“Mother Tongue” is a poem by George the Poet (George Mpanga), a British spoken word artist and poet. George the Poet is known for his thought-provoking and socially conscious poetry. His style is characterized by vivid imagery, rhythmic language, and a blend of spoken words and storytelling.

His poem “Mother Tongue” focuses on language, identity, and cultural heritage.

The poem reflects on the power of language and how it shapes our sense of self. It explores the interaction between one’s native language and the languages we learn or adopt. The narrator describes his sadness and frustration about the lack of connection he feels with his parents’ home culture due to their decision not to teach him their mother tongue.

You can watch George the Poet perform “Mother Tongue.”
Here’s the video link

Decreasing reading motivation among students and adults is a trend in Norway and internationally (OECD, 2017). Reading motivation encompasses why someone reads, what they enjoy reading about, and what they think they get out of it (Guthrie & Wigfield, 2000). Reading motivation and engagement affect how well students perform in reading, regardless of their grade level or cultural background. Ryan and Deci (2000) suggested three elements for fostering students’ intrinsic motivation toward reading: a sense of competence, independence, and positive interpersonal connections. Research documents show that learners who are taught reading focused on autonomy, a sense of belonging (relatedness), and competency shows remarkable improvements in their self-driven reading motivation and reading abilities (Orkin et al., 2018).

However, many students do not experience these benefits (Barber et al., 2020). There are different aspects to why people read and how engaged they are in reading, and teachers may use various methods to improve each aspect, especially for students from different linguistic and ethnic backgrounds. Educators claim that children’s desire to read is essential for developing strong reading skills; nevertheless, there is a lack of research focusing on the experiences of multilingual children in this regard (Smith et al., 2023). Being able to speak multiple languages provides a rich and varied perspective, and similarly, reading in different languages offers a wide range of insights and viewpoints.

Reading Motivation through Identity Validation
The poem “Mother Tongue” was chosen because of its engaging form and because it features a young main character with whom students will to some degree be able to identify. Relatability in terms of gender is an especially important factor for young male readers, and the protagonist may help to stimulate interest among the boys in the class. This poem’s oral style is likely to appeal to students: It is composed in a youthful, uncomplicated language and performed in a rap-like tone with strong emphasis on rhythm and rhyme. The poem’s focus is relatable to all students and is a good starting point for reflection on what role languages play in shaping one’s personal identity. When students see their languages and cultures acknowledged in the classroom, it fosters positive self-image. This positive identity, in turn, motivates them to engage with reading materials.

Multilingual Classroom Activities
The teacher used a range of multilingual classroom activities (e.g., listening to a multilingual song, reading a poem, illustrating key lines in posters, working with instruction verbs like decode, reflect and argue) that cater to English as a subject involving different language skills. Students engaged in reading, writing, and speaking tasks which drew on their multilingual abilities.

Language Development
The teacher also helped students develop their vocabulary by using a translation activity to work on the essential vocabulary from the poem. The goal was to balance valuing home languages with ensuring students improved their language skills and succeed academically.

Creating Multilingual Posters
Students work in groups to create posters based on quotes or factual knowledge gained from texts. They may work creatively but still apply knowledge into practice and make it possible for the teacher to observe their understanding. This process activates their language resources and visualizes their understanding of the text.

Whole-Class Discussions
Teachers can facilitate whole-class discussions to sum up group work. These discussions might be collaborative venues for students to share their outcomes, including how they have interpreted texts in different ways and depicted that in their posters. Though whole-class discussions are efficient, they are also challenging. Other solutions to conversations and oral exercises are suggested in resources.

In sum, this teaching approach recognizes that multilingualism may facilitate reading motivation, develop awareness of multilingualism as a resource in accordance with LK20, and enrich the classroom experience. In this Reading trail, we aimed to explore whether using multilingualism can enhance the learning experiences and motivation of readers. The Norwegian curriculum suggests that the potential is immense, stating that students should experience that learning languages is a resource in school and in society (Norwegian Ministry of Education, 2020). Simply recognizing multilingualism as a strength may, in itself, motivate students with other first languages than Norwegian to partake in English class and additionally provide them with a stronger language identity in the classroom.

References

Below are relevant competence aims after year 10 in English as well as relevant perspectives from the interdisciplinary topic “Health and life skills”.

Competence aims after Year 10
The pupil is expected to be able to

• use a variety of strategies for language learning, text creation and communication
• listen to and understand words and expressions in variants of English
• explore and describe some linguistic similarities and differences between English and other languages the pupil is familiar with and use this in one’s own language learning
• read, discuss, and present content from various types of texts, including self-chosen texts
• read, interpret, and reflect on English-language fiction, including young people’s literature
• explore and describe ways of living, ways of thinking, communication patterns and diversity in the English-speaking world

Health and life skills
In the English subject, the interdisciplinary topic of health and life skills refers to developing the ability of the pupils to express themselves in writing and orally in English. This forms the basis for being able to express their feelings, thoughts, experiences and opinions and can provide new perspectives on different ways of thinking and communication patterns, as well as on the pupils’ own way of life and that of others. The ability to handle situations that require linguistic and cultural competence can give pupils a sense of achievement and help them develop a positive self-image and a secure identity.

Download Word-document

Se word-dokument

(Coming)

The Reading trail was designed by the teacher with input from researchers for a class that had not previously talked about/ worked with multilingualism. This implies that both the theoretical aspects related to the topic – such as subject-specific terminology and perspectives on language competence – as well as reflections on the strengths and challenges of multilingualism, can be considered uncharted territory for these students. Multilingualism is the red thread throughout the different stages of the two lessons, which moves from the students’ individual attitudes towards languages in the introduction of the lesson to the text “Mother tongue” and the students’ reactions to and interpretations of this poem.

