Abstract
During the last decade, migrant and refugee flows toward Greece have contributed to the formation of a multilingual and multicultural mosaic within Greek schools. Due to the absence of their mother tongues from the class, non-native young students become “invisible” in the classroom and are confronted with adaptation difficulties. Within this context, utilizing all students’ languages in class seems a necessity, but also a difficult venture. However, the pluralistic approach “awakening to languages” could offer a solution, invoking a simultaneous cross-linguistic approach to many languages based on the students’ linguistic repertoire. Being taught since kindergarten, English is a significant part of young students’ repertoire. Hence, this chapter explores the role of English as a reference language within multilingual material for first schoolers’ awakening to other languages. The research consists of a two-stage qualitative study. First, 60 teachers were interviewed about language stimuli, appropriate materials, and the teaching and working mode within the first grade. Based on the answers elicited through the interviews and the principles of the awakening to languages approach, a tale about farm animals was created and tried out in three mainstream first grade classes. All three implementations were filmed, transcribed, and analyzed using the technique of thematic analysis. The conclusions reveal the importance of English as a facilitating factor in approaching untaught languages, serving as a bridge or reference for identifying words’ meanings, and recognizing letters’ pronunciation. It was also found that familiarity with an alphabet other than that of mother tongue seems to be an important vehicle to open up multilingualism.
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I would like to thank all teachers and students who accepted to participate in my study.
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Damaskou, E. (2023). The Facilitating Role of English as a Reference Language for the Awakening of Young Students to Linguistic Diversity. In: Raza, K., Reynolds, D., Coombe, C. (eds) Handbook of Multilingual TESOL in Practice. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-9350-3_18
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