Now I teach in primary school and my students are very curious to know words in my mother tongue. 

This situation becomes more marked if context and verbal and written language are new: levels of complexity and tangible comprehension needs are integrated. Credible in the ways, in the tones, in the agitations. Wherever the inclusion passes into the credibility of the speakers: looks, mimicry, posture, silence and smiles are universal human.

Everywhere the whole body speaks and says: yes, you can talk, I'm interested. However, if this is not the case, the body and the words contradict each other and communicate limited or denied permits, in a strong and clear way.

However I think that in a secondary school the situation is a little bit complex!

As I am neither a refugee nor a migrant but only  a person who has had to metaphorically “migrate” from the deductive kind of learning  to the inductive one (you can infer it from my language passport) I can only judge by my experience as a cultural migrant in order to respond to the given question. No doubt to allow students to use their own language in the classroom helps them to feel welcomed (and this is very important),  however it seems to me this permission could slow down the learning process. Over and above coming from a kind of a deductive learning I am a very shy person too, nevertheless I still do a lot of full immersion to learn how to communicate in English and I also am glad to!  If I could I would speak all the time in English despite not being good at speaking.  I do regret not being able to have any  chance to.

 Of course, as a language learner, there is   need me to lack emotional stress: a long time ago, at the beginning of my learning about English as an adult, an English teacher scolded me by screaming at me:  “shut up, let your classmates answer”. It was so both distressing and humiliating that I left the course despite being forced to pay the fee for the whole school year. It have taken several years before I found the courage to attend another English language course (online, of course!) TO SUM UP I THINK THE VERY IMPORTANT THING IS TO PUT THE LEARNER AT EASE, REGARDLESS BOTH OF THE TEACHING METHOD AND OF THE LANGUAGE TOO.
(to be continued with a picture on a welcoming teacher)

I have never experienced a situation as a teacher like the one described in the video. Only once I had a foreign student coming from Serbia that spoke very little Italian. I have some other foreign students, but they all speak Italian.  I always make them share some words in their language with the class. They are always proud of it.  I was myself a foreign student many years ago in three different situations. I did not feel bad and nobody told me not to use my language. It was me that tried to use the schooling language, even if I had always to learn it from the beginning!

Creating a multilingual dictionary is a powerful activity that teachers working in a multilingual classes can easily implement with their students.

I agree with the video because I think these activities can help foreign pupils learn another language and to develop students’ critical thinking, communication and creativity.

For my part, sometimes I ask how something is said in some pupils' mother tongue, I see it as an enrichment, even if I hardly remember words and pronunciation.

My father’s family was quite poor; my grandmother did not work and my grandfather was just a male nurse who worked many hours every day. Futhermore, my grandparents’ education level was quite low… my grandmother loved to read, to write and to tell wonderful stories, mixing freely the Italian language and her dialect. 

When my father was a child and started attending his primary school, he could only use Italian; every dialect was strictly forbidden. The Southern Dialects, even the Southern strong accents, were  condemned by the teachers and judged negatively. They were considered as a distinguishing mark that, in general, revealed a low and problematic socio-economic situation. 
 At school, my father often felt ashamed and embarrassed, he did not like his teachers at all. 

From the beginning, his story taught me that, as teachers, we need to allow our students to use their languages or dialects in the classroom without judging them. The knowledge of another language/other languages has to be acknowledged, valorized (especially at school) and considered as an advantage, a real strenght. 

From one hand, It is important to promote a multilingual environment and to develop language/cultural awareness, from the other hand, it is vital to explicit the weaknesses and the limits that characterize a monolingual environment. From my perspective, the next step should be represented by the official use of these beautiful languages in real tasks, school exercises and tests. 
Creating a multilingual dictionary is an amazing idea!

Then I went abroad but I was happy to use other languages and I avoided Italian because I wanted to learn better the new language.

Nevertheless I can imagine children who live in a foreign country for economical and security reasons could experience a difficult situation.

So the multilingual dictionary can be a good idea to valorize their language, identity and culture.

It could even be use in a secondary school to compare word root and reflect on origin of languages.

I have never experienced a situation similar to Kaotar one and I think such a situation could be avoided remembering that each language contains not only distinct surface features such as pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar, but also a shared skill and a central operating system that is common across languages. When working in language diverse classrooms knowledge of the common underlying proficiency can help teachers communicating more effectively with students who do not speak the main language of instruction, and this is the reason why teachers should evaluate and enhance students’ knowledge of their mother tongue.

Last year I had a Chinese student and I have never brought his home language to the classroom! Shame on me! Now I know I should!

I liked the final message a lot: “Il ne faut pas hésiter, il ne faut pas avoir peur de fair ces activités”.

This year I have students from different countries and even if I’d like to let them talk their mother tongue, sometimes this is very difficult because their languages are uncompressible. For instance, we have a student who just speaks Urdu. No one is able to understand her, she doesn’t speak any other language, we are helping her with images. 

Fortunately, It is not always like that, when we have students that speak any other language we help them to improve the new language and at the same time we help them to to keep their language and cultural heritage.