The UK is a wonderfully diverse society. Around 19 per cent of pupils in our schools come from a multilingual heritage, and between them, they speak more than 300 different non-English languages.
Research suggests that teachers can learn from this linguistic diversity - and use that learning to shape how they teach.
Although English is the main language of teaching in schools in England, we must assume there is no hierarchy in languages.
It’s important to recognise that, even among English speakers, there is variety: English varies from place to place, and the English we use and learn in school - the language of books and texts, of subjects and curricula - is not the same as the language we speak elsewhere.
Texts are constructed according to the conventions of their discipline. We do not speak like a biology textbook or use the language of fiction to tell our friends what we did at the weekend.
According to researcher Jim Cummins, we can understand these differences in terms of the distinction between the social language of general communication - basic common interpersonal skills (BICS) and cognitive academic language proficiency (CALP).
In schools, we should be helping all students to develop CALP, but we should also be creating opportunities for multilingual children to draw on all their languages to enhance their learning across the curriculum.
Studies have shown that when multilingual children are educated in all of their languages, there are detectable and meaningful advantages for all students within that community. For example, we may find that children have developed ideas, knowledge and learning in their home language that they do not yet have the ability to express in English. Providing ways for them to contribute and contextualise that learning adds richness to any classroom.
We also know that students feel valued when their linguistic background and their cultural heritage are acknowledged and actively promoted by their teachers.
So, how do we create opportunities for this to happen?
Allowing students to use and create dual-language texts, even when the teacher does not know the home language of the pupils, can help.
Similarly, encouraging students to talk about new vocabulary in a shared story or text in their first language has been shown to support vocabulary learning in both first and second languages.
This is a practice that can easily be accommodated into teaching: through shared story reading and discussing target words from the text, or by using illustrations and first-language translations of key vocabulary crucial to understanding.
Encouraging students to continue to learn in their first language is important. Even when languages are structurally quite different (for example between Mandarin Chinese and English), research suggests that first-language reading attainment plays a significant role during the process of learning to read in a second language.
There are many other opportunities for teachers to take this work further, but the suggestions above provide a starting point, and give a taste of what is possible.
We know there is value in encouraging students’ first languages in our classrooms. What we need now is more collaborative research, to help teachers put this into practice.
Together, schools and researchers can begin to find out more about what is powerful, when, for whom and in what ways.
If we can create an extensive toolkit of evidence for individual practitioners to draw on, we can give all teachers the power to truly make the most of the cultural and linguistic diversity of their classrooms.
With thanks to Dr Hamish Chalmers, lecturer in applied linguistics in the department of education at the University of Oxford, for his contributions and advice.
Megan Dixon is a doctoral student and associate lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University
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