How to utilise students’ cultural and linguistic experiences to promote language learning: Looking beyond the school

This article will first give an overview of multicultural, multilingual Britain and place it within the context of community literacy. It will then discuss education reforms and policies that have aimed to place multicultural and multiple literacy at their centre before considering theoretical basis for current understanding of additional language learning in the UK. Then the article describes a project, based on ethnographic case studies of an early years centre and its reception classes. Preliminary results and conclusions are discussed.