Linguistic solitude and classroom belonging: tracing the experiences of sole-speakers of a home language in a primary school plurilingual approach

Mainstream classroom teachers are increasingly being called on to affirm pupils' linguistic identity and to use plurilingual repertoires as didactic resources for learning. Multilingual pedagogical approaches often point to the value of enabling pupils to use their home language in group work and discussions, yet little research has explored the perspectives of pupils who are the only speakers of their language in a class. This paper explores how such pupils participate and interact when their teachers begin to implement 'Functional Multilingual Learning' in their highly linguistically diverse primary school in a socio-economically deprived area of Brussels, Belgium. Drawing on classroom video and pupil interviews collected over 9 months, it shows how sole-speaker pupils employed overt and covert acts of self and interpersonal positioning in order to narrate and navigate their linguistic competence in a classroom community that could not understand them. Multilingual practice sometimes reinforced a sense of solitude, particularly when pupils struggled to convert symbolic capital into meaningful linguistic and didactic capital. Yet their position could be could nonetheless be harnessed to support productive learning outcomes and to enable sole-speaker pupils to 'be multilingual'in school.