Full Description
Australian classrooms are among the most linguistically diverse in the world, with more than 350 languages spoken across the nation. Yet, despite this rich reality, schools continue to be shaped by the enduring dominance of English monolingualism. Translanguaging in Australian Classrooms calls for a fundamental rethinking of teacher education, curriculum, and pedagogy to better reflect and harness the plurilingual repertoires of today's learners.
At the heart of this book is the concept of Plurilingual Pedagogical Knowledge (PPK), a transformative framework that equips teachers to move beyond traditional literacy models and to value, mobilise, and affirm students' full communicative resources. Drawing on practitioner inquiry and richly detailed case studies, the book demonstrates how translanguaging can be enacted across subject areas, from mathematics and science to social studies and the arts.
Challenging entrenched language ideologies, this volume positions teachers as agents of linguistic equity, capable of designing inclusive classrooms that support both academic success and cultural identity. It offers a compelling vision for teacher education in Australia, one that places linguistic justice at the centre of professional practice and reimagines the future of schooling through the dynamic possibilities of plurilingualism.
Contents
Teachers in Linguistically Diverse Classrooms: The Australian Context.- Expanding upon Teacher Pedagogical Language Knowledge: Adapting to Multilingual Realities in Australia.- Methodologies for Researching Teachers' Pedagogical Language Knowledge.- Teachers as Communicators.- Case Study 1: Making the Language of Science Accessible to Multilingual Learners.- Teachers as Educators.- Case Study 2: Multilingual and Multimodal Approaches to Teaching Poetry.- Teachers as Evaluators.- Case Study 3: Multilingual Storytelling with Young Learners.- Teachers as Learners.- Case Study 4: Pre-service Teachers of Science Learning about Literacy from Refugee-background Multilingual Learners.- Teachers as Agents of Social Change.- Case Study 5: Learning to Enact Humanising Pedagogies with Multilingual Learners in an Adult Literacy Program.- implications for Teacher Education.
