Multilingual authors ‘standing taller’ in arts-rich translanguaging spaces

Abstract

Viewed through the monolingual English-only lens characteristic of many Australian schools, plurilingual students are often positioned as being in deficit as language and literacy learners and struggle to find their way into a writer’s identity. The importance of creating a translanguaging space to support plurilingual learners is well established in the literature. In the current case study involving a class of Year 4 students from a Melbourne school who took part in a six-week arts-rich book making experience, we addressed a gap in the literature by making visible how elements of the ‘translanguaging space’ interact to support students to come to see themselves as resourceful multilingual writers. Using Activity Theory, we found that the elements that supported the development of students’ multilingual writers’ identities consisted of the creation of a translanguaging space, the use of arts experiences to lead language interactions, the explicit introduction of translanguaging in a multimodal arts-rich space, and opportunities to apply translanguaging as multilingual writers. We argue that the playful multimodal opportunities for meaning making facilitated by arts experiences can support students to build identities as multilingual writers by providing a variety of multimodal entry points to that identity.