The purpose of this paper is to explore the linguistic and discursive practices of a group of (consecutively) trilingual students and their trilingual teacher, and the varying patterns of interchange between the L1s and the L2 depending on the particular pedagogical objective of the interchange. The data are exclusively naturalistic and were collected through participant observation and video- and audio-recordings of a series of language lessons in a Grade A classroom in Nicosia, Cyprus. The official language of the school is (Standard) Greek, but the vast majority of the student population are native speakers of other languages, mainly Russian, Georgian and Turkish. Teaching at all grades is monolingual, with the exception of the class examined here, in which the students, aged 6 to 8, are native speakers of Russian and Georgian but do not know enough Greek to cope in a monolingual lesson. The teacher's L1s are Russian and Georgian and her Greek is near-native; when teaching she uses both her L1s and the L2, as do the children.

The ethnographic observation provided a vast array of linguistic data, which were subsequently coded in terms of discursive moves and ‘episodes'. The analysis revealed that there were significant quantitative and qualitative differences in the use of the L1s and the target language depending on the type of literacy learning activity the students were engaged in. However, the anticipated pattern whereby the L1s would be used for clarification and as aids to comprehension, as well as for negotiating social roles and classroom management, did not emerge. By contrast, both L1s and, unexpectedly, also the L2, surfaced in personalized narratives, while the L2 was employed by teacher and students alike in ‘public' negotiation of interpersonal roles, in explaining structural and lexical aspects of Greek in relation to the L1s, and, crucially, in constructing metalinguistic terminology relevant to grammar and literacy. One of the most striking findings was the almost total absence of intersentential code-switching, which can be interpreted in terms of the students' metalinguistic awareness of the association of each variety with specific discursive/literacy strategies in the context of the particular community of practice. The data also reveal subtle hierarchical patterns both between the two L1s and the two varieties of the L2, the naturalistically acquired Cypriot Greek dialect and Standard Greek, the language of the school, Russian/Standard Greek being more strongly associated with literacy and public performativity than Georgian/Cypriot Greek.