Dr. Elena Pirovano
The University of Melbourne
As a teacher of Italian and a teacher educator, I have the privilege to work with students from many different cultural and linguistic backgrounds. This is an aspect of my job that continues to surprise and fascinate me as my initial experience as a teacher in the ‘90s was in a (then) very homogeneous linguistic context, in primary schools in my home country, Italy.
When I started teaching Italian in primary schools in Australia, and more recently at university, I discovered a more complex context where often students bring to the classroom, or the university lessons, multiple languages and experiences as language users and language learners. This complexity pushed me to reflect on my own beliefs around multilingualism and language learning.
Multilingualism as a resource framework
In the search to affirm my students’ linguistic resources, I embraced the notion of language as a resource in Ruiz’s (1984) seminal work on language policy. The notion of language-as-resource suggests that any language is valuable and a “source of expertise” (Ruiz, 1984, p. 28). De Jong et al. (2019) pushed this orientation of multilingualism as a resource into education, claiming that the school system cannot “ask multilingual students to leave their multilingual realities at the school door” (p. 109). Their framework positions multilingual students as capable and competent language users and suggests that teachers and educators “recognize and build on what students already know” (de Jong et al., 2019, p. 109).
Language portraits and linguistic repertoire
Starting from my students has always been my teaching philosophy, but I’m now more aware of the importance of further investigating their linguistic and cultural identities. I have integrated the use of language portraits in my teaching practice to open broad conversations around languages, linguistic practices, lived experiences with learning, using, speaking, or simply being exposed to multiple languages.
A language portrait is a multimodal tool to explore linguistic repertoires using a body silhouette on which the students position their languages using colours. Below are some examples from my doctoral research:
The multimodality of a language portrait is represented by the use of colours, written words, oral presentation and location on the body, modalities that enable deeper reflection on the meaning and emotional relationship with different languages, dialects, varieties and registers. When I invite my students to create their own portrait, I provide them with broad questions to guide them. For example, I avoid focusing only on the language that they speak and encourage to think about any language that they have encountered. They tend to start with the language(s) they use at home or in the community, and languages they have studied in formal settings (school or university). However, guided by the questions, they expand their thinking to languages they have learnt and lost, languages they desire, languages they do not speak but represent an aspect of who they are.
Why is this important?
My students of Italian enjoy sharing their portraits in the class and talking about their experiences with languages. They always appreciate the creative task and the use of colours and, at the same time, they take time to reflect on their languages. This generates, first of all, connections. Students feel validated in their linguistic practices by similar experiences of other students, and they feel empowered to talk about their experiences. It also provides teaching opportunities, such as comparing Italian and the languages spoken by the students eliciting metalinguistic reflections. Finally, it creates a space for leveraging linguistic repertoire in teaching practices through collaborative learning tasks (something I investigated in my PhD research).
Exploring linguistic repertoire has become routine in my teaching practice. I will continue to explore my students’ language resources and to make their multilingualism count in their learning experiences.
References
de Jong, E., Yilmaz, T., & Marichal, N. (2019). A multilingualism-as-a-resource orientation in dual language education. Theory Into Practice, 58(2), 107-120.
Ruiz, R. (1984). Orientations in language planning. NABE Journal, 8, 15-34. https://doi.org/10.1080/08855072.1984.10668464
If you want to know more about language portraits, you could start from:
Busch, B. (2016). Biographical approaches to research in multilingual settings: Exploring linguistic repertoires. In M. Martin-Jones & D. Martin, Researching multilingualism (pp. 46-59). Routledge.
See also this link for more language portrait examples.