The introduction (music video and the possible Mentimeter task) is meant as a trigger to raise curiosity about the topic and relate it to personal experiences. 

The reading stage is scaffolded through the introduction of key vocabulary covering words that are likely to be unknown to students.

In the two post-reading activities the students reflect on and express their reactions to the poem in two formats. First, an individual “quick-write” task after reading and watching the poem invites all students to share their thoughts individually. The focus in this task is on getting thoughts down on paper. The second post-reading activity, the poster task, is intended to encourage students to visualize important parts of the poem (see for example Kverndokken, 2018, p. 259). This allows groups to focus in-depth on a portion of the text, interpret its significance, and tie it to the overall theme of the text. Visualizing the text can be especially beneficial for students with low reading competency who struggle to move from decoding individual words and sentences to creating mental images of the text. In addition to this, students are asked to translate key words into other languages they know. This aspect encourages students to use a translanguaging approach and produce a multilingual text that showcases the linguistic diversity of the classroom. It is important that students share their products after finishing them, explaining what they drew and why, which words they translated into which language and reading out the translations.

References
Kverndokken, K. (2018). 101 litteraturdidaktiske grep: om å arbeide med skjønnlitteratur og sakprosa. Fagbokforlaget.

Here we describe reflections on the reading project from the perspective of students, teacher and researchers.

The students’ perspective
In interviews with five students after the conclusion of the lessons, the students stated that they found the unusual lesson design and topic of multilingualism motivating. The students interviewed were all multilingual with other first languages than Norwegian (including Pashto, Polish, Arabic, Armenian, Albanian). They stated that multilingualism had never been a topic in English lessons before, and that they had never previously been encouraged to reflect on the benefits of knowing several languages or been asked to use their existing language resources. They stated that they enjoyed reading the poem, using different languages when illustrating the poem and thinking about their own experiences. As one student said: «Jeg synes det er gøy å snakke om språk og lære nye språk, det synes jeg er gøy. Å lage plakater å sånn, vi pleier ikke å gjøre det i timen. Det var annerledes. » 

The teacher’s perspective
The teacher said that the outcome of the different activities varied a lot among students. Many students struggle with reading in English and a number of students are difficult to motivate for any type of activity. Those who undertook the task with determination exhibited expanded vocabulary and reflections on a previously unfamiliar topic. This became especially clear in the poster activity, where the quality and richness of content differed significantly. The teacher suggested that giving students a degree of choice in this activity would engage a greater number of students: “I think if we had better time, then we would have time to make them choose more themselves.” Another possibility could be giving them the option of carrying out the task in a different (digital) format. Hence, expanding the reading trail with one more lesson may have led to more in-depth work.

Researcher perspective
The interviews with the five students with different home languages show that individual students found the topic and activities motivating and enjoyed the unusual lesson design (including, among other things, music, video, and a multimodal poster activity), which deviated from the lessons they were used to. Most of the students interviewed had interesting things to say about their own attitudes towards languages and the poem. When asked for their interpretations of the poem in the interviews, four of the five showed an ability to connect the poet’s experiences to their own lives, indicating a high level of reading comprehension and reflection. 

The interviews also showed that the students recognized the usefulness of their existing language skills when learning English, and several of them gave examples of similarities between words in English and in their home languages. However, this way of comparing languages was not encouraged by the teacher during the project and, according to students, not something they were asked to do in other English lessons. The only language drawn on as a point of comparison in the lessons was Norwegian, which was used for translation of vocabulary. This presented a detour for many of the migrant students with other first languages. It would have been more productive for these students to include their first languages or other languages they know (possibly in addition to Norwegian) as encouraged by the curriculum. That said, it is understandable that foreign language teachers find it challenging to make use of the varieties of first languages present in their classroom as they are, most likely, primarily proficient in Norwegian and English and cannot be expected to guide or adjust other languages in class. The intention of the competence aim and the tacit knowledge and interpretation of it has perhaps not yet developed among teachers. Thus, what is expected of teachers and how they address the aim may vary. A greater amount of dialogue between the teacher and researchers before the project could also have helped to reach a common understanding of the relevant curriculum aims. 

The most important objectives of the project were to encourage reflection on the benefits of multilingualism and the theme of the poem “Mother Tongue”, in which the poet describes how his parents decided against teaching him their mother tongue and the longing he feels for this part of his identity and home culture. The lesson was designed to allow several opportunities to engage in reflections and discussions about these aims. To accomplish this, however, one needs to organize the class and lessons in a manner that demands and allows the students to collaborate. This shows a need to build a cooperative class environment and to tailor the different stages of the project carefully to the student groups in question to elicit the intended reflection and engagement. 

In particular, the whole-class discussions can often be difficult to conduct in an effective way, especially in classes with a high number of students. A typical situation is that only a few students take part actively while the majority are reluctant to share their views, sometimes because of insecurities or a classroom culture which has developed over time. This potential pitfall became clear in the lesson, with students proving much more willing to share their thoughts on the text in group interviews after the lesson than within the whole-class discussion. Assessing what will work in different classes and adapting methodology accordingly will always be pivotal.   

NAFO – Nationalt senter for flerkulturell opplæring: https://nafo.oslomet.no/ressurser/flerspraklige-ressurser/

Articles
Krulatz, A. & Iversen, J. (2019). Building Inclusive Language Classroom Spaces through Multilingual Writing Practices for Newly-Arrived Students in Norway. Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research 64(3), s. 372–388. https://doi.org/10.1080/00313831.2018.1557741