Mediating multilingual children's language resources

Abstract

The everyday reality of children's multilingualism is a significant resource for expanding students’ perspectives on the world, but many questions remain regarding the negotiation of these resources in mainstream classrooms. Drawing on research from a long-term Canadian study of multiliterate pedagogies, this paper explores mediation of home language use in mainstream classrooms, the functions it performs in students’ texts and the contribution of home language to students’ academic development. Three very different student texts and the contexts for their production are used to illustrate (a) differences between the mediational properties of multilingual models and talk about the models; (b) the contribution of monolingual educators’ to the students’ efforts; (c) the transformation of home literacies into academic practices and (d) students’ independent development of mediational tools. We argue more attention must be paid to pedagogic practices that capitalize on children's multilingual capacities if educators are to better support these students’ growth as meaning-makers.