Affirming pedagogies consist of actively demonstrating that students’ linguistic and cultural identities matter and are valued within the school context (Veerman et al., 2025). They can be implemented through school-wide policies, classroom activities and materials, and teachers’ interactions with students. One way to enact affirming pedagogy is by welcoming the use of home languages in the school environment (e.g. Fielding, 2016; Karlsson, 2020). Welcoming the use of home languages can become visible in the linguistic landscape of the school, for example, through symbols of the countries or regions of students’ home languages or through the visible presence of multilingual welcome signs or books (Gorter, 2013).

A school’s approach can go beyond simply allowing the use of home languages and involve the active acknowledging and celebration of students’ linguistic and cultural backgrounds (e.g. Busse et al., 2020; Demie & Lewis, 2018). This may be incorporated in planned lessons or curricular offerings (e.g. Busse et al., 2020), teachers’ interactions with students (e.g. Fielding, 2016), or in the general school climate (e.g. Demie & Lewis, 2018; Wedin & Wessman, 2017).

Affirming pedagogies sometimes draw on a funds of knowledge perspective, as the linguistic and cultural knowledge students bring with them from home is valued and built on in school (Moll et al., 1992, p. 133). Students’ diversity of experiences is perceived as valuable and not as a deficit that students must overcome. Affirming pedagogies that draw on a funds of knowledge approach involve connecting instruction to students’ lived experience including their home languages (e.g. Castillo & Wagner, 2019; Zaidi, 2020).

Translanguaging-based pedagogies intentionally create space for students to draw on their full linguistic repertoires in classroom learning, encouraging them to use all their languages as resources for meaning-making, participation, and understanding (Veerman et al., 2025). “Pedagogical translanguaging” (Cenoz & Gorter, 2021) goes further than being open to and welcoming different languages (as with affirming); it is about consciously employing different home languages in the classroom to support learning. An example of a translanguaging-based pedagogy is buddy pairing: students that have a same home language but different school language abilities are grouped together to facilitate learning support and peer-to-peer interaction (e.g. Morrison et al., 2020).

Pedagogical translanguaging implies that the teacher is aware of the used language for each activity, but it is not necessary that teachers share the same language repertoire as their students. Pedagogical translanguaging can be used in the classroom in individual learning activities, such as during reflection (e.g. Busse et al., 2020), reading activities (e.g. Cenoz et al., 2021), text production (e.g. Lau et al., 2021), but also during paired and small-group discussions (Milligan et al., 2016).

Scaffolding pedagogies aim to support students’ learning through the use of tools and strategies that involve a language which students are familiar with, whether these are physical learning materials or support-based approaches to instruction (Veerman et al., 2025). Whereas in other pedagogies scaffolding may be an implicitly present aspect or element, in this category it is the dominant aspect. These pedagogies can be used in tailored ways to specifically target the linguistic and learning needs of multilingual learners. One type of this pedagogy is scaffolding by learning materials. The teacher can, for instance, adjust textbooks with visuals and bilingual glossaries to aid understanding among students (e.g. Milligan, et al., 2016). The glossaries can be prepared with the help of students or parents who are experts in the students’ home languages. Scaffolding by learning materials can be used for supporting the simultaneous development of both the language of schooling and students’ home languages – usually referred to as holistic biliteracy or paired literacy – by using supports such as bilingual texts or texts available in students’ home languages (e.g. Zaidi, 2020), and multimedia or technology-based literacy programs (e.g. Castillo & Wagner, 2019). For a full paired bilingual approach, it is ideal that speakers of both languages are involved in developing the teaching materials.

Another scaffolding pedagogy is emotional scaffolding applied to multilingual education. Emotional scaffolding is a way to ‘help students recognize their emotions and utilize them to actively participate in classroom activities and achieve their learning goals’ (Back et al., 2020, p. 389). Especially in monolingual learning settings, multilingual students can experience and act upon negative emotions, such as anxiety, which can be masked by a language barrier (Back et al., 2020). Emotional scaffolding approaches aim to provide emotional scaffolds by for instance bilingual classroom assistants or specialists, volunteers from the school’s network, or parents (e.g. Back et al., 2020; Karlsson et al., 2020). Multilingual students can discuss academic and emotional issues with this person in their home languages with the aim to feel less isolated and to become more active participants in their classrooms (Back et al., 2020).

