Building knowledge about and with students : linguistic ethnography in two secondary school classrooms

This paper presents research conducted with teachers and students in one year 7 and one year 8 English classroom that worked to support in school English language learning by calling on the resources and repertoires of plurilingual students. In this work, students and teachers were engaged as linguistic ethnographers of their own language practices. Drawing on new international approaches from sociocultural and sociolinguistic theory, this methodological approach privileges students as experts with real insights into their use of language in the variety of contexts in which they participate (Prasad, 2013). This work repositions multilingualism away from deficit dimensions and instead builds on research that continues to show multilingual students possess repertoires of linguistic practice that can be a resource for literacies in English and for enhanced educational practice (Orellana, Martinez, Lee, and Montano, 2012).