Multilingual awareness and heritage language education: children's multimodal representations of their multilingualism

TLDR

The study analyzes visual narratives of multilingual children to explore how they perceive and represent their multilingual selves. The authors examine drawings from Portuguese heritage language students in Germany, treating them as multimodal translanguaging narratives to assess how children depict and understand their multilingual repertoires. The analysis identifies five patterns of multilingual self‑representation, ranging from juxtaposition to coordination of linguistic resources, and shows that children’s drawings reveal a nuanced multilingual awareness.

Abstract

In this article, we analyse visual narratives of multilingual children, in order to acknowledge their self-perception as multilingual selves. Through the analysis of drawings produced by children enrolled in Portuguese as heritage language (PHL) classes in Germany, we analyse how bi-/multilingual children perceive their multilingual repertoires and depict the relationship between the various multilingual and semiotic resources. The analysis describes five tendencies of representation of the multilingual self, covering diverse representations from juxtaposition to coordination of linguistic resources, and using several visual resources, such as flags and speech bubbles. The integrated analysis of children's linguistic and visual resources clarifies how they perceive their multilingualism and uncovers their multilingual awareness. We will (1) reflect on some pedagogical and political challenges that PHL classes in Germany face, regarding the enhancement of a deeper multilingual awareness; and (2) evaluate the data collection methodology, i.e. drawings as narratives about multilingualism or ‘multimodal translanguaging’, namely its validity and usefulness in order to understand children's perceptions about multilingualism and about their multilingual selves.