The aim of our study is to show how multilingual students’ ideas of their languages reflect their approaches to multilingualism as a resource in the classroom.

Translanguaging ((Williams 1996), which means simultaneous use of various lingual resources, has shown to promote multilingual students’ development of identity and knowledge when being used strategically in the classroom (Creese & Blackledge 2010; Garcia 2012; Wedin 2013; Cummins & Persad 2014; Garcia & Wei 2014). However, in many schools the target language is regarded as the only language that should be used in second language education (cf. Cummins 2007) which also was the case in the school in question for the study.

Our study is part of a 3-year research project, Interaction for language and identity development in multilingual classrooms, where one part of the project consists of action research (Denscombe 2009) with the focus on the teachers’ changing of strategies in the classroom for utilizing the students’ lingual resources. The base of our study is a self estimating survey by 39 students in grade 5, students’ texts, recordings of conversation, classroom observation and interviews.

The survey showed that the students have a large lingual potential but also great differences in  estimating and perceiving their first and second languages. Our results are not yet systematically analyzed, but there seems to stand out a pattern that students who have ranked both their languages on a high scale are considerably more positive to the teachers’ initiative than those with discrepancies in their rankings. Analyses of texts, colloquies, observations and interviews indicate that the students with high rankings of both their languages played an important role for those who initially were resistant by shaping new relations and contributing to mutual development of knowledge