Prof. Ester de Jong and A/Prof. Marianne Turner explain the immersive experiences they have used to help teachers to empathise with multilingual learners, and also to think about what might help to foster these learners’ comfort and understanding in class. This elaborates on their discussion in the first entry for the Multilingual Stance series.

In today’s increasingly unquiet, unstable and interconnected world, it is more vital than ever to engage productively with difference. There has been a great deal of scholarship on harnessing the language resources that multilingual learners bring with them to school, and we know this to be beneficial for these students. However, we also know that the devil is in the detail when it comes to bringing these ideas into the classroom.

In this podcast series – designed for teachers, teacher educators and scholars – Ester and Marianne will examine how linguistic diversity can be meaningfully leveraged in today’s classrooms.