Creating a plurilingual space through talk-in-interaction

Abstract

The creation of plurilingual spaces open to the diversity of languages and cultures present in the classrooms is encouraged by current European educational policies. Examining how participants co-construct such spaces in classroom interaction is essential to understand practiced language policy and the norms of language choices and alternations they rely to. In this chapter we will analyse a plurilingual activity in which the mother of a primary student tells an Arabian tale to the whole group of students. First, we will provide theoretical and methodological information to frame our analysis. Then we will focus on the sequential embeddedness of code selection and alternation and on the local meaning given to language choices by interactants. Our data reveals that while the mother is reluctant to use Arabic to tell the story, teachers and students accept this practice that, when enacted, results in a hybrid medium that resorts to the use of a variety of multimodal (gestures, tone of voice) and plurilingual resources (Arabic, Catalan and Spanish). Language selection as medium of interaction relies on different norms, as participants orient to their ‘preferred’ language, either as a personal choice or as a means to affiliate with the institutional norms of language use.