Dr Julie Choi, Associate Professor in Education (Additional Languages) at the University of Melbourne, shares simple ways teachers can make space for all the languages in students’ lives.
What happens to students’ home languages when they walk through the school gate? Or the Korean picked up from dramas, the Spanish phrases from a friend, the Auslan learned just for fun? For many students, these languages recede once school begins. They wait outside the classroom, surfacing again at the lunch table or on their way home. School, students quickly learn, operates in English. This is rarely anyone’s intention. Curricula are not designed with linguistic diversity in mind. Assessments cannot capture it. The structures of schooling were built for a monolingual world that no longer exists, if it ever did. Yet research consistently shows that the languages students engage with matter deeply for identity, belonging, and connection. When these languages remain invisible at school, students receive an unspoken message: part of who you are has no place here.
The good news is that classrooms can become different kinds of spaces without teachers needing to overhaul their curriculum or speak multiple languages themselves. Small shifts in practice go a long way.
Consider what happens when a student moves between languages mid-sentence, weaving Mandarin and English together to explain an idea. Many of us were trained to see this as confusion or a gap in English proficiency. But research tells us this is sophisticated meaning-making. Called translanguaging, this practice allows multilingual speakers to draw on their full repertoire of linguistic resources. It supports learning, creativity, and thinking. When teachers welcome this mixing, classrooms become spaces where students can bring all of who they are.
Making languages visible matters too. Displaying multilingual books, inviting students to share words and phrases, creating space for multilingual signs and labels: these acts signal that linguistic diversity belongs here. In my research with colleagues, we have seen what happens when students are invited to draw on all their full linguistic repertoires in creative projects. One parent told us their children had never seen Vietnamese as something valued until a bookmaking project made it public and celebrated. The shift was not just linguistic. It was a shift in how those children saw themselves.
Classrooms can also become spaces where knowledge flows in multiple directions. When a family member is invited to share a skill or practice, whether cooking, craft, storytelling, or something else entirely, students see that expertise takes many forms. This is not about showcasing cultural difference. It is about recognising that families hold knowledge worth learning from.
As students settle back into classrooms in the coming year, there are small moves that matter. When exploring a cultural artefact or practice, try saying a word in the language it comes from. Ask students how to pronounce it. Get it wrong, try again, let them teach you.
These moments show that teachers are learners too, and that linguistic knowledge can flow in any direction. Even simpler moves work. Allow students to draft ideas in their home language first, or pair students who share a language for discussion before reporting back in English. These practices require no additional preparation, just a willingness to see multilingualism as a resource rather than a problem to manage. Teachers can extend this through identity texts, creative projects where students draw on their full linguistic and cultural repertoires to produce work shared with a real audience.
A useful question to ask students is not “What language do you speak at home?”, which keeps languages in a separate box, but “What languages are part of your life?” This recognises students as people with rich and varied linguistic worlds, shaped by heritage, curiosity, friendship, and media alike. These shifts take only moments. But they tell students: all of you belongs here.
References
Choi, J. (2019). Multilingual learners learning about Translanguaging through Translanguaging. Applied Linguistics Review https://doi.org/10.1515/applirev-2018-0117
Choi, J., & Murray, L. (2025). Arts-rich translanguaging in community spaces: Vietnamese Australian parents đi chơi with collaborative bookmaking. The Language Learning Journal https://doi.org/10.1080/09571736.2025.2564705
Choi, J., Cleeve Gerkens, R., & Tomsic, M. (2023). “My book ideas were spinning in my head”: Arts-rich bookmaking experiences to create and sustain multilingual children’s meaning making flows. TESOL Quarterly https://doi.org/10.1002/tesq.3279
Slaughter, Y., & Choi, J. (2024). The affordances of identity texts with adult students with limited or interrupted formal education. English Teaching & Learning https://doi.org/10.1007/s42321-024-00184-x
Choi, J., & Slaughter, Y. (2020). Challenging discourses of deficit. Language Teaching Research https://doi.org/10.1177/1362168820938825
