Linguistic Repertoires: Teachers and Students Explore Their Everyday Language Worlds

Abstract

Australian English curriculum documents—like many Western English curriculum documents—acknowledge the linguistic and cultural diversity of student populations and ask teachers to recognize and build upon the skills students display in their homes and wider community. A crowded curriculum and a climate of high-stakes testing can make it challenging to find ways to explore students’ “repertoires of linguistic practice” (Gumperz, 1972; Gutiérrez & Rogoff, 2003) and build on them in authentic ways. This article shares how five Australian teachers and their students investigated how and in what ways they used language every day. These 10–13-year-old students who spoke 23 languages and dialects in addition to English explored their everyday multilingual, multimodal worlds as resources for thinking and acting in their study of English language arts. This article shares how teachers in three classrooms built knowledge of students (Rymes, 2010) and with students by normalizing multilingualism and creating spaces for students and themselves to reflect on and value everyday practices while enhancing linguistic repertoires.