Successful Kids from Immigrant Families: An Investigation of the Complex Multilingual Worlds of 10-year-old Gifted Writers in Suburban Toronto

Abstract

This paper discusses a case study of a small cluster of 10- and 11-year-old multilingual children, all first- or second-generation Canadians living in suburban Toronto, who collaboratively wrote an elaborate adventure book in English as a Grade 5 enrichment activity. We explore the language worlds of these gifted young writers to trace their patterns of multiple language acquisition, affiliation and use, and the influences on their strong literacy achievement in English. The study qualitatively analyses interviews with the children's teachers, their families and the children themselves in search of convergences in policy, practices, interests and attitudes that provide an interpretive filter for the children's outstanding creative writing in English. Environmental commonalities in socialisation emerge, but so do conflicting attitudes to languages in home–school relations, and within and between families. Larger questions about the nature of language maintenance required to support selective literacy achievement are posed against a backdrop of the linguistic portraits of these scholastically successful children of recent immigrants.