Cross-linguistic pedagogies focus on developing students’ language awareness and language learning strategies by actively fostering transfer between students’ multiple languages (Veerman et al., 2025). These pedagogies make students aware of the formal aspects of language. Cross-linguistic pedagogies can focus on language awareness on different levels: vocabulary, morphology, and even sociopolitical context. Teachers can use them with different aims, for example with the aim of increasing the awareness of connections between languages or with the aim of making students aware of their own multilingualism or that of others, as well as of languages and multilingualism in society.

An example of cross-linguistic pedagogies is translation activities (e.g. Corcoll, 2013). Another common cross-linguistic pedagogy is language comparison (Ticheloven et al., 2020). Language comparisons can be made between languages in terms of vocabulary, cognates and morphology (e.g. Soltero-González et al., 2016; Leonet et al., 2020), syntax and grammar (Hopp & Thoma, 2021), or in general (e.g. Zaidi, 2020).

Finally, a cross-linguistic pedagogy involves explicit comparisons about multilingualism in different settings, focusing for example on language rights and social inequalities (e.g. Carbonara & Scibetta, 2022). Explicit discussions about multilingualism are a way to not only build awareness of the linguistic features and functions of language, but also awareness of the meaning of language within a larger sociopolitical context.

Three semi-structured focus group interviews (one per school) were held with the adult participants, with interviews lasting between 45 and 70 minutes. As participants had different roles in the school, either as a teacher, language coordinator, or director, this enabled them to complement each other in their description of the school’s multilingual approach. The interviews were held in March–April 2022.

Six interviews (two at each school) with the children were held in small groups of three to six students of various linguistic backgrounds. The focus group interviews took approximately 20 minutes for each group.

During visits to each school, photos were taken of examples of multilingualism in the linguistic landscape, to add to visualize parts of the multilingual approach. Active consent was obtained before taking photographs, and any names or images of students were blurred out for privacy. The linguistic landscape data were not analyzed as a separate dataset; however, they contributed to our overall understanding of the school context and informed the interpretation of the findings by providing insight into the visibility and positioning of languages within the school environment.

The interview transcripts were thematically analyzed in the program ATLAS.ti using both deductive and inductive coding (Braun & Clarke, 2006). First, a close reading per case (within-case analysis) was performed on the data set and pertinent quotes were highlighted. During an iterative reading process, deductive codes were assigned in a theory-driven way (Braun & Clarke, 2006), as categorization of evidence-informed multilingual pedagogies. We used the typology of Veerman (2025) to categorize the different multilingual pedagogies. Fragments about how the different pedagogies were shaped were coded inductively.

Besides examples of pedagogies, respondents mentioned conditions or elements that they perceived as valuable for shaping multilingual education. We coded these fragments also inductively. After coding per case, a cross-case analysis was performed to search for overarching patterns, differences and similarities (Miles & Huberman, 1994).

To enhance reliability the coding scheme was discussed with three researchers of the research team until agreement was reached. For reliability of the coding and validity of the interpretations, the results of each step in the analysis were discussed by two researchers.

Respondents at all schools explained that shaping multilingual education started with the implementation of affirming pedagogies. About this category, they were the most vocal, particularly at School 1. Applying affirming pedagogies started with welcoming the use of students’ home languages, whether in the classroom, in the hallway or on the playground. S1E1¹ described that although it was sometimes a bit difficult to make the change to allowing languages which the teacher does not understand in the classroom, it was ultimately considered important both for students’ learning development and their self-expression. The students at School 1 confirm that they are aware of this freedom, and even if they don’t always choose to use their home languages at school, they appreciate knowing that all languages are allowed and welcomed.

Schools 1 and 3 also employed visual representations to promote linguistic and cultural diversity in symbolic ways, which is reflected in the linguistic landscapes. At School 3, a world map displayed the different countries where students came from (see Figure 1), and educators at School 2 expressed plans to create something similar in the near future.

