Introduction

In scholarship, there has been an increasing focus on cultural and linguistic diversity caused by migration and globally networked economies in different fields, including in literacy studies. More than two decades ago, The New London Group (1996) proposed that diversity be seen as a valuable resource in students’ classroom learning. They considered the capacity to work with a wide range of texts in different semiotic modes—visual, audio, gestural and spatial—as well as in different languages, dialects or registers to be crucial to meaningful participation in contemporary societies and communities (see also Kalantzis & Cope, 2017; Luke & Freebody, 1999). Multiliteracies is the term The New London Group (1996) used to frame this capacity, and emphasised linguistic and cultural diversity as embedded within the term. The focus on linguistic and cultural diversity is important given that, as Mills (2006) pointed out, the student profile in classrooms in countries such as Australia is neither monolingual nor monocultural. This is echoed by Luke et als' (2011, p. 150) understanding of the “need for substantive cultural content and engagement with the social texts and intellectual demands of everyday community life, and affiliated forms of institutional and social action”. Everyday community life may not be solely in English, and access to the cultural life of a particular community in a broader sense may also require focussed attention on maintaining community languages. In countries such as Australia, language attrition amongst second generation migrants is very common, and by the third generation it is almost complete (Eisenchlas et al., 2013).

In this paper, our objective is to explore how teachers can promote home language literacies as important in its own right, as well as leverage it as a resource for the learning of English. By ‘home language’ we mean “languages spoken or used in the home or community but which are not the majority language in the society” (Connaughton-Crean & ÓDuibHir, 2017, p. 23). Promotion of home language literacies is not straightforward given that “current formal assessments and discussions of literacy rates continue to hinge in the Anglophone world on mastery of reading and writing English” (Abrams et al., 2017, p. 1302). This focus is likely to be detrimental to the inclusion of a wide range of textual practices (associated with both English and other languages), and also to reading and writing in other languages. As García and Kleifgen (2010) argued, although linguistic and cultural differences are highlighted in the idea of multiliteracies, different semiotic modes are commonly given priority over variations in the linguistic mode; that is to say, research has not sufficiently addressed multilingualism. Scholarship on pedagogies that “recognize and legitimize multilingualism” (Dagenais et al., 2017, p. 263) is emerging to fill this gap, and this paper seeks to add to this area. In our study, we answered the following overarching question:

How can students’ home languages be actively leveraged in classroom activities as a resource for learning English in primary school?

We found that a focus on home language literacy practices could be an important element of this leveraging of home languages, and that teachers can support students’ multiliteracies whilst working towards curriculum objectives. It is this finding in particular that we focus on in the paper.

Home language literacy practices

In Australia, similar to other English-speaking countries such as the USA and the United Kingdom or UK, around 20% of the population report that they speak another language at home (Nordstrom, 2020). Although this kind of holistic data are regularly collected in Australia and elsewhere, it does not shed light on significant aspects of this use, such as reading and writing. Reading and writing in a home language is a ‘fragile skill’ if there is no institutional support because it needs to be practiced and maintained and it is often unnecessary in daily communication (Eisenchlas et al., 2013, p. 1) This is also true of oral traditions that are not part of daily practice. Speaking specifically about reading and writing, Baker and Wright (2021, p. 331) noted that “being denied the chance to develop literacy in the minority languages they speak can deprive bilingual and multilingual students of rich opportunities and resources”.

In recent decades, it has become common to think of literacy as plural—literacies. In the past, literacy, as a singular noun, used to be associated with cognitive skills required for print-based reading and writing; however, now the term “literacies” is generally understood as encompassing a much broader range of practices and having other components to meaning-making including different modes, the pragmatics of context, experience, history and power (Street, 2009). A broader understanding of multiliteracies has also entered the realm of home languages; for example, the way children engage with technology and social media in home languages (see Little & Kirwan, 2018), and the importance of considering transnational dimensions of language practices, such as mobility and the Internet, in language planning for minority language speakers (see Hatoss, 2020). Even when initiatives are focussed around reading and writing, multiliteracies in a broader sense can be a welcome side effect of learning online.

