About This Webinar
This webinar will feature real-world examples, challenges, and best practices from a recent British Council collaborative project with international universities in Central Asia.
The aims of this session are:
- to explore how language portraits can be used in group tutorials to promote multiculturalism and multilingualism.
- to consider barriers to multiculturalism and how these might be overcome.
Language portraits can be a useful tool for considering an individual’s identity (Mu et al., 2023) and have been used in classroom settings where students come from multilingual backgrounds (Siegman & Galloway, 2025). In our project, we introduced language portraits to student teachers to enable them to consider their multilingualism as part of their teacher identity. The student teachers were from multilingual backgrounds in Central Asia, collaborating with a UK university.
We then encouraged students to consider the key concepts of language competence for leaders: plurilingual competence, language repertoire, intercultural language skills, linking with the intercultural sensitivity index (lee Olsen & Kroeger, 2001). Students also explored barriers to multiculturalism such as language differences, cultural barriers, ethnocentrism, and I also discuss how these can be overcome.
Following the success of using this activity in the project, the approach has since been used it in the UK in small group sessions, and the webinar explores how it could be used in group tutorials.
About the Presenters
Alison Raby, University of Lincoln