School 1 also used decorations such as flags of different countries and phrases in different languages around the school environment as a general celebration of diversity (see Figure 2).

All schools worked on acknowledging linguistic/cultural diversity. For example, educators in School 1 described having multilingualism as a school-wide theme each March, which in 2022 involved projects in which students researched a country and language which they were interested in. In some classes, they paid particular attention to the language (see Figure 3), while others focused on culture and language, making posters or “mascots” to represent their chosen country. The artefacts produced during the projects were exposed in the school, contributing to the linguistic landscapes of the school.

One of the students participating in this project, S1P5, explained that he enjoyed the project because of the ease of being able to use his first language, while S1P6 chimed in and expressed: “I think because you do something that suits him. Because we love his country, that he can show us you are of course always proud of your own country.” So, the project was not only a chance for students to expand their understanding of other cultures, it was also a chance for students to be positioned as experts of their own languages and cultures. When organizing this kind of projects, schools sometimes collaborate with extracurricular organizations, such as the library. Libraries assist School 1 with various other (multi)lingual matters, such as organizing poetry events or events related to the Children’s Book Week or the National Reading Days.

While these projects were part of a special theme-of-the-month at School 1, educators explained that their focus on multilingualism is also an overall mindset which gets woven throughout each day and all year. This sentiment was echoed by S1E2, who described that even though Dutch is the main language used throughout the school day by far, teachers will intentionally invite students to share how their family does something at home or how they say something in their home language. These instances can happen “very naturally throughout the day,” which helps frame students’ linguistic knowledge as a resource.

Similarly, at School 3, S3E1 reports, “I think everyone does it a bit in their own way … We often ask how they say something in Arabic or in Tigrinya, for example.” At School 3, valuing linguistic diversity is also a mindset or an attitude, that shows up in a variety of situations, as one exchange in the interview with educators revealed: “It’s more of an attitude, yes, that you actually come back to it all day long and pay attention to it.”

Educators from School 2 also described pedagogies related to the appreciation of linguistic and cultural diversity. The most important aspect of this for School 2 was framing language as a resource. For example, S2E3 insisted that the word “achterstanden”, (in English, “deficiencies”) is a term that is “nearly prohibited” at their school. Within their approach, it is important that students feel both that they are welcome to use any of their languages in school but also that their linguistic background is a strength rather than a deficiency to overcome. Teachers from School 2 reported achieving this with explicit discussions about how a broad knowledge of languages is a strength, both for minority and majority language students. Another educator from School 2 described how she models positive reactions to linguistic diversity for her students in her behavior, saying, “so when the boy says that in Italian, I go all out: ‘Well, isn’t it great that you can do that in both Dutch and Italian? Wow!’ ”

Educators from all schools described efforts which resembled funds of knowledge pedagogies. At School 2, S2E3 referred to this as the “strength that [the children] have in their backpack,” and expressed that it is important that teachers build on this strength. S2E1 described one situation in which paying attention to students’ lives and linguistic backgrounds, and connecting instruction to this prior knowledge, helped facilitate learning about how to tell time. This was similar to an example from S3E2, who described “giv[ing] a space” in the math classroom for students to use and share with the class the different ways they have learned to solve math problems, which often differs from the way the same calculation is taught in Dutch schools. This helped teachers better understand students’ abilities in math and gave students a platform to demonstrate their prior knowledge to their classmates. Another example of a funds-of-knowledge-approach is a project at School 2 in which students took texts related to the curricular content home to translate the key words into their home language with their parents. Students from this school reported enjoying this activity and appreciating the way it helped them learn new words both in their home language and in Dutch. Thus, involving parents in this way not only has the potential to support students’ language development and understanding, it also shows students that their home lives are important and are valued. This practice is one that could be used with texts from any subject. At School 1, a funds-of-knowledge-perspective was applied to the school newsletter, by including reminders for different holidays celebrated by students and their families, such as Eid al-Fitr, and using these as talking points. To bring the cultural funds of knowledge of parents in the school, School 1 organizes accessible activities. This starts with bringing parents into contact with each other and encourage them to become more involved in the school. For instance, parents are invited to come to school to cut fruit in the morning. The director of School 1 explained that this simple activity helps parents connect, regardless of language barriers, making them feel welcome and more likely that they will be willing to show something of their life in the school.