Along with the opportunity to access resources connected to particular languages, there is an increasing amount of scholarship that indicates the benefits attached to home language literacy practices. For example, in the USA a correlation has been found between children’s reading proficiency in English at school and their ability to read in a home language (Slavin & Cheung, 2005). Even though language transfer has been found to be more successful between similar writing systems (Bialystok, 2013) given the lack of need to learn a different system, it has also been found to be positive for Chinese and English (Pu, 2008) and Korean and English (Pae, 2019). Oral proficiency in a language and reading ability are also correlated (e.g. August & Shanahan, 2008), but this does not detract from the advantages of biliteracy, and the transfer-as-advantageous position has been taken up by the International Literacy Association (2019).

Leveraging home languages for learning English literacy at school

Leveraging home language practices for learning at school commonly has the explicit objective of assisting students’ understanding of school-based learning priorities, such as reading and writing in English, and also has the potential to support home language maintenance through institutional affirmation. Using home languages as a resource to support students’ learning at school is well-established (e.g., Moll et al., 1992). It aligns well with concepts such as funds of knowledge (González et al., 2006) and virtual schoolbags (Thomson, 2020), both of which highlight the importance of considering the prior learning, skills and resources students bring to school from home and community settings. Leveraging these linguistic resources can also benefit school-family community partnerships, and these partnerships are encouraged in Australian schools as a way to promote students’ wellbeing and academic achievement (e.g., DESE 2022).

There are different ways of incorporating home languages in the classroom; for example, activating students’ prior knowledge (e.g., Cummins, 2007; Luk & Lin, 2015), guiding students’ creation of identity texts (e.g., D’warte, 2014), and also language arrangements whereby students are using different aspects of their language practices for meaning-making (Butzkamm, 2003); for example, in an Australian context, students may gather information on a topic in a home language, summarise in this language and then give a presentation in English. A particularly interesting multimodal digital meaning-making strategy is the use of Google Translate as a springboard for discussion (Dagenais et al., 2017). Home language strategies fulfil a wide range of goals, including crosslinguistic (across languages) and metalinguistic (within one language) awareness, the co-construction and display of knowledge, the validation of multilingual identities, and the critiquing of language inequities and hierarchies (see García & Li, 2014). All of these goals can strengthen literacy practices in English, especially if literacy is understood in the plural, or as textual practices that promote meaningful participation in contemporary societies (Kalantzis & Cope, 2017; Luke & Freebody, 1999).

Use of language(s) as a resource for learning has been increasingly guiding whole school approaches (e.g., Little & Kirwan, 2018) and the complexities around students speaking diverse home languages has been the subject of scholarship in Australia (e.g., Alford & Kettle, 2021; French, 2016; Turner & Cross, 2016). Internationally, a holistic understanding of literacy practices for (emergent) bi/multilingual learners is also becoming increasingly promoted to teachers in general (see Chumak-Horbatsch, 2019; Espinosa & Ascenzi-Moreno, 2021), and is being promoted in Australian policy documents, such as in the EAL Curriculum in Victoria (VCAA, 2020). In the Australian context, a study found that teachers in three primary schools initially assumed their language background other than English (LBOTE) students were literate in their home language, and this influenced the way they designed activities that incorporated home languages into the classroom (Turner, 2020). However, there is still a scarcity of research on the home language literacy practices of minority language students in Australia, and the impact this has on the way these languages are facilitated for teaching and learning.

The study

The research under discussion is taken from a larger qualitative study investigating the incorporation of home language practices in primary English classrooms. Eight primary and middle school teachers from five Victorian Government schools, who were all working with language-background-other-than-English (LBOTE) students, took part in a 2-day (non-consecutive) professional learning programme developed by the research team. The aim was to help teachers think through practical strategies that linked to their particular teaching contexts and teaching objectives, taken from the Victorian EAL Curriculum. The strategies included (1) ways to become familiar with students’ home language practices, (2) activities related to comparing/contrasting languages via chunking sentences into participant, process and circumstance (see Derewianka & Jones, 2016; Turner, 2021), and (3) student creation of multimodal, bi/multilingual digital texts. In the project, teachers devised a sequence of lessons specifically for their context with the support of the research team, then taught and reflected on these lessons.

