Home Languages in the English Classroom: Working with Multilingual Texts

‘Multicultural Resources in the English Classroom’ is a professional learning and research project designed to guide teachers and schools to work with a plurilingual approach. The forthcoming Victorian EAL curriculum refers to plurilingual pedagogy as offering significant potential for student learning. This is based on a growing body of research that the pedagogy enables student activation and co-construction of knowledge, the promotion of metalinguistic awareness and the affirmation of bi/multilingual identities. However, the approach can be challenging for teachers to implement, especially when their students are from different linguistic backgrounds. The project will address these challenges with a focus on the learning of English. Knowledge will be generated by synthesising the teaching of language and literacy, multilingual language practices and digital technologies. The approach used will be context-sensitive and delivered with the aim of scaling up to meet the needs of diverse urban and regional schools.