Parents can also play a role in cultural projects. At School 1, parents were involved in a project with the theme of art and poetry. They were asked to read a poem aloud to their child’s class in their home language. A video of this was shared on the school’s communication app. ‘Then everyone could see how rich we actually are, so many languages within our school.’ The aim of this project was to give children and parents an opportunity to showcase something about their lifestyle and culture at school.

Educators at all schools explained that shaping multilingual education, that at their schools started with affirming, needs a joint school vision on multilingualism and a solid knowledge base about multilingual education among the members of the school team. Schools 1 and 2 work on the knowledge base of their school team and the vison by keeping the team informed and introducing new teachers to the subject. At School 1, educational professionals noticed that their multilingual approach gained real depth after working with an expert (a professor in the field of multilingualism) to professionalize the team and create a joint multilingual school vision that suited the context of the school. At School 2 the vision on multilingual education is explicitly included in the school’s policy. The multilingual policy is regularly discussed during study days and parents are informed about it, for instance at parents’ evenings.

School 1 works together with a network of chain partners called ‘Together a story’. The network includes for example a speech therapist and someone from the local neighborhood team Youth and Family. The principal of the school and the partners meet several times a year to discuss, inform each other about, and ensure they convey the same vision on various topics, including multilingualism. The aim of this collaboration is to strengthen and inform each other, and to get the organizations to work together based on a shared vision (‘the same story’).

The second most prevalent type of multilingual pedagogy was scaffolding. One of the strategies within this type of pedagogy is scaffolding through learning materials. At School 3, a tech-based program was used to support multilingual learners’ math development. S3E3 explained how they use the digital platform Bareka in mathematics instruction, which allowed students to engage with the content without needing to rely on comprehension of the Dutch language. By using this program teachers could more accurately assess the math abilities of newcomer students and place them in a group that was better suited to their levels. At all three schools, scaffolding through learning materials were helpful in building on students’ prior knowledge to support learning. S3E1 and S3E3 described a method called World Full of Words, which scaffolded learning by helping students make links between concepts in Dutch with their home language.

Scaffolding strategies to promote holistic biliteracy or paired literacy were found at all schools. In some cases, this involved ensuring that students had opportunities to develop literacy in their home language simultaneously with their development in the school language. Educators at all three schools encouraged parents to continue using their language at home with their children, and to read with their children in their home languages. To enable this, Schools 1 and 2 worked closely together with the library to acquire foreign language or multilingual books. At School 1, this was facilitated by inviting parents to “receive a workshop at the library from a reading consultant about how to read to them, what you can do, what you can do with the story,” says S1E1. This was coupled with providing a picture book translated into their home language (see Figure 4), while the same book was available at school in Dutch, to support the simultaneous development of students’ literacies. At School 2, students also had the option to pursue biliteracy at school, where French-speaking students were given the opportunity to form a French reading circle during the normally scheduled reading time. Students at this School 2 also reported appreciating the availability of English books, which was particularly meaningful for one student, S2P10, whose first language was English. At School 2 students’ reading comprehension was also scaffolded by allowing them to work through stories with parents at home first.

At all three schools fostering parental involvement was considered very important because it is believed that parental involvement contributes to the well-being and learning of children. On the one hand, scaffolding pedagogies help to increase parental involvement, but fostering parental involvement also aids learning, as parents can scaffold their children’s learning too. Educational professionals used various tools to overcome language barriers, including interpreters, the interpreter telephone and digital translation tools. At School 3, a special communication app with a translation function (Kwieb) was used. Not only important school information is shared via the app, but also informal information about what the students are working on, the activities being undertaken, or the theme of the month. This has proven to be very fruitful, as S3E2 explains: “They often [the parents] know what I’m saying now. Normally they didn’t really know what we were working with but now they know.”