The study took a design-based approach, which relies on iterative sub-cycles of analysis and exploration, design and construction, and evaluation and reflection (McKenney & Reeves, 2018). In this approach, researchers and practitioners work together to explore instructional hypotheses that are refined over different iterations. This results in hypotheses being developed from established research and situated practices. The instructional hypothesis for the iteration of the research discussed in this paper was: Home languages can be actively included in classroom activities as a resource for learning English. The iteration was the initial analysis and exploration cycle of the project. The project was approved by the Monash University Human Ethics Committee (ID 23587).

In the paper, we draw on data from two teachers—Miriam and Xuan (pseudonyms) (see Table 1) to discuss the significance of supporting students’ home language literacy practices alongside the multiliteracies (capacity to understand and work with linguistic, visual, audio, gestural and spatial modes) they need to do well at school. Miriam was an EAL coordinator in a mainstream primary school and taught groups of EAL students, and Xuan was an English language school teacher. English language schools, within a Victorian government context, provide intensive English language programmes for newly arrived students for a period of 6–12 months prior to entry into a mainstream schooling setting (DET, Victoria, 2021). Both teachers had access to bi/multilingual teaching assistants who were able to interpret/ translate for children and parents. For Miriam the assistants spoke Arabic, Somali, and Vietnamese and for Xuan, Arabic. Their students spoke a variety of home languages (see Table 1). All the students were recently arrived immigrants to Australia. They were all evaluated as needing EAL support, and teachers were using the EAL curriculum. Their English language proficiency varied between B1 and B3 on the curriculum (VCAA, 2020)—B1 is a beginner level and B3 is the level before the students are taught the mainstream English curriculum.

Table 1 Participants
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Data collection for the two teachers included Miriam’s and Xuan’s reflections on the lesson sequences, as well as details on the lesson sequences themselves. These data were collected in written form and also from an hour-long group reflection session that was audio-recorded and transcribed. Student data included work samples, a set of questions for Xuan’s students where she asked for student feedback on the lesson sequence, and oral reflections for Miriam’s students on what they had learned. These latter were collected and transcribed by Miriam. Table 2 below gives a summary of the lesson sequences for each teacher. The teachers designed the sequences according to their own teaching goals and settings.

Table 2 Summary of Miriam’s and Xuan’s lesson sequences
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Data were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006, 2019). Themes—patterns of meaning—that directly related to how home languages could be actively included in classroom activities as a resource for learning English were generated from the data. The three members of the research team initially coded the data according to what had been discussed in the first professional learning—identity texts, crosslinguistic analysis and the generation of bi/multilingual texts. The next round of coding focussed on how teachers worked with these three different types of teaching and learning strategies in class, as well as student engagement. Acting independently, the team then began to generate themes within and across these codes, and met to discuss the themes. During this process, the team reached a consensus that support for students’ home language literacy practices was a conspicuous theme for two teachers—Miriam and Xuan. Findings related to this theme will be presented in the next section.

Findings

In this section, we will present evidence of the ways in which home language literacy practices were supported by the teachers, as well as the positive influence this was found to have on student engagement. Support included the teachers' preliminary focus on understanding their students’ home language literacy practices, the involvement of bi/multilingual teaching assistants and Google Translate. Student engagement was found to increase in relation both to learning and enjoyment.

Learning about home literacy practices

The two teachers were both found to design activities that would help inform them about students’ home language literacy practices, but in different ways. Miriam’s focus was on students’ confidence with different aspects of home language use, whereas Xuan focussed on students’ attitudes towards their language practices and on the contexts of these practices.

