Jeg Gotta Like Spille Fortnite, Men I Never Win the Game: Implementing Multilingual Pedagogies in a Norwegian Primary School

Abstract

Teachers in Norway have been increasingly faced with the challenge of adapting their instruction methods to address the needs of minority-language students. The current body of research on the issue seems to indicate that multilingual practices are being introduced in Norwegian classrooms. However, they often rely on majority languages, such as English and Norwegian. Some teachers have been found to employ minority languages to support learners’ English writing in drafts. As a result, minority languages in Norwegian schools tend to be regarded as less valuable than Norwegian and English. However, more recent projects are being implemented in Norwegian schools to help teachers alter their ideologies of minority languages. This article adds to this body of research by presenting two teachers’ work with multilingual pedagogies, involving the active use of minority languages alongside Norwegian and English in student texts. The data were collected from: teacher reports, student materials, and mentorship meetings. The findings indicate that the teachers successfully implemented multilingual pedagogies by using language portraits, parallel translanguaging in multilingual posters and multimodal dictionaries, and complementary translanguaging in multilingual poetry. These multilingual practices enabled the students to showcase their linguistic identities and multilingual literacy practices. The implementation of multilingual pedagogies benefited from the long-term availability of scholarly input and guidance for teachers and the opportunity to share experiences in a professional network.