Multilingual Literacy Research Articles

Sustaining Ourselves in Unsustainable Places: Revitalizing Sacred Landscapes Within Schools

AbstractThis department explores how teachers can sustain students’ multilingual literacies and reimagine literacy learning across multiple contexts in conversation with researchers, practitioners, and communities.

Technology supported early literacy learning in a multilingual community preschool

ABSTRACTThere is conflicting research on the value of using digital technology with young children. This study investigated how an app, used in conjunction with dual language picture books, can support the social, emotional, and literacy learning of bi/multilingual children. Twenty-one children used the app Talking Stickers at home and school for four weeks. The classroom was observed and the educators and parents were interviewed and surveyed. The findings indicated that children had enhanced opportunities to practice social, cognitive, and multi-lingual literacy skills, and bonds between home and school were strengthened. The research has implications for classroom practice and home-school programmes.

A Transformative Justice Approach to Literacy Education

AbstractThis department explores how teachers can sustain students’ multilingual literacies and reimagine literacy learning across multiple contexts in conversation with researchers, practitioners, and communities.

Reconciliation

Reconciliation

Sustaining Multilingual Literacies in Classrooms and Beyond

AbstractThis department explores how teachers can sustain students’ multilingual literacies and reimagine literacy learning across multiple contexts in conversation with researchers, practitioners, and communities.

The Need for Cosmopolitan Literacy in a Global Age: Implications for Teaching Literature

AbstractGiven the realities of this increasingly connected, complex, and conflicting age, governments and policymakers around the world are recognizing the importance of global education. The field of literacy has not been immune to the pressure to globalize. Today, the notion of literacy must account not merely for social processes but also for global processes. The global turn in literacy studies affirms the cultural and linguistic diversity of students and acknowledges the need to empower them with a plurality of literacies—critical, digital, information, and multilingual literacies, among others—to prepare them for future workplaces. Among the range of new literacies, the most fundamental is cosmopolitan literacy because it entails critical, aesthetic, and empathetic skills and dispositions needed to engage with diverse values in our globalized world. In this commentary, the author discusses the principles informing cosmopolitan literacy and how it can be developed through literature.

Mediation

Mediation

Thinking Language Awareness at a Science Centre

Situated in the highly multilingual context of Vancouver, this article discusses aspects of a collaborative research project, intertwining the development of language awareness and scientific, technological, and multilingual literacies in a science centre environment. Participants were multilingual, kindergarten-aged children who attended an interactive, activity-based science educational program in a local science centre and participated in writing activities in a nearby community centre. The article will discuss the science centre as a transformative learning environment to harness cultural and linguistic diversity, a vital resource to simultaneously develop language awareness, and science knowledge. Multimodal data sources include visual documentation of the linguistic landscape at the science centre, as well as photographs, video recordings and field notes of children working individually or in small groups, and a selection of the products children created.

Narrating Literacy Practices at an Urban Secondary School in Surabaya

This study is aimed at narrating the implementation of literacy programme at an urban secondary school in Surabaya, focusing of how the school integrates and accommodates the concept of multilingualism (Java, Indonesian Language, English, French, and Japan) on its creative application and how the integration and accommodation of multilingual literacy is carried out on the day-to-day literacy practices. Drawing on qualitative data analysis gathered mainly through semi structured interviews with four teachers and two students and observations, the research findings suggest that school literacy programme is not only aimed at socializing and habituating the literacy culture within the school, but literacy programme facilitates spaces to accommodate the students’ creativity in the literacy practices through their participation, involvement and engagement in designing, managing and disseminating the school programme. It can be argued, therefore, that the literacy programme at the school transcends the expectations of the school in which the initial thought and expectation are only within the boundary of socializing and habituating the literacy culture within the school, but it transforms into more advance creative spaces for the students to learn languages and gain 21 century skills.

Readings

Readings

Forms of science capital mobilized in adolescents’ engineering projects

AbstractThe purpose of this multiple case study was to identify the forms of science capital that six groups of adolescents mobilized toward the realization of their self‐selected engineering projects during after‐school meetings. Research participants were high school students who self‐identified as Hispanic, Latina, or Latino; who had received English as a Second Language (ESL) services; and whose parents or guardians had immigrated to the United States and held working class jobs. The research team used categories from Bourdieusian theories of capital to identify the forms of science capital mobilized by the participants. Data sources included transcripts from monthly interviews and from bi‐monthly group meetings during which the group members worked on their engineering projects. Data analysis indicated that the groups activated science capital in the following categories: embodied capital in the form of formal scientific knowledge, literacy practices, and experiences with solving everyday problems; social capital in the form of connections with authorities, experts, and peers; objectified capital in the form of information and communication technologies (ICTs) and measuring tools; and institutional capital in the form of awards and titles. The participants co‐mobilized multiple forms of science capital to advance their engineering projects, and some instances of co‐mobilization enabled the future activation of subsequent forms of science capital. Engineering, as a vehicle for learning science, provided the youth with opportunities to draw from diverse community resources and from multilingual literacy practices, recasting these resources and skills as forms of science capital, which were mobilized toward the attainment of other high‐status forms of science capital. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 55: 246–270, 2018