Miriam’s activity was a short survey that she designed to differentiate between home language practices related to listening, speaking, reading and writing (see Fig. 1). She found the survey to be especially useful with regards to the information she gained about reading and writing:

The survey gave me a good idea of how [the students] viewed their language capabilities in their home language and confirmed that most don’t write or read their [home language]. (Miriam—written reflection)

Fig. 1
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Home language practices survey—Miriam’s class

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The quotation indicated that Miriam already suspected a lack of confidence with home language literacy practices, which may have been the catalyst for the survey. Her discovery reinforced the need for support if students were to bring written forms of their home language into class. The survey was thus a very useful point of departure for subsequent activities.

In contrast, Xuan elected to generate language portraits (see Fig. 2) and language maps (see Fig. 3), both of which were forms of identity text. From these texts, Xuan was able to get an idea of how students felt about their various language practices (the language portraits), and where they engaged in different language practices and with whom (the language maps). For example, in Fig. 2, English appears around the outside of the body—it has not yet been internalised, Iraqi Arabic is a familiar (and internalised) language, French also but less so, and Assyrian is the language of the heart. In Fig. 3, another student has depicted their context-related language practices, including their understanding of different language varieties. These activities helped Xuan to understand her students’ language practices in a general sense, but not necessarily to understand their home language literacy practices. She learned about these practices as students engaged in translation activities:

Everyone except for [one student] was able to write in their own language first and then translate into English or some of them were doing that at the same time. (Xuan—group reflection)

Fig. 2
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Example of a language portrait—Xuan’s class

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Fig. 3
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Example of a language map—Xuan’s class

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Even though the language portrait and map did not give specific information about students’ capacity to read and write in a home language, it was a positive and affirming way to normalise the presence of—and discussion around—other languages in the English classroom.

Bi/multilingual teaching assistants

Another support for home language literacy practices was the involvement of bi/multilingual teaching assistants, who were enlisted in different ways. Xuan enlisted a teaching assistant to liaise with parents and work one-on-one with students, whereas Miriam enlisted three teaching assistants in whole-class activities on crosslinguistic and metalinguistic awareness.

First, Xuan’s support for her students’ home language literacy practices involved designing a lesson sequence that included the knowledge and input of parents. She asked an Arabic-speaking teaching assistant to liaise with the families of Arabic-speaking children in her class (seven of eight children):

We’re very lucky to have an Arabic multicultural aide involved with us from the very beginning so from the translation of the letter to take home for the students, and the parents asking their permission to use photographs of the students when they were babies and young and asking the parents about, you know, what was it like when they were children. (Xuan—group reflection)

This was an effective way to include parents in their children’s learning, but was not necessarily supportive of home language literacy practices. Xuan thus explicitly included writing in home languages in the activity (see Table 2), and the children chose how much Arabic (and Samoan—see Table 1) to include in their autobiographical texts. Xuan then learned that one of her students could not read or write in a home language:

[One of my students] said I can’t read Arabic Miss […] I said but surely you can talk to your parents, in what language? And she said Assyrian, but I can’t write […]. I said that’s OK, you can always use your spoken language at home […], and we can always ask [the teaching assistant] to help you to translate [into Arabic]. […] In the end, she was the only one who had every single page translated in Arabic and English and her sentence structures in English just improved so much. (Xuan – group reflection)

The writing support provided by the Arabic-speaking teaching assistant thus appeared to help the students’ writing across both Arabic and English, and gave the assistant an active role in her learning. The assistant was asked to help with the Arabic: if the activity had only been in English, this inadvertent benefit of English language learning with the assistant may have been missed.

In Miriam’s setting, the bi/multilingual teaching assistants were given an even more active teaching role in the classroom. Miriam enlisted assistants who spoke Arabic, Somali and Vietnamese (three languages spoken by her students), and invited them to help teach the class. The groups to which she refers in the quotation below were not language groups but groups of different English language proficiency:

I had one of [the teaching assistants] come in to each of the three groups and with our shared text […] I got them to write their language underneath and […] they showed us where the different parts of the sentence were […] that was probably the best thing that we’ve done so far because it was a fabulous chance for them to talk about how things work in different languages. (Miriam—group reflection)

Miriam further described what these bi/multilingual teaching assistants did as ‘fantastic’ and reported that they “were so excited and the kids who spoke those languages were so excited”. This approach brought home language literacy practices into the classroom in a way that helped all the students’ language awareness, and affirmed the assistants’ linguistic knowledge.

