6. ‘我的...futuro?': Multilingual Practices Shaping Classroom Itercation in Italian Mainstream Education

Responding Inclusively to Linguistic Diversity in the Classroom

“…Enriching the schoolscape with all the languages and varieties that students bring into the classroom has several advantages: first, it creates spaces for all language resources to be made visible and meaningful in class (Boeckmann et al, 2011), thus validating their use even when they are not the languages of schooling (Carbonara & Scibetta, 2020;Hesson et al, 2014). This, in turn, can encourage students to build a positive view of linguistic diversity, while also unveiling and challenging existing language hierarchies and ideologies (Laihonen & Szabó, 2017).…”

“…The second part was dedicated to the schoolscape: after unpacking its concept, the teachers were asked to take a tour of their own school and document the language-related signs inside their classrooms, in the foyer, in the teacher's room, as well as in bathrooms and corridors. To do so, they had to work in small teams of two or three and use their mobile phones to capture what they believed were salient language-related signs in the school environment (see for instance The visual documents were then shared with the whole team and discussed to identify: the authors of the photographed signs, the function attached to them (symbolic, informative or pedagogic; see Carbonara & Scibetta, 2020), the language(s) displayed on the signs and those that were absent, and the message each sign communicated with regard to the relationship between the languages present and absent in it.…”

“…Interestingly, the work that the team did around the schoolscape since the second COMPASS workshop seems to have been inspired by the same social-emotional and social-cultural goals detected above (Sierens & van Avermaet, 2014), i.e., fostering positive attitudes towards all languages, encouraging positive identity construction, and making all students more receptive to linguistic diversity. In this sense, the use that the team made of the schoolscape was mostly symbolic (Carbonara & Scibetta, 2020), i.e., aimed at signaling the school's openness to all languages. While recognizing this as a fundamental step, some of the participating teachers felt that more time and support were needed for a more profound change to happen at the level of pedagogy and programming, in other words for the schoolscape to become a space where disciplinary content is displayed multilingually to also enhance and support the learning process (Menken et al, 2018).…”

“…-Teachers learn about the concept of translanguaging (García, 2009) and explore authentic school experiences in which a classroom translanguaging approach is adopted. -Teachers develop an awareness of how a translanguaging approach can inform teaching practice by collaboratively analysing existing translanguaging-based didactic units (Carbonara & Scibetta, 2020) and by discussing how they would adapt those units to their own classroom setups and needs. -Teachers and researchers engage in a process of reflection and exchange on their attitudes towards linguistic diversity, classroom practices and pedagogical decisions.…”

Interaction in the Multilingual Classroom

“…Ethnographic multilingual classroom interaction studies reveal a range of findings: teachers exercise considerable agency in enacting different practiced language policies, i.e. in the use of different languages (Asker and Martin-Jones 2013;Rose ´n and Bagga-Gupta 2015;Toth 2017Toth , 2018 and students' heritage languages (HLs) can be leveraged without their teacher knowing them (Pacheco et al 2015;Ebe 2016;Woodley 2016;Pacheco 2018;Carbonara and Scibetta 2021). Often, however, a bilingual (rather than multilingual) policy of the use of two shared languages is enacted in whole-class interaction, whereas languages that are not shared are relegated to group or dyadic translanguaging spaces (Gynne 2019;Brevik and Rindal 2020;Rodrick Beiler 2020;Ka ¨llkvist et al 2022); teacher translanguaging patterns tend to be characterized by bilingual translation practices, whereas students translanguage more dynamically (Wei 2015;Rosiers 2018).…”