Search

Contemporary phenomena, such as increasing migration and globalization, has brought into contact various languages and cultures rendering classrooms highly heterogeneous. But how do children perceive their plurilingualism? In this context, the present research seeks to explore refugee children’s linguistic repertoires through qualitative research methods, interviews, and creative, visual methods, language portraits. The research participants were seven refugee students aged from 7 to 12 residing in a camp of Northern Greece. The study shed light on students’ plurilingual repertoires corroborating the effectiveness of visual methodologies to unveil individuals’ plurilingualism and highlighting their need to move across separately named languages depending on a given socio-cultural context. Simultaneously, the analysis of the language portraits indicated patterns of language placement according to personal attachment and language knowledge. The study aspires to contribute to pertinent research by providing insights and suggestions both for policymakers to implement a plurilingual and intercultural type of education and educators to transform the invisibility of student plurilingualism into an obvious advantage for the whole class aiming at a more inclusive educational and social basis for all children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increasing linguistic and cultural diversity in contemporary societies inevitably affects the field of education by challenging teachers to cope with the coexistence of different languages in the classroom. The present research was intended to investigate migrant children's attitudes towards languages through language portraits in order to help educators obtain insights into student multilingual repertoires and experiences. To this end, by adopting a qualitative approach, the study used linguistic portraits and semi-structured interviews to collect the data. The participants of the study were 10 primary school children whose ages ranged from 8 to 12 with a migrant background who have been living in Greece, particularly on the island of Crete. Using the method of content analysis, the findings of the study indicated that migrant children made specific color choices based on flags, emotions, and world experience, and they put colors on parts of the body according to their functions, which signified students' multilingual identities and experiences. Moreover, the findings highlighted multilingual students' need to negotiate their multiple linguistic repertoires, make choices between the languages, prioritize them, rank them, or give priority to the second language, Greek, without, however, abandoning their first languages. The present study aspires to contribute to the relevant research and draws implications for the implementation of multilingual education and culturally sustaining pedagogies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]