Multilingual repertoires as intercultural resources: what students from migrant communities bring to an English-dominant university

This paper examines the complex backgrounds and biographies of a group of undergraduate students from London’s migrant communities in a university context influenced by globalisation, migration and policies of widening access. Drawing on select interview and classroom observation data from an ethnographic study of academic literacy practices, this paper builds on research which seeks to make visible the increasingly complex linguistic diversity in English dominant universities (Marshall & Moore 2013; Preece 2008; Preece 2011). It offers a complex reading of the applied social science students’ multilingual repertoires arguing that language background and diasporic connections should be viewed as intercultural resources for knowledge-making, rather than in deficit terms. Thus, within a dynamic university setting, the good interculturalist has much to learn from the multilingual repertoires and intercultural resources of his or her students.