Browsing by Author "Foster, Nell"

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    Multilingual tasks as a springboard for transversal practice: Teachers’ decisions and dilemmas in a functional multilingual learning approach
    (Taylor and Francis Group, 2023) Foster, Nell; Auger, Nathalie; Van Avermaet, Piet
    Functional Multilingual Learning (FML) aims to leverage pupils’ full language repertoire in a strategic and transversal way across the curriculum in order to enhance access to conceptual understanding and improve skills in the language of schooling. This linguistic-ethnographic study explores the pedagogical decisions of four teachers in a French–speaking primary school in Brussels, Belgium as they create ‘meaningful multilingual tasks’ for their linguistically diverse classrooms. Findings indicate that tasks serving symbolic and linguistic functions were the easiest for teachers to conceptualise, and that class-level learning objectives often took precedence over individual objectives. Multilingual scaffolding only occurred in classrooms already functioning extensively within a socio-constructivist paradigm and needed to be supported by a free classroom language policy to be the most effective.
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    �We shouldn�t stay in our little bubble� we need to go and swim a bit in other bubbles� an exploration of the theoretical, pedagogical and social dimensions of functional multilingual learning in a Brussels primary school.
    (University of the Western Cape, 2023) Foster, Nell; Bock, Zannie; Tyler, Robyn
    Background: I begin this thesis by completing the original quotation that lends itself to the title. It came from Myriam (a pseudonym), a ten-year-old girl born in Brussels to Ethiopian parents. She used a mix of French, Amharic and Tigrinya with her parents and three siblings at home, although her preferred and strongest language was French, the language she used everyday at school. Her statement was in response to my question about whether it was more important for her to share her languages with her peers or to learn and find out about theirs; her answer isemblematic of many of the questions I seek to address in this research.