Google translate

Google Translate was also found to be a useful point of departure in classroom activities, and again was found to be used in different ways. Both Miriam and Xuan were found to use it when devising language noticing activities and also encouraged its use among the students. When students who were not confident reading and writing in a home language used it themselves, the Google Translate sound function was found to be particularly beneficial.

In their lessons, both teachers chose to compare and contrast sentence structure across languages, and found Google Translate to be a useful tool for understanding where the meaning lay in sentences. For example, Xuan wrote sentences on the board in English and then searched in Google Translate for the sentences in Arabic and Samoan. She then used the sentences as a springboard for discussion with students, asking them to notice differences and similarities between languages:

We used Google Translate and […] I asked them to come up and teach me where each word [is]. This is my pen and this is Anne’s pen, can you show me what it looks like [in your language] and they actually went up to the board and highlight where all the parts of the words are […] And so we’ve been doing that for almost every lesson when it’s a sentence structure type of lesson. (Xuan – group reflection)

Miriam’s approach was similar, but she started with stories in other languages, and chose sentences to translate back into English, making sentences strips for students to cut up according to chunks of meaning:

I’ve been taking a sentence out of that text that was easy to work out between me and Google Translate and […] I’ve written them on sentence strips and we’ve cut them into participant, process and circumstance and then we’ve had a look at the other language, whatever it is and we’ve moved the English around to match where those parts are in the text from the other language. (Miriam—group reflection)

For both Xuan and Miriam, there was no guarantee that Google Translate was completely accurate (they did not share the home languages of their students), but it provided an opportunity to help the students become more aware of how meaning is structured in different languages.

The multimodality of Google Translate—the sound function alongside the written function—was further reported by Miriam to be important, and made even more so by home literacy practices that relied on different scripts:

I was surprised at the level of knowledge [the students] brought to the checking of [their translations], as most had said they don’t really write or read much in their home language. They found the sound function really helpful. (Miriam—written reflection)

This quotation also reveals that students’ low level of confidence with reading and writing—Miriam’s own reported finding when the students responded to her survey (see Fig. 1) did not necessarily mean that they had no knowledge at all, and could problem-solve with the help of an aural mode. Not all languages had this sound function—Somali did not, for example—but it appeared to be useful for the other languages in the classroom.

Student engagement

Students’ engagement with home language literacy practices was reported to be positive by the teachers and by the students themselves. This positive engagement was noted in terms of both enjoyment and learning. Enjoyment in particular could be related to being ‘seen’, or to have something of their own affirmed. Learning related to home languages and language awareness in general as students learned about their classmates’ languages, as well as English.

First, many of Xuan’s students chose to focus on what they liked when she asked them what they had learned when they had explained/ taught her about the difference or similarity between their home language and English. Four of the seven students reported that they enjoyed the approach; for example, “I like it when I compare English and Samoan”, “I like to explain to my teacher in my language”, “I like share Arabic with the teacher to understand me”, and “I like it when we did it in my languages”.

An affirmation of students’ life histories aligned very well with leveraging home language literacy practices as a resource for learning English in that it created a space where the students could be confident that their difference was valued. However, it was clear from the students’ reflections and also Xuan’s comment below that the affirmation of students’ home language practices in the classroom played a significant role in their engagement:

Having [the bi/multilingual teaching assistant] in the classroom and validating their roles and also allowing them to see how the first language is really, really crucial in helping them learn English and how it’s bringing out more than just learning English. It’s bringing out their confidence in the classroom, their sense of pride and how they wanted to share. (Xuan—oral reflection)

Student engagement with their home language practices in class was important as a way to foster learning in the classroom. Learning English appeared to be only one benefit of active incorporation of these practices, albeit an important one. This finding was also evidenced in Miriam’s class: positive engagement was clear from the way that Miriam spoke about the activity with the teaching assistants and the excitement it generated amongst the students who shared the languages that were incorporated in the lesson (see bi/multilingual teaching assistant section).

