Seminar by Professor Angela Creese (University of Birmingham) 'Using linguistic ethnography to investigate the multilingual classroom'

Linguistic ethnography (LE) studies how people make use of linguistic and other semiotic signs to constitute social processes. In this seminar paper Professor Creese illustrates how LE provides careful, rigorous and systematic methods to document the resourcefulness of translanguaging as pedagogy in the multilingual classroom. Translanguaging is a means of describing the strategic use to which people put their multilingual resources in contexts of linguistic, social, and cultural diversity. Professor Creese looks at how people draw on their biographically organised repertoires in communication in language classrooms and bilingual homes. She explores the possibility of linguistic ethnography to reveal which social practices are meaningful to participants and specifically describe how encounters between teachers and students about multilingualism in the classroom are recontextualized and revisited in the home. Overall she argues that LE offers a powerful methodological and theoretical approach to understanding how people reconcile conflicting ideologies about multilingualism.