Negotiating Multilingual Resources in English Writing Instruction for Recent Immigrants to Norway

Abstract

Recent studies have demonstrated how teachers can draw on students' multilingual resources in teaching English writing, even in monolingually oriented policy settings. However, limited research has been conducted outside of countries where English is the majority language or in classes where few students share a language background. This article reports on a linguistic ethnography of English writing instruction in two introductory classes for newly arrived students in Norway (Grades 8–10, N = 22), where students and teachers negotiated the role of students' diverse language backgrounds and emerging Norwegian. Data reflect 3 months of participant observation, including classroom video recording, recording of students' computer screens, text collection, and creation of language portraits, followed by stimulated recall interviews. The teachers and students drew on multilingual resources in various ways during writing instruction, most extensively in receptive and oral uses. However, Norwegian assumed a privileged position among the language resources of the class while students sidelined their less formal or prestigious literacy resources. The study demonstrates teachers' and students' ability to reshape English writing instruction as a multilingual space but also concludes that multilingual literacy must be promoted as more than an instrumental resource in the service of English writing development.