There was additional student reflection in Xuan’s class that the leveraging of home languages was not only enjoyable but resulted in more learning of the home language; for example, “I learned new words in my language an[d] then I learn English”, “I feel good when my family learn with me how to speak English. And I learn Samoan from them”, “I learn more Arabic. Because my mum know[s] what I learn at school”, “I remember more of my language”. All of these reflections relate to the inclusion of the family in the students’ learning at school. Students also focussed directly on the learning of home literacy practices; for example, “I learn more Arabic and I am better at it now”, “I learn more of my own language when I translate it in my own language”, and “I learned more of my language and I learned writing in my language”.

Xuan’s students also reflected that they had learned English alongside home language and this is clear in the first two of the quotations in the paragraph above. Another three students only focussed on English in their reflections; when asked what they had learned, they responded: “Spelling and grammar”, “I learn new things. I learn how to use grammar in a better way”, and “It [i]s easier for me to learn gram[mar]”. The focus on grammar in these quotations may have been a result of the activities on comparing and contrasting structures such as the use of past tense, emotive words, sequence words and transitions (see Table 2).

Finally, learning related to language awareness in general was evident in the reflections of Miriam’s students. Students commented on differences and/or similarities between languages, not only between English and their home language but also referring to the languages of their classmates. Three examples are given below:

I learned that the Vietnamese alphabet has more letters than English. In Somali, the words are different and you put them in a different order. The participant goes in a different place sometimes. In Somali, the describing word is sometimes in a different place as well, but not always.

Somali was very interesting. […] Some sentences in Vietnamese go in the same order as in English. In Vietnamese, sometimes you don’t need a word when you do in English, or it just doesn’t exist, for example in English we say “On birthdays…” but in Vietnamese we just say “Birthdays…”

Sometimes if you have one word in English, you need lots of words in Arabic. “And” in Arabic is only one letter. In Arabic you start writing from the right to the left.

The language awareness evident in these responses has the potential to improve reading and writing in English because English is the language compared/contrasted each time, and students can see the kinds of structures that may need attention; for example, word order, prepositions and the need for fewer words, respectively. Miriam also reported language awareness activities to be intrinsically valuable:

I think all [the students have] come to a bit of an understanding […] have the concept that different languages work different ways […] so that’s probably the most valuable thing we’ve done so far and it was certainly the most fun. (Miriam—group reflection)

The quotation here shows an understanding of the value of general language awareness that is not only connected to English and a student's home language. Although the students in this study were all EAL students, this kind of activity could also be beneficial for monolingual students. Understanding similarities/ differences in how languages are structured may be of service to students in the learning of additional languages.

Discussion

This paper has explored a multilingual approach to the formal teaching and learning of primary school English within a multiliteracies frame. The frame expands on traditional notions of literacy as print-based reading and writing, and engages with the “social texts and intellectual demands of everyday community life” (Luke et al., 2011, p. 150). Home language maintenance can still have an emphasis on more traditional print-based practices, but multimodal home literacy practices provide additional opportunities for multilingual experiences, as well as helping with students’ learning of English. Students’ language practices can be little understood by teachers if students are left to draw on their home languages privately, with no space given to this in the classroom. An institutionally passive approach to home languages may be interpreted by the students as a clear delineation of funds of knowledge (cf Gonzalez et al., 2006), and as a lack of value attached to skills and resources gained in different domains. An active approach has the potential to make stronger connections with background knowledge, enhance metalinguistic and crosslinguistic awareness, and affirm bi/multilingual identities (García & Li, 2014). In light of this, we investigated how teachers could leverage primary students’ home language practices in a meaningful way as part of everyday teaching and learning.

