Multilingualism in teaching : A study of how pupils in grade 5 use their languages as a tool for understanding

The aim of the study is to investigate how multilingualism can be expressed in a classroom. With the aid of a qualitative approach applying the sociocultural perspective and with translanguaging as a theoretical framework, a fifth-grade class has been observed during three lessons in Swedish and mathematics. The class teacher was also asked to answer questions by email about how the pupils’ multilingualism was manifested in the classroom. The result shows that the teacher promotes the pupils’ opportunities for developing knowledge, language and identity by letting them translate words and summaries of texts from Swedish into their mother tongue. The pupils are helped by being allowed to use their multilingualism since they can help each other with words they do not understand and can carry on conversations with each other with no linguistic obstacles. By working in language groups, the pupils are allowed to converse with each other by switching between their languages and thereby creating further conditions for accomplishing the tasks with which they are presented