For School 3, where many of their students are newcomers in the Netherlands, emotional scaffolding was considered very important for students “landing,” as according to S3E2, making sure students feel safe within the school is the first priority when they arrive. One way in which she describes doing this is by always checking in with the group about how they are feeling at the beginning of each day, often using English to ensure that students who are still not confident in Dutch can participate in the discussion. At School 2, teachers sometimes ask the Turkish teaching assistant to speak with Turkish-speaking children to resolve conflicts or discuss feelings. This helps teachers gain a better understanding of the students. One teacher noted that this assistance revealed more about the origins of conflicts and provided deeper insights into the students.

All three schools used strategies that aimed at stimulating students’ systematic use of their full linguistic repertoire to support their learning process. The schools reported not having very strict rules about language separation which makes translanguaging possible. At School 1, they intentionally do not have “fixed days” for different languages, and while they used to do this at School 3, now, “it [using different languages] really just happens” (S3E1). At School 2, S2E2 explained that while students are free to use whatever language they want, they encourage students to be aware of how their language choices include or exclude classmates.

Educators from all schools offered examples of how pedagogical translanguaging was used to aid students’ comprehension, although they rarely used the term translanguaging. Sometimes this involved the teacher drawing from their own linguistic resources and encouraging students to do the same. S1E2 often translanguages with a multilingual student in English, a shared language of theirs, to ease their communication. At School 3, students were facilitated to use translanguaging to help each other. As S3E3 describes, “I noticed very quickly that if I started explaining something that at a certain moment a child understood what I meant and that he would explain it to the rest in Tigrinya. The whole group then knew what I wanted.” Educators from Schools 1 and 2 also described using this strategy. One student, S3P1, expressed their appreciation of this practice, explaining: “If you don’t know the word in Dutch, you can ask someone who speaks Dutch very well and who can also speak Arabic.” S1E1 described their pedagogical approach as focused on “learning from and with each other.” S3E3 also described this kind of collaboration happening sometimes at their school, in one case where students with differing levels of language ability and time they have lived in the Netherlands were able to help each other out through questioning and co-problem solving to understand a civics lesson.

Buddy pairing was a frequently employed practice to support multilingual students in all three schools. As S1E2 explains, “sometimes you just need that other student who gets over the hump to make it work again.” At School 3, S3E2 described how they sometimes intentionally pair students with the same language background together, but that it also often happens “a bit automatically that they pull towards each other.” In general, teachers do not see this as a hinder to students’ language development, but as supportive of learning, as S2E1 explained, in the math classroom, “the goal is math, the goal is not language.” By pairing students with the same language background together, it helps remove barriers to learning by allowing them to focus on the instructional content. Students also saw advantages of buddy pairing. For example, S1P5 remembered how being able to use her home language with other children helped her when she first arrived in the Netherlands, and now she expressed pride in her ability to help other children using her linguistic resources, explaining: “I can speak English myself since I was 3, so I can say that too. I can speak Tigrinya and I’m learning Turkish and Arabic now, so if I know those languages, I can help other people too. So that seems nice to me.”

Finally, a few cross-linguistic pedagogies played a role in the multilingual approaches of the participating schools, although they were far less salient than the other types of pedagogies. Mostly, cross-linguistic pedagogies appeared in the form of engaging students in explicit discussions about multilingualism, particularly at Schools 1 and 2. For example, S2E1 specifically mentioned using Cummins’ common underlying proficiency model (García & Li, 2014) to explain to students how language acquisition works and how their multilingualism is a strength. At a later point he describes this as “telling the story of multilingualism.” At School 1, there is a similar belief in “the power of multilingualism,” as S1E1 calls it, and the idea that “another language can also be a connection between languages.” There, the examples that educators brought up about their multilingual projects in March and the importance they place on building on students’ home languages demonstrate this awareness of the cross-linguistic connections between languages.

Educators at School 2 were especially vocal about how they used comparisons between languages and translation activities to support students’ learning. Beyond the translation activities students at School 2 completed with their parents at home, S2E1 described using connections between Dutch and Arabic, Turkish, or Moroccan to support students’ grammar development, explaining, “linking it to their own language does make it more accessible and I don’t have to speak Arabic, Turkish or Moroccan for that.” Several students expressed happiness about the fact that the translation activities they did with parents helped them acquire new words in their home language which they were able to use at home. In school 3 no cross-linguistic pedagogies were applied.