In classrooms around the world, including in Australia, linguistic diversity is increasingly common. Many children arrive at school with rich repertoires of languages, dialects, stories, and cultural knowledge. At the same time, the books we offer them can sometimes tell a more limited story about language, learning, and belonging.

In applied linguistics, multilingualism has become an established—and largely uncontested—ideal. Concepts such as translanguaging, linguistic repertoires, and challenges to monolingual norms are now widely discussed in scholarship and policy.

In the second blog entry for the Multilingual Stance series, Marianne Turner from Monash University and Ester de Jong from the University of Colorado, Denver discuss the benefits of thinking about multilingual stance as a continuum, rather than in opposition to a monolingual stance.