Multiple voices and perspectives: Comparing students’ language resources to actual language use across countries and contexts

It is generally agreed that embracing linguistic diversity in education is a key part of developing inclusive societies that respect diversity and difference (Council of Europe, 2008). However, scholars have expressed concern about the lack of a multilingual pedagogy in the classroom that includes and draws on all students’ existing language resources, whether home languages or additional ones (Cenoz & Gorter, 2017). This paper provides new knowledge by reporting on multiple datasets from an international project, combining a student perspective and an observed perspective on students’ language resources and the actual use of these resources in language lessons in three countries. The project aims to spotlight the role that teaching plays in developing students’ ability to communicate in more than one language. The classes in this project were strategically sampled to include language homogeneous and heterogeneous contexts in the three countries and includes eight French classes and eight English classes in each country (n=48), among students aged 13–15 (n=1440). This paper reports on findings from the first year of the project and includes two strands of data to identify the two most linguistically diverse English and Frech classrooms in the LANGUAGES project: (1) the Ungspråk student survey (Haukås et al., 2021), where the project obtained a quantitative and systematic overview of all students’ reported linguistic repertoires, and (2) a well-proven video observation design in the classroom (Brevik, 2019), where the project systematically recorded four consecutive lessons in each language class (n=192). Adopting a mixed-methods approach (Greene, 2007; Tashakkori et al., 2020), this study focuses on the results specifically relating to similarities and differences between students’ reported language repertoire and the use of languages in the classroom. The contribution relates to trends across the three contexts, showing the extent to which the most linguistically diverse classrooms capitalises on students’ diverse language resources.