Plurilingual Pedagogical Practices

subheader deeperdive | Action-oriented Approach|Plurilingualism|Tech-mediated

Plurilingual pedagogies can take various forms, with the ultimate focus of tapping into language learners’ repertoires, plurilingual and pluricultural identities, and competence. To create action-oriented language tasks for our language class tasks, it is important to think about how we can engage learners in the target language while advancing their entire repertoire of languages and cultures. First, we invite you to watch this introductory video about the overall goal of plurilingual pedagogies. While there are several pedagogical moves that teachers can implement, we present five fundamental ones in the form of short video tutorials that have been used in empirical research with a high degree of success. We suggest you watch these short videos and reflect on the questions below.

  1. Cross-linguistic analysis
  2. Cross-cultural comparisons
  3. Translanguaging
  4. Translation as mediation
  5. Pluriliteracies 

Reflection questions 💭❓

Think about some language tasks you already use in class. How can you adapt them to add one or more of the plurilingual practices above?

When using action-oriented plurilingual tasks, learners often create artefacts that include plurilingual pedagogies either in the process of completing the tasks (e.g., doing research in one language and mediating the concept to another language – translation as mediation) or in the product itself (e.g., a podcast where they interview people using two or more languages – translanguaging – about similarities and differences between two cultures – cross-cultural comparisons). Can you envision one artifact your learners can create and how you would include plurilingual pedagogies?

If you’d like to read more about each practice above, read the short description in this guide, from pages 13 to 17.

Now that you have an idea of plurilingual pedagogies, you can decide to do a deeper dive into action-oriented tasks and explore how plurilingual pedagogies can be used by going to Action-oriented Plurilingual Tasks; alternatively, if you want to know more about the Action-oriented Approach you can check out the Introduction to Action-oriented Approach, Action-oriented Approach in Practice, or Action-oriented Approach Scenarios.

AALE Toolkit Home | Action-oriented Approach | Plurilingualism | Tech-mediated | AALE Infosheets Exploration