(Dis)engaging in Language and Sciences Lessons: How do Primary School Students in Multilingual Luxembourg Communicate With Each Other?

As the country with the highest percentage of immigration in Europe, Luxembourg has a very diverse school population. This doctoral project is part of the research project ‘CALIDIE’ that investigates how multilingualism can be capitalized on. In Luxembourg, the teaching of Luxembourgish, German and French accounts for 40.5% of all curricular time. Assessment studies have shown that students of Portuguese, French and Slavic heritage underperform compared to Luxembourgish and German-speaking students in primary schools (MENJE, 2017). While studies in preschool, Year 1 and Year 2 classes show that some teachers begin to draw on children’s semiotic repertoires (Kirsch 2017), the present project targets Years 4 and 5. The focus lies on translanguaging practices. Translanguaging is the enactment of a person’s linguistic and non-linguistic resources. Research in bilingual and trilingual school contexts has shown that translanguaging can promote knowledge, understanding and academic success (García & Sylvan 2011). To help students learn, teachers need to encourage students to make use of their resources in a strategic and responsible way, whatever the status of the languages (García, Johnson & Seltzer 2017). In this paper, I examine the extent to which a fourth-grader of Slovenian language background deploys (or does not deploy) his linguistic repertoire while interacting with peers. Data are drawn from eighteen days of observation and video-recordings of the students’ language use in German, French and Science lessons from September 2017 to July 2018 in a state school in Eastern Luxembourg. The thematic analysis focuses on classroom interactions among students; the learning activities; the languages; and the purposes of their (in)flexible language use. Preliminary results show that peer interactions and child-led learning activities are scarce; the students communicate in the language of instruction; and translanguaging is used to (help) participate. The findings are tentative because data collection is on-going.