In this article, we explore how literacies and language variation can support teachers’ navigation of linguistic diversity in the English classroom. We discuss how to extend students’ language knowledge, whatever that may be. We move away from considering home language practices only as a scaffold for standardised English language at school, because this means these practices are not relevant to monolingual (in English) students nor students who have grown up speaking English as well as another home language. Our aim is to do justice to the learning potential related to linguistic diversity. We propose that the embedding of language variation in literacies and multimodality, digital multimodal composing in particular, is a way to address the intrinsic value of developing students’ linguistic repertoire as a whole.
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