Drawing from a linguistic ethnographic project in accommodated language education for adult learners with intellectual disability, PTSD or migration stress, this paper engages with the sensing pedagogic body. We explore three language teachers’ recurring physical exercise and relaxation activities in their language courses, including music and images. We expand on previous findings of similar activities in a detailed account of these embodied activities as aesthetic and ethical, breaking with normative temporality and logocentrism, in line with crip theory. Building on both a Levinasian and Deleuzian perspective, we foreground the listening-resonating subject in multisensorial interactions entangled with materialities, and learning as ongoing. The findings contribute new knowledge on the role of aesthetics and relational ethics in this type of embodied space, of relevance to both educational research and practice, in accommodated language education and beyond. The findings also contribute to scholarly debate about representing subjects and subjectivity in linguistic ethnography.

The paper builds on ethnographic fieldwork in a Language Introduction program for recently arrived students in an upper secondary school in Sweden. In a short period of time, this program prepares students for using Swedish as an academic language, in order to enter a national program. One response to this challenge is that schools allocate the recently arrived students to level-based groups. We contribute new knowledge about this practice by focusing on the nature of teacher support in one beginner group and one more advanced group, based on ethnographic data from classroom observations and interviews. Drawing from language scaffolding theory, we show how the teachers in both groups initiated collaborative dialogue. This dialogue was most prominent in peer work in the advanced group, affording space for flexible language use and affective-relational dimensions. The peer work seemingly compensated for less teacher bridging to students’ previous language resources, less explicit feedback, and less use of multimodality. The findings contribute new knowledge about how teachers accommodate beginner learners in their everyday teaching, although accommodating all students was not feasible. Other possible ways of grouping and supporting learners while closely attending to learner development could be explored further.

Artikeln bygger på etnografiskt fältarbete i ett språkintroduktionsprogram för nyanlända elever i en gymnasieskola i Sverige. Detta program förbereder eleverna på att använda akademisk svenska för att på kort tid kunna komma in på ett nationellt gymnasieprogram. En respons på denna utmaning är att skolorna delar in de nyanlända eleverna i nivåbaserade grupper. Vi bidrar med ny kunskap om denna praktik genom att fokusera på hur lärarstödet ser ut i en nybörjargrupp och en mer avancerad grupp, baserat på etnografiska data från klassrumsobservationer och intervjuer. Med utgångspunkt i teori om språklig stöttning visar vi att lärarna i båda grupperna initierade kollaborativ dialog. Denna samarbetsdialog var mer framträdande i elevdialog i smågrupper i den avancerade gruppen, vilket gav utrymme för flexibel språkanvändning och affektiva-relationella dimensioner. Det arbetet kompenserade till synes för en minskning av lärarens överbryggning till elevernas tidigare språkliga resurser samt minskade användning av explicit återkoppling och multimodalitet. Resultaten bidrar med ny kunskap om lärares sätt att tillmötesgå nybörjarelever i deras dagliga undervisning, fastän det inte var möjligt att tillmötesgå alla elevers behov. Andra möjliga sätt att gruppera och stödja eleverna och deras utveckling skulle kunna undersökas ytterligare.

Drawing on a larger project on teaching Swedish as a second language to migrant upper secondary school students in Sweden, this paper focuses on one teacher’s literature class and a book-group discussion about a graphic novel based on Selma Lagerlöf’s A Tale of a Manor. The aim was to contribute to further knowledge on the dialogic potential of teacher-led literary discussions on graphic novels with language learners, by focusing on the cumulative aspect of the interaction. We also analyzed the teacher’s role and how it affected the students’ responses and interpretations. Our findings show how the cumulative dialogue created new student insights relating to the novel’s protagonists, literary themes and the saga genre, which is central in Lagerlöf’s novels, and how literary concepts and visual cues were used as resources for interpretation. The discussion of the graphic novel included multifaceted and multimodal analyses, in which the teacher urged the students to formulate interpretations and responses anchored in both the written text and the images. This teacher-led dialogue holds great potential for encouraging students’ literary reading, as well as their confidence when it comes to giving responses to literature, which is of relevance to similar languageand literature teaching contexts.

