This paper investigates a monolingual approach to the teaching of linguistic minority pupils in an English primary school at Key Stage Two (7-11 years old). The work is based on a longitudinal case study of one Russian-speaking migrant pupil and her schooled experience. The analysis and discussion explicate the prohibition of the first or home language (Russian) in the school, and reveal how denying a seven-year-old migrant child permission to use her L1 is detrimental to her learning experience and her well-being. The focal data derive from participant-observation fieldnotes, visual artefacts and interviews with the child, her mother, and a class teacher over a 7-month period. Through an analysis of the participants' stancetaking, we show how the pupil's voice is inaudible in her struggle against a monolingual attitude towards her bilingualism and multicompetence. Our contribution therefore builds on work in critical migrant language education, to identify the importance of enabling the presence of the L1 in learning for migrant pupils.

This paper explores the use of creative techniques in a study of the experiences of Russian-speaking linguistic-minority migrant children in English state-funded primary schools at Key Stage Two (7-11 years old). The methodology is based on an interpretative paradigm using a qualitative research approach: a longitudinal multiple-case study with four embedded cases (each case representing one pupil).Focusing on specific examples from the research, the paper considers the benefits of using creative techniques within interviews to generate unique data with linguistic-minority pupils, the constraints of the techniques, and possible solutions for these. The cyclic (i.e. rounds of repeated interviews) research design, which focused on the processes of change, called for systematic alternation of the techniques. I demonstrate the unique integration of board games (the 'interview-through-game') and the 'filling-in exercise' in the interviews. This enabled a continuous adjustment of the techniques by me and by the children, retaining both the systematicity and flexibility (or constraint and emergence) of the creative techniques' development and application. This design helped to reveal the experiences/issues of the participating children, which would otherwise be challenging to explore using other methods.

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