Moving across and beyond language(s): insights into the translanguaging practices in a multilingual classroom

Migration flows of the 21st century lead to increasingly multilingual societies and entail rapidly evolving language practices. In sociolinguistics and education, there has been a growing interest in exploring these language practices. While most translanguaging studies carried out at school attend to the flexible use of two or more named languages, they only marginally acknowledge the pupils’ semiotic repertoires. Meaning making, however, occurs across and beyond languages. In this presentation, I will provide insight into the meaning-making processes of a newly arrived pupil in Luxembourg. As the instruction of French, German and Luxembourgish accounts for more than 40% of all curricular time, it can be difficult for newcomers to access the curriculum if they have to learn two or even three languages. This raises the question if and to what extent pupils draw on their resources to engage with the curriculum. My doctoral research tackles the following question: In what ways, to what extent and for what purposes do four multilingual fourth graders of different backgrounds deploy and develop their semiotic repertoires in interaction with their peers and teachers? To address that question, I visited two primary schools in Luxembourg where I observed, took field notes and video-recorded the pupils’ interactions as well as their use of multilingual and multimodal resources. A selection of recordings was discussed with the focal pupils in stimulated recall interviews. Observations, video-recordings and interviews were transcribed and analyzed with thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke 2013), multimodal interaction analysis (Norris 2004) and sociocultural discourse analysis (Mercer 2004) respectively. This presentation is based on the classroom interactions in one of the investigated schools and foregrounds one of the main findings: the pupils aligned their translanguaging practices to those of their peers. They adapted their language use to the interlocutor, orchestrated their semiotic resources in the same way as their peers and reproduced the teacher’s translanguaging practice. The study highlights the interconnectedness of classroom and individual practices and draws attention to the importance of resources other than linguistic ones in meaning-making processes at school.