Marianne Turner is an Associate Professor in Bilingual Education and Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL).

In her research, Marianne aims to explore how multilingualism in education can help all students learn and thrive. She focuses on building capacity for multilingual approaches by strategically leveraging students’ language knowledge and experiences in mainstream and bilingual settings, and by investigating the opportunities afforded by the inclusion of different languages. By exploring communicative practices and the drivers for these practices in different contexts, she has contributed to conceptual scholarship on translanguaging (a view of language that helps to investigate social inequity and student learning).

Her work has been published internationally in general education, languages, bilingual education, and TESOL journals. Her book Multilingualism as a Resource and a Goal: Using and Learning Languages in Mainstream Schools is available from Palgrave Macmillan, and her co-edited volume Multilingualism as Opportunity: An Integrated Perspective on English and Languages Education in Australia (co-edited with Bill Green) from Routledge. She is also the coordinator of the website Leveraging Languages for Learning.

Marianne began her career as a languages teacher (TESOL and Japanese), and this practical experience sparked a desire to work with teachers to help to make multilingual approaches feasible and sustainable on-the-ground in different settings. She has received research funding from the Department of Education and Catholic Education in Victoria to explore and understand the leveraging and learning of language in linguistically diverse educational settings. She has disseminated her research to teachers in different forums: as a Keynote Speaker for teachers’ associations, such as VicTESOL and MLTAV, and in the form of resources for the Department and Catholic Education.

She welcomes PhD students who would like to take a translanguaging approach to education settings. She will have capacity to take new students from mid-2026.