Validating young learners’ plurilingual repertoires as legitimate linguistic and cultural resources in the EFL classroom

Abstract

Abstract In the last decades, the applied linguistics literature has increasingly called for more classroom-based research focusing on language teaching approaches that embrace students’ plurilingual repertoires as valuable linguistic and cultural resources for learning and affirm learners’ plurilingual identities as legitimate and appropriate in the classroom context. This paper discusses research findings of an empirical investigation that responded to this call. The study examined the impact of the use of plurilingual tasks in the English as foreign language (EFL) classroom on language learning processes and learners’ identity construction. Five case studies were conducted in four primary schools and one secondary school in Germany. Research data were collected from multiple sources such as field notes, video recording of school lessons, in-depth interviews with teachers, teachers’ reflective journals, anonymous questionnaires, and focus group interviews with learners. The research findings have shown that the use of plurilingual tasks in the EFL classroom created enhanced opportunities for the learners (a) to share aspects of their identities that were previously ignored in the school context (b) to use their diverse language abilities as resources in the language learning process and (c) to be actively involved in explicit reflective thinking about language and culture.