Abstract
When families migrate to a new country, faith communities offer a source of support and a way of maintaining social, cultural and linguistic connections. The church, temple or mosque may be one of the few places where children speak their community language with a sizeable group of people. Faith classes also provide a rare opportunity to learn to read and write in the community language or liturgical language. Yet these important sites of language and literacy learning have been little studied. It is for this reason that a major research project was set up by the Centre for Language, Culture and Learning at Goldsmiths to investigate children’s learning in four recently arrived communities in London: Tamil Hindu, Bangladeshi Muslim, Ghanaian Pentecostal and Polish Catholic. The study took place over three and a half years, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, and was conducted by a team of 11 people, including researchers from each linguistic background who also had personal experience or knowledge of the faith group with whom they worked.
Highlights
When families migrate to a new country, faith communities offer a source of support and a way of maintaining social, cultural and linguistic connections
Faith classes provide a rare opportunity to learn to read and write in the community language or liturgical language. These important sites of language and literacy learning have been little studied. It is for this reason that a major research project was set up by the Centre for Language, Culture and Learning at Goldsmiths to investigate children’s learning in four recently arrived communities in London: Tamil Hindu, Bangladeshi Muslim, Ghanaian Pentecostal and Polish Catholic
In this article we introduce each faith setting and the participants in our study, and explain how we gathered our data, before discussing some of our findings with regard to children’s social, cultural and academic skills
Summary
When families migrate to a new country, faith communities offer a source of support and a way of maintaining social, cultural and linguistic connections. The church, temple or mosque may be one of the few places where children speak their community language with a sizeable group of people. It is for this reason that a major research project was set up by the Centre for Language, Culture and Learning at Goldsmiths to investigate children’s learning in four recently arrived communities in London: Tamil Hindu, Bangladeshi Muslim, Ghanaian Pentecostal and Polish Catholic.
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