This paper reports on an investigation into the communication activities in a multicultural elementary school classroom in England. In the first exercise, the whole class worked in groups of three, each group led by a bilingual child, to devise a doctor-patient dialogue in that child's foreign language. When the dialogue was presented to the class, it was the task of the class to discover what was being said based on the context and gestures in the six foreign languages of the students. In the role playing, the foreign language children appeared to exploit the interplay between the different languages to first disrupt the power relations of doctor-patient discourse and then to take over the powerful role for themselves as doctor, although the patient always won in the end. In a second project, three children developed versions of a popular comic book in their native languages. As with the role playing, the comic book encouraged new forms of social interaction as well as becoming a vehicle for metalinguistic discussion. Again, there was an interweaving between genre and the use of the different languages and a chance to express common aspects of social identity within the classroom. The children experienced aspects of difference through speaking and writing other languages and entered into their bilingual classmates' world on new terms. (NAV)