In the study, teacher-initiated support for home language literacy practices was found to be a significant theme for two EAL teachers. This kind of support is uncommon in settings where the student cohort is linguistically diverse, and teachers do not share their students’ home languages. It may only be when teachers begin to work with students’ extended language resources in the classroom that they become aware of the great range of student capacity to read and write in a home language (Turner, 2020). In our study, the two teachers both opted to support home language literacy practices, rather than solely draw on students’ more consolidated funds of knowledge, such as their oral practices. This is likely to have been influenced by the professional learning in the study, which included a written component in its inclusion of comparing/contrasting language and multimodal, bi/multilingual texts.

The home language literacy strategies used by the teachers were multimodal in that they incorporated different kinds of meaning-making informed by the experiences of the students and the resources of the classroom. Literacy practices thus reached beyond reading and writing print in a traditional sense (cf Kalantzis & Cope, 2017; The New London Group, 1996). The students engaged with different scripts often with the assistance of a spoken version of the home language, and the main approach of the teachers was the active inclusion of teaching assistants and Google Translate. The teaching assistants were employed in schools as linguistic and cultural brokers, and there was potential for them to have an active role in the classroom. As Yoo (2019, p. 247) pointed out in her discussion on culturally and linguistically diverse student language brokers, there can exist a “bidirectionality of literacy practices from home to school and school to home”. Our research illustrated that bi/multilingual teaching assistants—and also parents—could be leveraged to bridge the school-family community partnership. This was done by valuing the teaching assistants’ and parents’ funds of knowledge, and understanding that their literacy practices were not necessarily shared by students. The affordances of Google Translate were also noted, similarly to previous studies (e.g., Dagenais et al., 2017): it was found to be an easy-to-use, multimodal point of departure for meaning-making by both the teachers and the students.

Finally, supporting students’ home literacy practices as a way to leverage their English language learning was found to necessitate a shift in the locus of control in the classroom. By valuing the funds of knowledge of both the students and the bi/multilingual teaching assistants, the teachers facilitated—but did not seek to control—all the literacy learning that was taking place. The teachers’ willingness to position themselves as co-learners and the students and teaching assistants as ‘experts’ allowed an expansion in students’ home language literacy practices, which went hand-in-hand with their improvement in English. It may have been difficult for this learning to occur had the teachers not been willing to incorporate knowledge that they did not share into classroom activities. Google Translate proved to be a useful support, but provided a springboard for discussion, rather than definitive answers: meanings needed to be negotiated with the students. The significance of the disposition of the teacher in the leveraging of home languages for learning at school is worthy of further research. This significance also applies more broadly to pedagogies which draw on the notion of virtual schoolbags (Thomson, 2020) and the need for institutional engagement with the literacy demands of students as they navigate community life (Luke et al., 2011, p. 150).

Implications and conclusion

Exploring multilingual practices as a significant aspect of multiliteracies is pressing in countries such as Australia where language attrition is a significant issue, especially in the literacies domain. Literacy practices in English unfold against a wider backdrop, and understanding students more fully may help teachers make informed choices about the pedagogical approaches they employ in the classroom. However, it cannot be assumed that teachers are well prepared for such pedagogies. Our study was based on professional learning that incorporated strategies with a literacies focus, such as digital bi/multilingual texts and crosslinguistic analysis. These provided the participants with relevant professional knowledge and strategies. An implication of our findings is that this kind of professional learning may be beneficial in helping to widen the current mainstream view of multiliteracies in Australian schools to include multilingualism, particularly for EAL students, but also for LBOTE students more generally. Another implication is the importance of actively leveraging the knowledge of bi/multilingual teaching assistants employed to help the school with students from a similar language background, as well as positioning Google Translate as a point of departure, and not (solely) as an approximation of authentic language use.

In sum, our objective in the study was to help teachers consider how to leverage students’ home languages in their learning of English. They were able to do this by supporting student learning of home language literacy practices, and this only appeared to be possible for many students by conceptualising literacy more broadly as literacies: the inclusion of multimodality was found to be important. Given the small scope of our analysis, more research on the ways in which bi/multilingual literacy practices can be recursive and interact with each other to further students’ learning may help to inform pedagogical approaches and lead to the strengthening of home literacy practices, as well as those associated with school achievement.