Page 62 - Languages Victoria December 2019

Languages Victoria
and languages learning as well as their own personal experience as learners and speakers of more than one language (see Truckenbrodt and Slaughter, 2016).
‘The EAL curriculum also relates to the development of EAL students’ plurilingual awareness. A student who develops plurilingual awareness is able to integrate their knowledge of multiple languages in a way that enriches their communication and learning in all languages.’ (VCAA, p. 4).
The EAL curriculum suggests that teachers support the introduction of plurilingual pedagogies, meaning pedagogies that encourage students to access and use all their languages and literacy skills learnt through the other languages that they may know or use in everyday life. The additional languages class is already a plurilingual space where English and the additional language coexist and support each other in the learning process. Could the additional languages class be the plurilingual space where the home languages of students also have a place?
What are plurilingual pedagogies and how can they be incorporated in an additional languages program?
Emergent bilingual students bring to the classroom experience their knowledge of home languages that may not be shared between other students and/or the teacher. Research, mainly in EAL contexts (for example Cummins, 2006; García and Li, 2014), suggests that allowing these students to access their home language has a positive impact on their English proficiency. In fact, after the initial immersion in the language that allows students to become fluent in everyday conversations with peers, they need specific support to develop a more academic form of English language used in school such as technical language of different disciplines, or written styles and registers. Research suggests that allowing them to ‘make sense’ through their home language and to build on that knowledge enhances their languages learning experience.
Plurilingual strategies are all the strategies that allow students to refer to their home language. Some of these strategies are: translanguaging (see Lin, 2013 for some examples), such as the use of different languages, shuffling from one language to the other in order to make sense of the learning task; explicit comparisons (fig. 3) between languages such as vocabulary or language structure comparisons, as well as comparison of cultural aspects; and translation (see Wilson and González Davies, 2017 for examples) in other learning contexts, which is the use of translation as a pedagogical tool to reflect on vocabulary, syntax, or even cultural elements
Page 62 Volume 23 Number 2