A pressing issue in multilingual education is whether to use students’ multilingual repertoires in L2 classrooms (Cummins 2017).  Research on L2 learning supports multilingual/translanguaging classroom practices (e.g. Lee & Macaro 2013), but much of this research involves participants sharing the same L1 prior to having classroom exposure to English (their L2). The present study breaks new ground by focusing on multilingual participants with a range of different L1s: they are simultaneous bilinguals of Swedish (the majority language) and a heritage language (e.g. Somali), or L1 users of their heritage language, learning Swedish and English as L2s in secondary school in Sweden. Triangulated data were collected in 2018 in two intact classes (students aged 14-15): ethnographic observation (14 lessons) and questionnaires and interviews (19 students and their teacher). Using a bilingualism/multilingualism (Baker & Wright 2017) framework, we apply concepts such as ‘language dominance’, ‘age of onset’, ‘heritage language’, ‘majority language’ and ‘school language’ in qualitative analysis. Classroom observations revealed that the teacher used mainly English; Swedish was used only judiciously, serving specific functions. Interviews revealed that the majority of students stated that they benefit from their teacher’s use of both English and Swedish. Students with lower English proficiency expressed a greater need for Swedish. Students with an age of onset for Swedish of 10-11 expressed a need to use heritage-language translations, e.g. English-Arabic. Results are discussed with reference to the ethnography-of-language policy framework (Johnson 2014), and have implications for education in Sweden where students need literacy in both Swedish and English.