Creating and Navigating a Transborder Writing Space: One Multilingual Adolescent’s Take‐Up of Dialogue Journaling in an English‐Medium Classroom

Abstract

ABSTRACTCentering the literacy practice of a newly arrived, transnational, emergent multilingual student, the author provides insights into how these students, particularly when positioned as lacking literacy and content knowledge when labeled as students with interrupted formal education, might benefit socioemotionally and educationally from the opportunity to story their own lives and write their way into a new classroom and culture. The author shows how Marlón, a newly arrived immigrant from Guatemala, leveraged existing bodies of linguistic, content, and experiential knowledge to maximize his participation in the classroom‐based literacy practice of dialogue journaling. As such, the author demonstrates how the relatively low‐stakes, low‐tech, dialogic nature of journaling afforded Marlón the opportunity to create a transborder writing space in which he enacted agency in his decisions to translanguage, engage in multimodal writing, invoke familial knowledge, and share personal experiences. In the process, Marlón created an agentive border space that spanned cultures, nations, and languages in ways that authentically represented his multifaceted and complex identity and lived history. Students like Marlón are a growing demographic; thus, the author calls for teachers to consider the benefits of creating instructional spaces for low‐risk, low‐tech writing to ease transnational, emergent multilingual students into classroom and school‐based writing. The author also suggests the need for further research exploring the implementation and benefits of literacy practices that take into account newly arrived students’ identities holistically.