Nineteenth International Conference on Diversity in Organizations, Communities & Nations

Abstract

The current reality in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) classrooms is characterized by super-diversity. Students in today’s classrooms compose a multilingual and multicultural total with different needs, expectations, interests, and constraints. These super-diverse classrooms give teachers a multidimensional role. In order to respond to the new reality, scholars searched for ways and methods in which to exploit their students’ full potential. To that Cummins (2001) supports that students’ performance in the classroom is improved when students feel that their identity is valued in the teaching process. This paper presents an identity text activity that inspired and developed from the researchers’ participation on a post-graduate course Language Education for Migrants and Refugees. We applied the activity in two learning environments: a multilingual-multicultural formal educational setting in Athens, a multilingual class in a general education school, and in a formal educational setting in a DYEP class in the island of Chios. The activity’s aim, which focused on producing multimodal “products” that students create and “invest their own identities in producing them”, was to give them opportunities to participate, to come forward their dual identities and the students to discover who their classmates are. Students were encouraged to share their thoughts using any means and language available to them. The final part of the paper suggests some creative activities that were based on students’ identity texts and encourage the development of the multiple languages/identities that exist in these classrooms.