In schools and teacher education in Denmark, ‘cooperative learning’ and similar learning methods are often designed in a manner where group roles are clearly assigned, and interactional progression is scripted. Such patterns are said to function as a guard against “off-task behavior”, and thus aid students in solving the assignment and facilitating learning (e.g., Stenlev 2003; Kagan and Stenlev 2010). In this conceptualization, talk not directly oriented at the assignment is viewed as undesirable. Moreover, such directives are thought to be crucial for multilingual students’ learning, who are considered to lack key linguistic resources when the language of instruction is not their first language. However, such recommendations run counter to findings in studies of language play (Cook 2000; Tarone 2000; Belz 2002; Cekaite & Aronsson 2005; Pomerantz & Bell 2011), which have found language play is not necessarily a distraction to communication, but rather often functions as a facilitator for language learning, identity work, and student wellbeing. For example, Pomerantz and Bell (2011) showed how a group of foreign language learners “constructed new ways of interacting and new subject positions” (158) through language play and humor. This paper aims to demonstrate how students’ interests and identities are inherent in their language play during different researcher-generated literacy assignments in the classroom. It argues that language play, rather than being universally disruptive can aid students’ learning processes by synthesizing findings from three consecutive, iterative studies of different peer-groups of multilingual students participating in a large-scale longitudinal project, Signs of language (Laursen & Kolstrup 2018a, 2018b, forthcoming). The participating students in two of the groups were in year 7 (age 12-13) while the students in the third group were in year 9 (age 14.15).

In the three studies, different and intersecting forms of language play, as described by Cook (2000), stood out: We observed language play 1) with linguistic form, when one group repeated syllables from a word in the text in focus accompanied by explicit statements of joy; 2) with semantics, when another group, while visibly amused, created an imaginative world where one of the students was an Egyptian princess who had died and was about to be mummified – a process that paralleled the scientific process of mummification explained in the text at hand; and 3) with pragmatics, when the third group continuously engaged in stylizations of accents and gender, and when they tested out racial and national categorizations on each other, making their own and their peer’s identities an item of play.

The first part of the paper demonstrates how language play in the three groups is not a mere distraction to the interaction or the assignment at hand, as implied by Stenlev (2003), but rather a means to the students’ continued interest and personal investment in doing the assignment well. The second part of the paper discusses the implications of these findings for teachers and teacher educators, drawing on previous literature of language play and creative language use (Kramsch 2009; Cook 2000; Laursen 2019) and translanguaging pedagogy (García et al 2017). In this discussion, we focus especially on how those in teacher education can use such research to challenge teachers’ oftentimes conservative viewpoint of student language, and accordingly soften dichotomies between on-task and off-task behavior. In this way, the paper adds to current scholarship in educational research by showing how this research-based view of language play dovetails with efforts to conceptualize student interest as dynamic and continuously developing during classroom activities. Its findings also specify the pedagogical and epistemological benefits from embracing a holistic view on student identity to encompass students full linguistic and cultural repertoires.

The data in this paper comes from the largescale longitudinal study, Signs of language, a 10-year qualitative project (2008-2018) focusing on exploring and improving multilingual children’s literacy skills in Danish schools (Laursen 2019). The study followed the same five school classes in five different cities from their first year through to their final tenth year of compulsory schooling. All five classes were characterized by high linguistic diversity. Twice a year, each class participated in two researcher-generated activities and a lengthier activity developed by their own teachers and a research assistant. The researcher-generated activities were developed by the project’s PI, in close collaboration with the five research assistants who were employed at different teacher education colleges nearby the participating schools. The interventions were characterized by focusing on exploring classroom designs that would create more opportunities for multilingual students to participate in the classroom, e.g., pushed output, drawing on students’ linguistic repertoire; and/or on gaining insight into students’ thoughts, feelings, and attitudes about literacy. All interventions were video recorded, and student products were collected or photographed. This paper focuses specially on two of the researcher-generated interventions: one in year 7, called Legogloss, and one in year 9 focusing on multimodality. Two of the studies in this paper (Laursen & Kolstrup 2018a, 2018b) draw on data from the Legogloss intervention while the third study (Laursen & Kolstrup, forthcoming) draws on the one about multimodality. In the Legogloss intervention in year 7 (age 12-13), students were asked to read a text individually, take notes, and then rewrite the text in collaboration based on their notes. In the intervention about multimodality, the participating group is in year 9, and students were asked to produce a multilingual and multimodal product based on a short introduction showing five examples of multimodal and multilingual advertisements. Approximately 40 groups of 3-4 students across the five schools participated in each of the researcher-generated activities. Each of the groups in focus here were chosen for further analysis because they stood out by living up to the hoped for academic purpose with the literacy assignments, and they all seemed to be engaged and have fun while doing so. For the analysis, the recordings were transcribed by a student assistant, whereafter we looked through them many times while detailing the transcript. Central excerpts were transcribed according to the conventions of Conversation Analysis (ten Have 2007) to capture both verbal and non-verbal communication.

The paper discusses three outcomes that are especially relevant for teachers and teacher educators who are concerned with supporting the academic learning of multilingual students. First, enhancing teacher understanding of the connections between, and benefits of, language play and language learning, can help teachers better identify and encourage language play as well as designing for it. Previous research shows how such designs have the benefit of more engaged and motivated students and can support students’ academic learning and metalinguistic awareness (Laursen 2019). This involves a more nuanced view on dualisms about students’ talk being either on-task or off-task, as implied by Stenlev (2003), to take seriously the relevance and learning potentials of creative language use (Cook 2000; Kramsch 2009). Second, the paper illustrates the value of planning activities that take students’ interests and their investments in the activities and social relations into account. This is by no means a novel suggestion but rather one that has infused the educational system in, at least, a Scandinavian context for decades through Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development and the associated metaphors of scaffolding. In this regard, we wish to further explore the prospects of Martin-Beltrán et al.’s (2017) concept of ‘zone of relevance’. Finally, synthesizing the two previous points, a nuanced view of language as complex and interest as a dynamic entity can aid the awareness and attentiveness to student identity. In todays’ global societies, the multilingual student is increasingly no longer the exception, and should be positioned as somebody with a repertoire of language and knowledge which they can and are encouraged to draw upon in their learning (García & Kleyn 2016; García et al 2017; Laursen 2019).

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