Plurilingual pedagogies in teachers’ everyday technology practices: negotiating possibilities for EAL students

Abstract

Increasingly recognised as the key to promoting educational equity and diversity, plurilingual pedagogies are classroom approaches that engage students’ linguistic, cultural, and multimodal resources as diverse ways of knowing and making meaning. Within English as an Additional Language (EAL) education, a considerable body of literature explores how digital technologies can be leveraged to support plurilingual pedagogies. However, many studies are interventionist, focusing on externally initiated innovations, rather than on how plurilingual pedagogies are enacted within teachers’ day-to-day engagement with technology. In this article, we adopt an understanding of everyday technology practices as emergent, productive, and tactical, and examine how teachers enact plurilingual pedagogies within these practices. We bring this conceptualisation to an analysis of interviews with ten teachers across different school sectors in Victoria, Australia. Through reflexive thematic analysis, three interrelated plurilingual pedagogies were identified: engaging students’ diverse semiotic resources; connecting with students’ lived experiences and life-worlds; and leveraging students’ use of home languages. These pedagogies were analysed in relation to the participants’ temporal and structural constraints, such as workload, time pressures, and institutional and systemic monolingual ideologies that persist in Australian schooling contexts. The everyday lens brought to light the synergies between the plurilingual pedagogies evidenced in the data analysis and the teachers’ creative, relational, and purposeful engagement with digital tools in ways that allowed them to support students’ needs while navigating conflicting demands in their professional contexts. The paper concludes with considerations for educators and researchers in Australia and internationally.