Multilingual communication under the radar : how multilingual children challenge the dominant monolingual discourse in a super-diverse, early years educational setting in England

The operant “one nation – one language” model in Western culture has resulted in linguistic hegemony being almost universally presented as an uncontentious reality. This article accepts Foucault’s challenge to deconstruct this officially sanctioned “truth” by looking at how the educational system in England legitimises the discourse that speaking English is normal, marginalising multilingual practices. Data is drawn from a year-long study of thirty “super-diverse” children in an inner-city school in the north of England. The research presents language portraits in which the children demonstrate they have internalised the rhetoric that English should be spoken in school. These are contrasted with ethnographic observations which provide co-constructed researcher-pupil cartoons representing social interactions in a range of contexts. The illustrations demonstrate how the children challenge the idealisation of English language in school by operating spatial agency in which they seek (and find) opportunities in peripheral and liminal spaces to speak their own language.