Multimodal tools for exploring communicative practices among multilingual students in remote central Australia

Emerging research on linguistic diversity and critical language awareness has highlighted the importance of understanding and affirming the complex and dynamic language ecologies (see Simpson et al., and Angelo et al., this volume) of the community in classrooms (Fairclough, 1992; Garcia, 2015; Carter, Angelo and Hudson, 2018; Ollerhead, 2018). This orientation demands novel ways of including children's perspectives on their own linguistic practices, identities and learning needs in research, policy and practice. This paper describes two arts-informed, multimodal language awareness activities: language portraits (Wolf, 2014; Busch, 2016) and interactional language network maps (Dagenais and Berron, 2001; Prasad, 2014; Smythe and Toohey, 2009). These were used in a larger study of the way in which Warlpiri students in a remote bilingual school in Australia's Northern Territory understand and represent their diverse communicative practices. Students made strong connections between language and identity and expressed sophisticated awareness of their own language use. The tools revealed the depth and variety of linguistic resources and cultural funds of knowledge that students in a remote community bring to their classrooms and raised questions about how this knowledge might be harnessed to enrich learning in multilingual classrooms.