The effects of multilingual pedagogies on language awareness: A longitudinal analysis of students’ language portraits

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to investigate the use of language portraits as a tool for longitudinally investigating the changes in children's language awareness within a project that combines and implements translanguaging pedagogy and pluralistic approaches in an Italian primary and middle school (from Grade 1 to 8) with a high percentage of immigrant students. The language portraits produced by 71 children (between 9 and 12 years old) before and after their exposure to multilingual pedagogies were analysed using NVivo R1 in order to identify recurring patterns and differences. After engaging in multilingual activities, the emergent bilingual children whose first language portraits did not include their home languages decided to represent them. The majority of the children in the second language portrait also represent the languages spoken by their peers, indicating the recognition of the collective linguistic repertoire, as a result of the implementation of multilingual pedagogies.