Developing teachers’ critical language awareness through multilingual digital multimodal composing in Australian primary classrooms

Abstract

Attention to critical language awareness has substantially increased in Anglosphere countries, particularly within translanguaging scholarship. However, students’ home language practices can still be positioned solely as a pedagogical tool – a scaffold for learning English – rather than valued in their own right. In this paper, we build on our previous research on digital multimodal composing (DMC) by exploring how multilingual DMC can afford the development of a teacher’s critical language awareness (CLA). We focus on a telling case of one in-service English-as-an-additional-language (EAL) primary teacher who incorporated multilingual digital multimodal composing into her EAL classroom during a 2-day (non-consecutive) professional learning course. We analysed curriculum documents, classroom photos and videos, lesson plans, teacher’s written reflections, student digital multimodal texts and students’ oral reflections through the lens of DMC orchestration. Our findings indicated that joint orchestration, particularly for the designer role and the linguistic and aural modes, helped to develop the teachers’ CLA. Potential opportunities for CLA development via spatial and visual modes were also identified. Implications for teachers’ professional learning are discussed.

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