Acceso usuarios
Sophie Liggins
This paper reports on a 15-week project which aimed to raise the profile of Heritage Languages (HL) in a mainstream secondary setting in London. It was carried out with 11 HL speakers of various language backgrounds. The project provided the students with a series of ‘linguistic outlets’ (thishe term ‘has been chosen by the author to highlight the restrictions imposed on students’ multilingual repertoires by the monolingual mindset dominant in schools) which encouraged engagement with the HL in a mainstream setting. The paper draws from interactional data recorded during the sessions to examine what happens when students are encouraged to use their full linguistic repertoires, with a specific focus on the students’ perceptions of being plurilingual. The findings are explored with a view to develop guidelines for practice and policy when planning for plurilingual pedagogies in mainstream secondary education and to uncover potential facilitative and preventative factors when thinking about the reception of such pedagogies by the students. The findings of the research highlight how a modification of linguistic priorities in a mainstream setting has the potential to dislocate language categories and literacies for broader understandings to take place.
