Multilingual Teachers as Digital Literates

This chapter re-examines the concept of the multilingual teacher through the lens of digital literacy, exploring how educators and learners navigate an increasingly multimodal, media-rich landscape. Drawing on socio-cultural theories of literacy it argues that computing education must extend beyond functional skills to encompass broader communicative practices, fostering both linguistic and computational fluency. The chapter situates the computing curriculum including visual and textual programming languages within a holistic framework of language and literacy development from the Early Years. Coding syntax is explored in relation to grammar rules in English and other languages, helping to demystify computational thinking for linguistically diverse learners. Case studies from primary classrooms in the UAE and the UK illustrate how young children, including English as an Additional Language (EAL) learners, engage in coding as a form of multilingual storytelling, using tools such as ScratchJr to co-construct narratives that blend visual, textual, and logical elements. Successful curricula integrate computer science, information technology, and digital literacy, with programming knowledge and computational thinking carefully sequenced to support conceptual progression. The chapter concludes by exploring the opportunities and ethical challenges of artificial intelligence in education and proposes a model of digital literacy that enables multilingual teachers to lead holistic, creative, and computationally rich learning experiences.