When Does Language Knowledge Become a Resource for Learning?

Kaiyu Ma, Monash University

Permission is only the beginning. Students’ multilingual repertoires become classroom resources when teachers create meaningful opportunities for them to think with those repertoires.

Nine years ago, I was a postgraduate student in an English-medium classroom in the UK. Like many of my peers, I often found myself thinking in Chinese before trying to express those ideas in English. Sometimes my classmates and I would quietly switch into Chinese while discussing a difficult pedagogical concept. It was never because we wanted to avoid English. More often, we were trying to make sense of the task before finding the words to express our ideas in English. Even though our teacher never explicitly discouraged us from using Chinese, we were still hesitant to do so. We lowered our voices, glanced around the room, and stopped speaking Chinese as soon as the teacher walked past.

That experience stayed with me long after I graduated. This year, I found myself back in an English-medium postgraduate classroom in Australia – but this time as the teacher, having tutorials in a Master of TESOL programme. My students were all international students; many were Chinese, and many hoped to become English language teachers themselves. They arrived with years of language learning experience and professional knowledge.

At my very first tutorial, I noticed six Chinese students sitting together at one table. They were quietly discussing the task when I walked towards them. Almost immediately, the conversation stopped. They looked slightly embarrassed. The moment felt instantly familiar because I had once been that student.

Although I was also Chinese, I was no longer simply another Chinese speaker in the classroom. I was the teacher, and in many English-medium classrooms the teacher often comes to represent the language norms of the classroom. The students seemed to be waiting for me to decide whether Chinese belonged there or not.

"You can use whatever language helps you discuss the task," I said.

Two students looked surprised. "Really?" one of them asked.

"Yes," I replied. "What matters is that you can develop your ideas."

At the time, I thought I had solved the problem. Looking back, I realise that I had only taken the first step.

Simply giving students permission to use their languages did not automatically turn those languages into classroom resources. Years of English-only expectations could not disappear because of a single sentence from the teacher. For several weeks, the students remained cautious, slipping back into English whenever they thought I was listening.

Watching this happen made me rethink my assumption. If students already possessed rich multilingual repertoires, what was stopping those repertoires from becoming resources for learning? When does a student's language actually become a classroom resource?

The answer began to emerge through one classroom activity. Students were asked to translate English sentences into another language they knew and then discuss what the translation made them notice. At first, I assumed that most students would choose their mother tongue. Some did, but others deliberately chose languages they had learned later, including Korean and Spanish. They drew on whichever language helped them think about the task in a different way.

As the discussion unfolded, they began moving naturally between languages, and these conversations were no longer limited to classmates who shared the same linguistic background. Chinese students asked a Japanese classmate how particular expressions would be understood in Japanese. Indonesian students contributed examples from their own linguistic and cultural experiences. Others compared Korean, Spanish, and English, not because they spoke those languages perfectly, but because each language offered a different perspective on the task.

Students were using their linguistic knowledge to compare language systems, question assumptions, and think more carefully about how meaning is constructed. Their conversations were sometimes messy – a sentence might begin in one language, continue in English, and end with an example from another language altogether – but the messiness reflected genuine intellectual engagement.

That was the moment I realised something important had changed. My students had always been multilingual. They did not suddenly become multilingual because I told them they could use Chinese, Japanese, Indonesian, or another language. Those languages had always been part of who they were. What changed was that the classroom finally gave those languages something meaningful to do.

For me, this is the difference between allowing languages and leveraging them. Allowing languages is an important first step, but it is only the beginning. A teacher can tell students, “You may use your mother tongue,” while continuing to design every activity as though English were still the only language that matters.

Leveraging languages asks something more of teachers. It means designing learning experiences that encourage students to compare languages, build on one another’s linguistic knowledge, and use their different repertoires as tools for making meaning. In other words, multilingualism becomes pedagogically meaningful not because different languages are present, but because they are intentionally put to work.

Of course, this is not always straightforward. Multilingual classrooms are complex, and encouraging students to use different languages does not automatically guarantee inclusion. Some students may prefer to work in English, while others may not share the same language as their group members. This means that classroom activities need to be deliberately designed so that students’ different languages become resources for one another rather than remaining private means of communication. For example, students can be invited to compare how the same idea is expressed across different languages, explain language-specific examples to classmates who do not know that language, or work together to identify patterns that emerge across languages. In these moments, students do not need to share the same language to learn from one another. They learn by making their different linguistic knowledge available to the group. The aim, then, is to create learning environments in which students’ linguistic diversity contributes to everyone’s learning without excluding anyone from the conversation.

These experiences have also changed the way I think about TESOL teacher education. The students in my tutorials were not only learning about English language teaching in an abstract way; they were also developing ideas about the kinds of classrooms they might one day create themselves. If multilingual resources are consistently treated as distractions, or not part of core business, future teachers may reproduce those assumptions in their own practice. If, however, they experience classrooms where different languages are recognised as resources for thinking and learning, they may begin to imagine different possibilities for their own students.

Further reading

Turner, M., & Tour, E. (2024). Literacies in the English classroom: Leveraging and extending the linguistic repertoire of all students. The Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, 47(1), 39–52. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44020-023-00045-3