Resumen de Aspects of agency and sense of belonging: multilingual learners challenging monolingual literacy practices
Multilingualism is a recognised asset in contemporary educational discourse. In Finland, the current national core curriculum for basic education [Finnish National Agency for Education, 2014. Finnish core curriculum. Finnish National Agency for Education] takes pupils’ linguistically and culturally diverse backgrounds into account in multiple ways, for instance using students’ multilingual resources for learning. Despite this, however, multilingual pupils’ perspectives and expectations have not been adequately investigated. The aim of this article is to explore linguistically diverse pupils’ agency and sense of belonging related to literacy practices. The data of our study consisted of survey responses from pupils (N = 38), pupils’ interviews (N = 5), classroom observation in two lower secondary schools and field notes. In this article, we argue that multilingual literacy practices are unsystematic and that all pupil perspectives are not taken into account at school. For example, pupils expressed that they needed more support from teachers to cope with the literary practices at school. Additionally, sometimes the voice of multilingual pupils was silenced. To deliver more socially just L2-education, school practices related to multilingualism and literacies should be discussed critically, as pupils’ voices are the foundation for such transformation and development in this area.
