Learning through languages: plurilingual strategies for primary classrooms

Plurilingual strategies

Plurilingual strategies recognise and work with language students use at home and at school. They include any activity that brings students languages into the classroom to enhance teaching and learning. The benefits of these strategies are well-established, and they are included in the Victorian EAL curriculum.

Benefits 

  1. Activating prior knowledge
  2. Co-constructing knowledge
  3. Helping students display understanding
  4. Promoting metalinguistic awareness and developing language resources
  5. Affirming bi/multilingual identities

An introduction to plurilingual strategies

Getting started

Plurilingual strategies actively value students' linguistic background and help them to learn at school. Leveraging what students know commonly leads to more active student engagement. The sections below draw on the experiences of primary teachers in Victoria who incorporated plurilingual strategies into their teaching practice.

  1. Getting support from the school community
  2. Understanding students' language practices
  3. Working with languages
  4. Generating digital bilingual multimodal texts
Plurilingual strategies