In response to a growing number of students facing barriers participating in mainstream lessons taught in German (i.e., language of instruction), policymakers in Austria introduced segregated language-support measures in 2018/19: German Language Support Classes (GLSC; 15 hours per week of pull-out instruction) and German Language Support Courses (GLSCO; 6 hours per week of pull-out instruction) (BMBWF, 2024). These German language support measures reflect a monolingual tradition that prioritizes the dominant language over others, a pattern also seen in other European countries (Gogolin, 2021). Consequently, Austrian schools fail to leverage students’ diverse linguistic resources, as German continues to dominate the school system and serves as the key language for academic achievement (Schwab et al., 2024).

Despite these policies, students with migration biographies bring diverse linguistic repertoires and lived multilingual experiences, even as their first languages are often confined to the private sphere (Duarte, 2019; Martini & Torregrossa, 2023). It is therefore crucial to examine how students in a monolingual school perceive and describe their multilingualism. This paper analyzes the self-representations of students attending GLSC and GLSCO by examining their language portraits, an educational and research tool used to make individuals’ linguistic repertoires visible (Busch, 2021). The study addresses two questions: how children visually represent their multilingual repertoires through language portraits.

This study is based on qualitative data from the longitudinal research project “A Multiperspective Study on German Language Support Classes” (2022-2025), of Viennese primary and secondary school students. It focuses on the language portraits of primary school children (n = 123) from 21 Austrian primary schools, between the ages of 6 and 10. Vienna has the largest number of elementary school students whose native language is not German, making up 60.5% of the cohort (Statistik Austria, 2025) providing a particularly relevant research context. Language portraits are a participatory research tool that encourages students to represent their spoken languages on a human silhouette that resembles them, explicitly representing their own bodies (Soares, 2021). Because of the multilingual background of the research team, participants could draw on their multilingual resources. During the interviews, the children were first invited to choose a color for each language or dialect they speak and to place these colors on a human silhouette, which symbolically represents them, by associating languages with specific areas of the body thus allowing the expression of emotions or experiences linked to each language (Busch, 2010). Follow-up questions regarding choices of color, placement of languages and general reflection of their drawings and symbols give participants the opportunity to enhance and express their linguistic identity orally. Because of the combination of a drawing task followed by a narrative description, the language portrait technique is also called a multimodal research method (Busch, 2018). This approach allows us to understand how students live and experience language more specifically, the embodiment, the social and emotional experience of language (Weidl & Erling, 2025). The interviews were then transcribed verbatim by our team of researchers. They were analyzed afterwards using a thematic analysis method where patterns were found (Braun & Clarke, 2006). The collected data was analyzed following the six steps for thematic analysis as defined by Braun and Clarke (2006).

Preliminary findings suggest recurrent placement patterns, particularly involving the heart, head/brain, national flags, and hands/arms, which are in line with previous work in this field. First languages were most often linked to the heart or the head, and that students frequently selected colors inspired by the national flags of the countries associated with these languages. The heart, as a central body part and vital organ, is construed as a site of intimacy (Busch, 2018) and linguistic expression, and as the locus of the L1 where emotions are deeply embedded (Pavlenko, 2012). When asked to describe the drawings and thus the hearts, children used expressions such as “giving strength”, “my heart wants to talk Turkish”, “I like Persian very much”, “Chinese is my mother tongue that’s why it’s in the heart”, “Macedonian is spoken at home” or “when I speak, it always comes from somewhere around here”. While some portraits explicitly placed only one language in the heart, others showed either a divided heart (one field for German and one for the L1) or two hearts side by side (one for Turkish and one for German) without any explicit hierarchy. Positioning children’s L1 in the head can be related to conceptualizations of the L1 as the language of thinking and knowing (Peters & Coetzee-VanRooy, 2020). Some children placed all their languages in the head (“All my main languages are in my head”), while a few located their L1 there with reasons like “I think in Turkish,” “I remember Serbian well,” “I first learned Arabic,” or “Because I sometimes speak in this language, or I pick up a word in this language very quickly, think of this word, and then use it”. These findings advance research on GLSC/GLSCO by illuminating students’ self-portrayals and multilingualism within a largely monolingual school system.

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