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Hi all,

This is my quick contribution to the interesting discussion on superdiversity and translanguaging:

Question 1: What are some of the challenges and opportunities that contemporary diversity might present to teachers and curriculum planners working in the field of English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL)?

For me, the biggest challenge is to contest monolingual approaches to language teaching (i.e. one language only in the classroom) in developing pedagogies that are more in line with current sociolinguistic realities and the realities of speakers’ repertoires. It does not seem to make sense anymore (if it ever did) to teach students monolingually how to be (more) multilingual.

Question 2: English might be just one of many languages which ESOL students encounter day-to-day. They may well be developing their competence in a range of varieties of English as part of a multilingual repertoire, and may be translanguaging as a matter of course. How might ESOL teachers and their students address this multilingual reality in their classrooms?

I think that any pedagogical proposal that takes students beyond the classroom in contexts of superdiversity will necessarily lead them to encounter languages besides English as they go about solving learning tasks. I believe teachers need to think systematically about how different languages (and different modalities) might support the learning of English in teaching process connected to local realities. While a student project might end in a final production in English, the process could easily include linguistically diverse inputs and outputs. For example, students might be asked to interview local residents, who they might share other languages with, or to photograph the linguistic landscape of their area, and then report back on their findings in English, in some format.

I find the FREPA descriptors useful for expanding my view of the knowledge, skills and attitudes multilingual students bring with them, and of the repertoire teachers can help them to develop: http://carap.ecml.at/Accueil/tabid/3577/language/en-GB/Default.aspx

All the best, I look forward to reading other ideas on this.

Emilee




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