Deivis D. Pothin

I was thinking about my pupils and the linguistic diversity in my classroom this year. At the moment I have 25 pupils in my class. About half of them speak Arabic as fluently as English. Others come from mixed ethnic backgrounds: Britain, The Caribbean, Thailand, Holland, etc. One of my pupils was born in Amsterdam, grew up speaking Dutch, Arabic, English and understands a bit of German. Other two boys started last week and are at the early stages of second language learning acquisition, still developing their basic interpersonal communication skills in English. And we are just talking purely about language, not to mention the interactional, social, cultural, identity and religious aspects that come with the language. Now you can have an idea of what it is like to teach in a multilingual classroom – not an easy task, but certainly a fascinating one.

I was looking at the website of the Centre of Multilingualism in Education from London Metropolitan University and found Jim Cummins’s PowerPoint presentation about Multilingualism and Equity and here’s my favourite slide:

PS. For the complete PPT presentation, click here.

Today I received an email from Beatriz Fontana, my friend and former lecturer at Unisinos, telling me about a weblog project with her students. It’s interesting to notice how language learners interact through comments or hyperlinks, and the discourse used when talking about themselves or their own learning – lots of questions that would need a long post to write about – or a master’s dissertation, like I did. In the meantime, take a look at these weblogs published by some Brazilian language learners and leave a comment

AlexEnglish
Bartira Almeida
Shinigagne
Adriana Soares
Andreia Flores
Fran Gaspareto

It’s been 6 months since I last posted on this weblog but believe me, being a primary school teacher and a blogger is not as easy as it seems. I got swamped with work in order to maintain and improve the recently improved results of the last Ofsted inspection and had no energy (or time) to post.

I’ve recently arrived from Brazil where I spent all the summer holidays with my family and friends. I really needed to get away from this frantic routine. The school is still being refurbished and the last two days were a mix of dust, messy rooms and endless ICT jobs to be done. I will truly come back to real life tomorrow, when children restart school. Until the next summer holidays I will continue to dream with the blue skies of southern Brazil and the marvellous sunset of Guaiba river, in Porto Alegre.