Multilingual literacies: Romanian Roma children learning to read and write in an English primary school

Abstract

The study sought to understand how three multilingual Romanian Roma learners approached and made sense of literacy-related activities in an English primary school so that this can illuminate classroom practice to ensure more inclusive forms of literacy education. The following research questions were addressed: (1) What are learners’ linguistic and cultural contexts? (2) What linguistic and communicative resources and attitudes to literacy do they display in the classroom? (3) What are the educational implications of learners’ contexts, resources and attitudes for literacy instruction? Following the tenets of literacy as social practice and multilingual literacies, this ethnographic study shows that Roma children display a variety of linguistic and communicative resources and attitudes that can be effectively exploited in the classroom, enabling their home languages and cultures to be appreciated and legitimised as valuable tools for literacy learning. This can help counteract the effects of the structural power imbalances between dominant and minoritised languages, cultures and speakers in the classroom and beyond. The study’s main contribution is its engagement with the multilingual literacies of Roma learners from migration backgrounds, an aspect that has important consequences for the implications for literacy education presented in this article.