Playing with languages through languages

Abstract

This paper presents and discusses multilingual workshops developed and tested in the project Tværsproglighed ilæreruddannelsen (Plurilingual Approaches to Teacher Education) focused on the development of plurilingual approaches in teacher education in Denmark. We discuss the guiding principles underlying the joint teaching of English and French in teacher education. Our aim was to involve all our students and to ensure the development of a genuine plurilingual gaze and for them to take an additive approach (Holmen 2019) by not only teaching the students together, but also organisingthem in a manner which necessitated interdisciplinary collaboration. Furthermore, we consider the implications of a plurilingual approach to language learning with undergraduate students in teacher education, Danish lower secondary pupils, and their teachers. We exemplify how the inclusion of artefacts such as LEGO inspired by playful learning (Händel et al. 2021) in the development of multilingual activities promoted a willingness for undergraduate students and lower secondary pupils to participate. Our choice of LEGO had two main purposes: to inspire students to design their own activities for a given target group, focusing on a playful approach to learning, and to get students to focus less on themselves and to engage their entire linguistic repertoire.