Multilingual Pedagogies in Practice : Life and Learning in a Diverse Australian Secondary School

This book presents an in-depth ethnographic case study of a multilingual and multicultural Australian secondary school, focussing on young women from circumstances of precarity and displacement, including refugees, migrants and international students.

Using evidence from multiple data collection phases spanning three years, the author illustrates these students’ multilingual practices in three domains: their social lives, their learning and their practice of translanguaging. The discussion is built around extensive examples of practice, highlighting the purposeful, playful and private characteristics of translanguaging, and making connections to cognitive, pedagogical and social dimensions of multilingual practices. The book also illustrates a continuum of ways in which teachers respond to students’ multilingual practices, and suggests factors which may shape these responses. Multilingual pedagogies that have been successfully implemented in secondary classrooms are described, in order to demonstrate how teachers with different levels of confidence and experience might adopt and adapt multilingual teaching approaches.

The research emphasizes the agentive power of students and teachers in challenging a monolingual and colonial status quo and shaping equitable and effective education for multilingual students.