Making It happen
When these challenges arise, we encourage schools to tap into research and proven practices. For instance, leading experts like Jim Cummins explain the development of everyday communication (BICS) and deeper academic language skills (CALP), which commonly takes at least six years, so that international educators can understand multilingual learners’ language learning journeys. Recent studies (e.g., Carbonara & Scibetta, 2020; Cummins & Persad, 2014; García & Kleyn, 2016) show that multilingual teaching approaches, such as pedagogical translanguaging – intertwining languages and keeping them together rather than separate – not only improves academic performance but also enhances literacy in both home and school languages, boosts metalinguistic awareness, fosters collaboration, builds inclusive learning environments and validates multilingual learners’ identities. One could even go so far as to say that it unlocks limitless learning.
Sharing this understanding with families is crucial. By doing so, we strengthen the home-school partnership that underpins every student’s success.
A helpful visual overview of this research can be seen in this figure from Chaika, 2023:
Creating lasting change takes time. It calls for whole-school collaboration, ongoing teacher development, and a clearly shared vision that everyone in the community can rally around. Across our network of more than 90 schools, we see this vision taking shape. Each school is at its own stage in the journey, but they are all united by a shared dedication to creating linguistically inclusive spaces, celebrating diversity, and continually striving to grow as educators and learners.
Together, we’re building curious and confident multilingual minds.
“As a Learning.First organisation, we put learners and their learning at the centre of everything we do.”
*This term refers to the concept that the norms, structures and content of learning assume that learners have multilingual identities and unique linguistic repertoires and that these should be utilised to facilitate multilingual competencies and learning spaces that are favourable for the development of multilingualism.
