As part of a Teaching and Learning Center workshop on Languages, we asked participants and other GC instructors to share activities they’ve done that leverage multilingualism in the classroom. Here are some examples:

1. 1. In a literature survey class, you can encourage students to read text in their original language if they can and allow them to use secondary sources in any of their languages for research projects. You can also asks students to present on translation by showing and reading out texts in the original and (various) English translations.
   2. You can ask students about languages that they know or that they’re trying to learn, and then assigning peer review groups (at least once during the semester) matching students who know and students who are learning a language and encouraging them to conduct it in both / either / a mixture. This would also work for discussion groups
   3. Alternatively, you can do jigsaw activities where you ask multilingual students to find an article in an academic journal (or in a popular news source, depending on the task) in a language that they speak and that has to do with a topic that their group is considering. This broadens everyone’s knowledge (including the instructor’s) of the topic under discussion and treats multilingualism for what it is (a huge affordance and a resource rather than something that needs to be “overcome”)
   4. You can ask students to go and photograph their “linguistic landscape” — the language(s) that they notice in their neighborhood, on the train, at school, and elsewhere — and to discuss what they found when they were specifically paying attention to language use. You can ask students where they see other languages and when they expect that the audience is monolingual, even if we’re living in a city with a wide variety of languages. Such activities highlight our own expectations when it comes to language use.
   5. In a media class or any class that incorporates video, you can do a crowdsourcing activity where you allow students to find and post (to a course site, for example) adaptations of a movie or video from their linguistic or cultural background.
   6. As a close reading assignment you can have students look at different translations of a text, after which you ask them to work in small groups looking at a (selection of) a text for the course. You can then ask students to translate a short passage  either into a language they know into a different dialect, style or form in the same language as the original. After this, have students analyze the original passage and the new translation they have made. What kinds of differences are there? What were some of the decisions about language and syntax that had to be made to translate it?

Do you have an activity you want to share, please let us know! Join our group or email ankegeertsma [at] gmail.com.

A huge thanks to Elizabeth Alsop, Kaitlin Mondello, Inés Vañó García, Jing Zhao, Angelique Aristondo, Michael E. Rolland and Lindsey Albracht for sharing these activities.