Modern Approaches to Researching Multilingualism
Chapter: Exploring Student Teachers’ Multilingual Identity Through Dominant Language Constellations: DLC Artefacts in Teacher Education
- Contributor
- Editors
- Publisher
- Year
- ISBN
- Language
- Nayr Ibrahim
- Danuta Gabryś-Barker & Eva Vetter
- Springer
- 2024
- 9783031523700
- English
Book Description
The volume offers a collection of the most recent research coming from scholars and practitioners in the field of multilingualism research in various contexts of natural/immersion environments, school/formal instruction, grounded in multilingual societies and individual multilinguality of semi-monolingual countries. The studies included in the book constitute an exemplification of new methods of research used (e.g., narratives, visualizations, metaphors) as well as new approaches to multilingualism (affordances, dominant language constellations).
Chapter Description
Exploring Student Teachers’ Multilingual Identity Through Dominant Language Constellations: DLC Artefacts in Teacher Education by Nayr Ibrahim
This paper reports on a study of student teachers’ development of a multilingual identity in a pre-service teacher education context through the concept of Dominant Language Constellation (DLC). As linguistic diversity in schools around the globe is increasing, teachers are required to meet the challenges of teaching children who live with multiple languages. However, teachers are seldom required to reflect on and engage with their own multilingualism, which forms the basis of a subjective approach to educating teachers multilingually and shifting perspectives on the self. Embedded in the material culture of multilingualism and visual artefactual methodologies, this study used DLC as both a theoretical underpinning and a creative qualitative tool for collecting data. It included twenty-seven DLC artefacts created by future teachers of English in Grades 1–7 and 5–10 in northern Norway, supported by oral and written narratives. Plurisemiotic analysis of student teachers’ DLC artefacts indicates an evolution in their perceptions of their linguistic identity as they started ‘seeing’ themselves as plurilingual individuals for the first time. Furthermore, they reflected on the classroom implications of including multilingual practices in a context of increasing linguistic diversity in Norway, through capitalizing on their own and potentially their learners’ multilingual identities.