Honouring multilingual repertoires and identities: Our languages, our stories

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Lytra, Vally; Tharoo, Soukeina; Banfi, Emanuela; Chengyan, Zhan; Costa, Carla; Eleftheriou-Kaparti, Maria; Meyer, Zoe and Schmid-Ilina, Polina. 2020. Honouring multilingual repertoires and identities: Our languages, our stories. EAL Journal, Autumn, pp. 18-21. [Article]

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Abstract or Description

International schools are important sites of multilingualism. They pride themselves on educating a linguistically and culturally diverse student population and on fostering intercultural understanding through an appreciation of students’ identities and cultures as well as those of the wider community. While students’ cultures and heritages take centre stage in planned whole-school events, such as International Day, and in school-sponsored cultural and religious celebrations, we have observed that their rich language and cultural repertoires and experiences tend to be less visible and audible as resources for learning in everyday school life. Our “Home Language Collaborative Project” sought to problematise this inherent contradiction by moving beyond a mere acknowledgement of multilingualism to exploring how students can deploy their multilingual repertoires and identities in the home language classroom and experience their home language learning from a “language-as-a-resource” perspective (Ruiz 1984).

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Article