Researching and teaching (with) the continua of biliteracy

Nancy H Hornberger

doi:10.1515/eduling-2021-0004

Abstract

Abstract The continua of biliteracy model offers an ecological framework to situate research, teaching, and language policy in multilingual settings. Biliteracy is understood as “any and all instances in which communication occurs in two (or more) languages in or around writing” and the continua as complex, fluid, and interrelated dimensions of communicative repertoires; it is in the dynamic, rapidly changing and sometimes contested spaces along and across the continua that biliteracy use and learning occur. Formulated in the 1980s in the context of a multi-year, comparative ethnography of language policy in two Philadelphia public schools and communities, the model has served in the years since as heuristic in research, teaching, and program development locally, nationally, and internationally in Indigenous, immigrant, diaspora and decolonizing language education contexts. It has evolved and adapted to accommodate both a changing world and a changing scholarly terrain, foregrounding ethnographic monitoring, mapping, ideological and implementational spaces, voice, and translanguaging, antiracist and decolonial pedagogies in multilingual education policy and practice. I trace this trajectory, highlighting experiences in immigrant contexts of Philadelphia and Indigenous contexts of South Africa, Sweden, and Peru where the continua of biliteracy have informed bilingual program development and Indigenous and second language teaching.

Highlights

The continua of biliteracy model offers an ecological framework to situate research, teaching, and language policy in multilingual settings
The story begins in Philadelphia in the 1980s, informed by my prior decade in the Andes working with Quechua communities, and moves over time to other continents and sites of Indigenous language revitalization, Immigrant/ refugee/heritage language education, diaspora and linguistic borderlands, postcolonial and decolonizing contexts, mostly in the global South and far North
We argued based on her experience that mapping biliteracy teaching with the teachers in this way provided a tool to uncover tensions in the teaching of majoritized languages in this Indigenous context of postcoloniality, to challenge constructs of student shyness, Hornberger and to propose pedagogies to support the flourishing of student voice (Hornberger and Kvietok Dueñas 2019)

Summary

The continua of biliteracy and how it grew1

The Continua of Biliteracy (CoBi) framework is useful in research and teaching as well as curriculum, program and policy development in multilingual. The story begins in Philadelphia in the 1980s, informed by my prior decade in the Andes working with Quechua communities, and moves over time to other continents and sites of Indigenous language revitalization, Immigrant/ refugee/heritage language education, diaspora and linguistic borderlands, postcolonial and decolonizing contexts, mostly in the global South and far North. It is a story of decades and dialogues across the continua framework and other conceptual tools embedded in it or emergent in the field over time. Researching and teaching (with) CoBi the current decade with its resounding calls for decolonialist and antiracist pedagogies in the wake of the 2020 global pandemic

CoBi and Philadelphia’s minoritized language communities in the 1980s

Sápmi and the Amazon: ethnographic monitoring and mapping CoBi in the 2010s

Findings

Imagining multilingual schools