Page 67 - Diversity in Action

Global Citizenship Education and English Learning through Picturebooks

for holistic engagement, with the ultimate goal of helping learners explore
themes/language in-depth and make them their own. The nine steps sug-
gest that teachers can ‘arouse interest, attention and curiosity; make vocab-
ulary memorable; engage with the story; facilitate initial comprehension;
retell or act out; think from within the story; explore issues; transfer; inter-
nalise’ (Read, 2008, pp. 7–9). The last four steps draw on teachers’ questions
and creative teacher talk to explore themes such as those linked with GCED
while scaffolding the development of children’s higher order thinking in mul-
tilingual classrooms.

Stories in Plurilingual and English Learning
Picturebook mediation and creative teacher talk can be effectively integrated
withtranslanguagingstrategiesinmultilingualteachingapproaches.Schools
serve as a microcosm of our increasingly multilingual society, which includes
not only migrants who speak a range of languages but also speakers of mi-
nority languages, especially in border regions. The coexistence of these di-
verse languages in one area is often referred to as multilingualism, while an
individual’s developing competence in two or more languages is referred
to as plurilingualism (Council of Europe, 2001). Classrooms frequently in-
clude plurilingual pupils, and disregarding their competences in multiple
languages can be considered a form of exclusion. Multilingual classrooms
should be recognised as the norm and learners’ plurilingualism should be
acknowledged and valued. Viewed through a GCED lens, plurilingual teach-
ing and learning in the classroom appear not only congruent but natural
and fundamental. Moreover, plurilingual learning provides multiple learning
affordances for young learners and is congruent with principles of inclusion.
In multilingual contexts, a variety of strategies are used to scaffold learner
understanding, motivation, and active participation.
Oneeffectivestrategy is translanguaging, a term introduced by Baker
(2001) to translate a Welsh concept used in Wales, particularly by the edu-
cationalist Cen Williams in 1994. Translanguaging refers to the deliberate,
planned, and systematic use of multiple languages for teaching and learn-
ing purposes. Scholars such as Wei (2018) and Kirsch (2024) have argued that
these multilingual practices support both teachers and learners in problem
solving and knowledge construction, making them a natural fit with con-
structivist pedagogies that view individuals as active meaning makers.
Monolingual English picturebooks can be used in a beginner class by
adopting a translanguaging approach. Teachers often aim for reading ses-
sionsto beinteractiveandto develophigher-orderthinkingskills.In theearly

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