expectations, from parents and teachers, should surround such programs. A CLIL languages program is a pedagogically sound program offering that can make a difference to students’ learning outcomes, with advantages over traditional Chinese-as-a-Foreign-Language practice where language content may not be linked to the child’s learning in other curriculum areas. The research is framed and analysed through the 4Cs (content, communication, cognition, culture) lens, allowing a detailed analysis of what language and culture are taught, who participates and how they participate, as well as how the teacher makes decisions and plans.

An Interactive, Co-constructed Approach to the Development of Intercultural Understanding in Pre-service Language Teachers

In our responsibilities for language teacher education, we have critiqued in recent years the sometimes limited success of intercultural learning activities, and become dissatisfied that the intercultural concept has been diminished to static and essentialized comparisons of culture, in some language classrooms. This has led us to explore an experiential collaborative approach to the development of intercultural understandings in pre-service language teachers, where an intercultural dynamic can be seen operating in co-construction between themselves and their peers. The researchers introduced two groups of pre-service language teachers to discourse analysis, and recognition of classroom discourse patterns, such as Initiation–Response–Evaluation. The pre-service teachers, in small groups, discussed a number of transcripts from school language classrooms that were endeavouring to ‘be intercultural’. The chapter reports the unexpected additional learning that emerged from this task. The discussion offered the pre-service teachers an opportunity to critically examine cultural assumptions, both in the classroom lesson transcripts, and among themselves. Within their small group interactions, the pre-service teachers constructed a zone where they could voice diverse perspectives, notice, explore and respect the complexity of the interaction. Structured social interaction enables some of them to transform their thinking, and take away the beginning of their own personal and dynamic understanding. It appears to represent a useful task to support critical reflection, in requiring pre-service teachers to move beyond the acquisition of knowledge about ‘intercultural’, into active questioning of their perspectives, complexity, and assumptions.

Children’s Language Use

The language we use enables us to show who we are. It can tell others about our ideals, our beliefs and can show elements of our personalities. Chapter 2 explored the literature and established that language use is a fundamental element of our identities. In this chapter the children’s stories about their own language use are presented from their interviews and journal extracts and these are supported by the questionnaire data from the whole class of students. These stories show the individual relationships these children have with multiple languages and how these form part of who they are. Through exploring the students’ stories emerging from the research question “What is the nature of students’ language use in the home?” we gain insight into the language use of these children beyond the bilingual program and begin to explore their identification with bilingualism.

Context, Data Collection and Analysis

In this chapter the context of the study is explained, in order to set the scene for the children’s stories. The methods of data collection are explained and justified. The children are all aged between 10 and 12 and are in the same class in the last 2 years of primary school. They are all enrolled in a bilingual program within the school. A questionnaire, interviews, journal-keeping and classroom observation provided detailed pictures of the children’s experiences of language. This is explained in detail in this chapter.

The Bilingual School Program’s Contribution to Bilingual Identity Development

In this chapter the children’s identity development is explored through the programmatic contribution to that process. The teachers’ views are explored and the observational back-up to that data are explored for their links to the children’s development of bilingual identity.

Attitudes to Language

In order to further understand the children’s attachment and connection to their languages, it is important to understand their attitudes to language. In this chapter, the children’s stories in relation to what they think about and feel about each of their languages are presented, and this is then followed by associated data from the whole class of students.

Attitudes to Bilingualism

In addition to talking specifically about their language use and their attitudes towards their languages, the children also spoke specifically about their feelings about being bilingual and their feelings of connection to the associated cultures linked to the languages in their lives. In this chapter the children’s experiences of being bilingual and feeling bilingual are portrayed through their stories.

Bilingual Identity: Being and Becoming Bilingual

Exploring issues of identity can be extremely complex, and necessitate engagement with a wide range of different fields that have explored the notion of identity in different ways. Exploring prior work is needed in order to ascertain one’s own standpoint about what identity is, how it might be measured or captured, and why we might want to understand it in more depth. In this chapter I will clarify the position on identity and bilingualism that is being operationalized in this study. I will describe the framework for the study: The Bilingual Identity Negotiation Framework.

Conclusions and Implications for Educating Multilingual Children in Today’s World

A number of implications can be drawn from this study of young bilingual children and their development of identity associated with their languages and cultures. The children’s stories show that the children interpret their experiences in various ways, some of which align with prior research and some of which challenge current thinking and policy approaches. This chapter outlines the themes emerging from the case study as a whole and the implications for the education of multilingual children today.