Multilingualism as a Learning Resource in Map-Based Geography Lessons

Multilingualism, including foreign and heritage language repertoires, is omnipresent in classrooms across educational lev-els and societies. How-ever, there is a lack of existing geography education approaches that allow students to use their language repertoires as a learning resource to ensure an in-depth understanding and participation. As maps are inherently geographical, and gaining map skills plays a pivotal role in geography education, an explorative qualitative research design was developed concerning a multilingual map-based approach. Upper secondary students (n = 20), six of whom had a heritage language different from the target language, at a high school in North Rhine-Westphalia completed a multilingual task and evaluated it. The results of the qualitative study provide initial evidence of multilingual map-based education set-tings in geography education. This approach allowed students to use their language repertoires as a learning resource, and learners with differing heritage languages performed equally well as their peers in correctly implementing map-related words in their written texts. However, this approach did not encourage the use of lexically complex map-related words. Students’ perspectives on the approach were included, although they were brief and limited. Still, the responses reflected a range of perceived benefits and challenges. The pedagogical implications of the results for teaching practice are elaborated upon at the end of the paper.