AbstractThe study aims to explore how students’ linguistic resources are used for learning in a school in Gambia. The study is a field study and was conducted at a Senior Secondary School during January and February 2023. As a postcolonial country, Gambia is a culturally and linguistically highly diverse country with English as the official language and several native languages, also called local languages. Despite this fact, English is the only language of instruction. The local languages are used as the main means of daily communication, while English is used in communication with the authorities and as a language of instruction. The students, in other words, do not learn to read and write in their first language, which is one of the local languages.The theoretical framework for the study is Janks’ theory of critical literacy (2010) which emphasizes the concepts of domination, access, diversity, and design. The method is a qualitative research method with an ethnographic approach, based on interviews with both students and teachers, as well as participant observation and documentation of lessons in several school subjects. The material consists of audio-recorded interviews and field notes from the lesson observations. The results show that the majority of the study’s participants expressed advantages in using all their common linguistic resources in school. However, one teacher considers that he, as a state school employee, is obliged to use only English as the language of instruction and sees no reason to question it. Also, according to one student’s opinion, it is right to use English as a common language, and not to use the local languages as a support for students’ understanding.The result from the classroom observations shows that there is a gap between the students’ requesting more language support in teaching and the teachers’ use of multilingualism as a resource for learning. Only occasional examples and no systematic use of local languages were observed during lessons for promoting learning and multilingual development. Despite this, there were teachers, who, although they were obliged through the curriculum to only use the English language, chose to include students' linguistic resources, interests, and earlier experiences in the curriculum. One conclusion of the study is that the issue of linguistic and cultural diversity in the classroom) is not easy to solve, due to the complex language situation in Gambia. Another conclusion is that teachers, through their choice of a didactic design based on students’ linguistic resources, interests, and earlier experiences, can support students’ access to the curriculum and contribute to a more equitable education. Keywords: Access to the Curriculum, Didactic Design, First Language, Language of Instruction, Language Domination, Linguistic and Cultural Diversity, Multilingualism

Drawing on theoretical work in literacy education, drama education and second language education, and taking account of poststructuralist, postcolonial, third world feminist, critical pedagogy, and intersectionality frameworks, this dissertation presents findings from an ethnography that critically examined the experiences of English language learners (ELLs) in three different drama classrooms, in three different high school contexts. More specifically, this multi-site study investigated two aspects of multiliteracies pedagogy: i) situated practice and ‘identity texts’ (Cummins et al., 2005; Cummins, 2006a) and ii) multimodality and embodied learning by overlaying, juxtaposing, or contrasting multiple voices (Britzman, 2000; Gallagher 2008; Lather 2000) of drama teachers and their students to provide a rich picture of the experiences of ELLs in drama classrooms. The diverse drama pedagogies observed in the three different drama contexts offer possibilities for a kind of cultural production proceeding from language learning through embodied meaning-making and self-expression. The situated practice of drama pedagogies provided a third space (Bhabha, 1990) for the examination of students’ own hybrid identities as well as the in-role examination of the identities of others, while moving between the fictional and the real in the drama work. The exploration of meaning-making and self-expression processes through drama, with attention to several aspects of embodied learning—from concrete, physical and kinesthetic aspects, to complex relational ones—was found to be strategic and valuable for the language and literacy learning of the English language learners. The findings from this study highlight the role of embodied forms of communication, expression and meaning-making in drama pedagogy. This embodied pedagogy is a multimodal form of self-expression since it integrates the visual, audio, sensory, tactile, spatial, performative, and aesthetic, through physical movement, gesture, facial expression, attention to pronunciation, intonation, stress, projection of voice, attention to spatial navigation, proximity between speakers in space, the use of images and written texts, the use of other props (costumes, artefacts), music and dance. The dialogic, collective, imaginative, in-between space of drama allows students to access knowledge and enrich their language and literacy education through connections to the real and the fictional, to self/others, to past and present experiences, and to dreams about imagined selves and imagined communities (Kanno & Norton, 2003).

Drawing on theoretical work in literacy education, drama education and second language education, and taking account of poststructuralist, postcolonial, third world feminist, critical pedagogy, and intersectionality frameworks, this dissertation presents findings from an ethnography that critically examined the experiences of English language learners (ELLs) in three different drama classrooms, in three different high school contexts. More specifically, this multi-site study investigated two aspects of multiliteracies pedagogy: i) situated practice and ‘identity texts’ (Cummins et al., 2005; Cummins, 2006a) and ii) multimodality and embodied learning by overlaying, juxtaposing, or contrasting multiple voices (Britzman, 2000; Gallagher 2008; Lather 2000) of drama teachers and their students to provide a rich picture of the experiences of ELLs in drama classrooms. The diverse drama pedagogies observed in the three different drama contexts offer possibilities for a kind of cultural production proceeding from language learning through embodied meaning-making and self-expression. The situated practice of drama pedagogies provided a third space (Bhabha, 1990) for the examination of students’ own hybrid identities as well as the in-role examination of the identities of others, while moving between the fictional and the real in the drama work. The exploration of meaning-making and self-expression processes through drama, with attention to several aspects of embodied learning—from concrete, physical and kinesthetic aspects, to complex relational ones—was found to be strategic and valuable for the language and literacy learning of the English language learners. The findings from this study highlight the role of embodied forms of communication, expression and meaning-making in drama pedagogy. This embodied pedagogy is a multimodal form of self-expression since it integrates the visual, audio, sensory, tactile, spatial, performative, and aesthetic, through physical movement, gesture, facial expression, attention to pronunciation, intonation, stress, projection of voice, attention to spatial navigation, proximity between speakers in space, the use of images and written texts, the use of other props (costumes, artefacts), music and dance. The dialogic, collective, imaginative, in-between space of drama allows students to access knowledge and enrich their language and literacy education through connections to the real and the fictional, to self/others, to past and present experiences, and to dreams about imagined selves and imagined communities (Kanno & Norton, 2003).