I det här blogginlägget ställer jag frågan hur vi kan samtala mer om flerspråkighet i skolan. Utgångspunkten är ett pilotprojekt i en förberedelseklass med nyanlända högstadieungdomar i Sverige. Tillsammans med lärare i svenska som andraspråk utformade vi ett temaarbete om flerspråkig medvetenhet som lyfter elevers och lärares erfarenheter av flerspråkig användning och språktillägnande (se Hedman & Fisher, 2022a, b). I temaarbetet deltog ytterligare en språklärare samt elevernas studiehandledare.

This paper builds on a collaborative pilot project on Critical Multilingual Language Awareness (CMLA) in a linguistically diverse Preparatory Class with migrant adolescents in Sweden. Importantly, the approach involved Multilingual Study Mentors (MSMs), whose role normally is to provide scaffolding in the strongest language of recently arrived students to facilitate learning in the language of instruction. Previous research has shown that MSMs are left at the margins of education. This paper explores some of the many audio-recorded conversations on multilingualism between the six MSMs and the students as scenarios of possibility (Heath, S. B. 2000. “Seeing Our Way into Learning.” Cambridge Journal of Education 30 (1): 121–132. doi:10.1080/03057640050005816), facilitated by the MSMs' widened epistemic authority and invested symbolic self (Kramsch, C. 2011. “The Symbolic Dimensions of the Intercultural.” Language Teaching 44 (3): 354–367. doi:10.1017/s0261444810000431). Through their careful positionings and personal involvement, students were encouraged to engage in various themes on multilingualism via co-learning processes and translingual practices, beyond the mere display of accurate and efficient communication in the majority language, hence, moving towards increased student participation. These findings demonstrate the potential MSMs – or possibly other community members – have to shape co-learning that is of importance to CMLA.

I denna text diskuterar vi sambedömning i modersmålsämnet och ger konkreta förslag på hur modersmålslärare kan arbeta med och utveckla en sambedömningspraktik. Vi presenterar också tidigare forskning om sambedömning utifrån två teoretiska utgångspunkter: Den första utgångspunkten är en social syn på lärande baserad på forskarna Jean Lave och Etienne Wengers studier av lärande i en praktikgemenskap. Dessa forskare intresserade sig för hur medarbetare lär av varandra, till exempel genom att mindre erfarna lär av de som har större kunskap inom ett visst område. Den andra teoretiska utgångspunkten handlar om vad som karaktäriserar och främjar en professionell dialog i sambedömning. I den professionella dialogen har deltagarna vanligen olika roller, där någon kan ha mer inflytande än andra, vilket ofta gäller sambedömning i modersmålsämnet. 

This paper explores the role of collaborative teacher agency in facilitating translingual adjustments in a linguistically diverse primary school in Sweden. We focus on three multicompetent language teachers, who taught minoritized languages in the marginalized Mother Tongue (MT) subject, Modern Languages, and offered Multilingual Study Mentoring. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork, including teacher interviews and fieldnotes from everyday MT practices and preparations for an annual musical performance, we investigated how the teachers adjusted to the students’ multilingual repertoires through relational agency and distributed expertise (Edwards, A. 2011. Building common knowledge at the boundaries between professional practices: Relational agency and relational expertise in systems of distributed expertise. International Journal of Educational Research 50(1). 33–39). These adjustments affected the offered language provisions beyond what was required, based on students’ linguistic competencies and parental involvement. Didactic adjustments also afforded migrant students literary experiences that starkly contrasted with the limited literacy content in beginner courses in Swedish. These “responsive professional actions” (Edwards, A. 2011. Building common knowledge at the boundaries between professional practices: Relational agency and relational expertise in systems of distributed expertise. International Journal of Educational Research 50(1). 33–39, p. 39) thus impacted on the students’ opportunities for multilingual development, expanded language registers, including verbal art, and linguistic inclusion. Through these actions, language was reformulated as asset, and we find that an ethics of care (Watkins, M. 2011. Teachers’ tears and the affective geography of the classroom. Emotion, Space and Society 4(3). 137–143) was closely intertwined with this relational agency. The findings contribute new knowledge on the role of collaborative teacher agency in diverse settings also of relevance to other national contexts.