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.