Multilingual Literacies: Invisible Representation of Literacy in a Rural Classroom

AbstractIn many countries, educational policies typically mandate school activities that promote a homogeneous and narrow range of academic literacies for all learners despite the diverse nature of human learning. This ethnographic case study examines how a 12‐year‐old Kenyan fourth‐grade student performing below average on all standardized tests used multiple invisible literacies while documenting his knowledge and life experiences in a rural context. Invisible literacies are covert meaning‐making literacy practices that are not privileged in the classroom. Examination of these practices shows a convergence between school and home literacies, suggesting a need for education stakeholders to identify literacies that are otherwise marginalized and to reposition multilingual learners in nondeficit ways by centering and integrating these literacies. This study demonstrates that a monolithic and monolingual approach to literacy, in isolation from other visual, oral, and practical forms of literacy used by multilingual rural students, denies such learners access to and development of literacy in general.

Towards critical cultural and linguistic awareness in language classrooms in Norway: Fostering respect for diversity through identity texts

This article reports the results of a school-based curriculum development project that aimed to support language teachers working with culturally and linguistically diverse student populations in Norway to develop teaching strategies that foster intercultural citizenship and multilingual competence. Three university researchers collaborated with two schools to increase mutual respect and tolerance for cultural and linguistic diversity in language classrooms, to increase awareness of the positive impact of home language maintenance on academic performance, and to improve the engagement of multilingual literacy and student identity in the classroom. Data were collected during teacher workshops and while following the delivery of the project, and consist of lesson planning materials, texts produced by students, and a follow-up teacher survey. The article presents examples of activities and materials the teachers at the cooperating schools designed and implemented, samples of student work, as well as teacher reflections on the extent to which the project promoted multiliteracy and intercultural citizenship. The findings suggest that while the project helped strengthen awareness of cultural and linguistic diversity at the schools, understanding of the relevance of the home language to literacy development and academic success and multiliteracy were not adequately supported. Implications for future work to promote language classrooms that foster linguistic and cultural diversity and multiliteracy are discussed.

PENDIDIKAN VOKASI SEBAGAI PONDASI BANGSA MENGHADAPI GLOBALISASI

One indicator of the era of globalization is characterized by the emergence of free trade, free goods out of the country knows no bounds (borderless), this indication shows that the workforce with professional qualifications are highly demanded in the world of work in this era of globalization.In the organization of education systems-oriented world of work in Indonesia, there are two terms used education, namely: vocational education and vocational education. In Article 15 of Law No. 20 of 2003 on National Education System explained vocational education is secondary education that prepares students primarily for work in a particular field, while vocational education is higher education that prepares students to have a job with a certain applied skills equivalent to the maximum degree program. Thus, vocational education is provision of formal education which was held in higher education, such as: polytechnic, diploma, or the like which are directly related to the advancement of knowledge and skills necessary for candidates for employment in the field of engineering and industrial services. Vocational education building 8 Competency, namely: Communication Skills, Critical and Creative Thinking, Information/ Digital Literacy, Inquiry/ Reasoning Skills, Interpersonal Skills, Multicultural/ Multilingual Literacy, Problem Solving, Technological Skills.With vocational education effective and efficient is expected to generate prospective workers who have the soft skills and hard skills with critical thinking ability and skill in solving problems to face the world of work in the era of globalization.

Flow as a Metaphor for Changing Composition Practices

Given that research in language and literacy studies proffers multilingual and translingual literacy studies as central to contemporary English studies, English studies can benefit from increased attention to hip-hop language practices. While some linguists have argued for closer analysis of hip-hop nation language (HHNL) because of its relevance to youth identities and promise for critical language pedagogies, I argue that the concept of flow within HHNL studies has been largely overlooked for its value to the rhetorical development of students in English studies. While some linguists have employed the concept of flow to discuss the global movement of Black English across the globe and its implications for English as a lingua franca, flow also highlights the manner and means that artists use to move between ideas, concepts and dispositions in their compositions and therefore becomes valuable to the way English teachers may teach, study and discuss with students the possibilities of language. Because, surprisingly, academic writing is still too often viewed as a unified discourse that privileges edited American English above rhetorical fluency, flow provides an interesting way of repositioning writing and linguistic pluralism for students by focusing discussions of language and composing on features such as rhythm, vernacular eloquence, and layering and rupture in ways that press for newer considerations of language and literature within English studies.

Language ideologies on English as a Lingua Franca in Brazil: conflicting positions expressed by undergraduate students

Abstract Drawing on the concept of ideology proposed by Voloshinov (1929 [1999], Marxismo e filosofia da linguagem: Problemas fundamentais do método sociológico na ciência da linguagem. Trad. Michel Lahud; Yara Frateschi Vieira 9 ed. São Paulo: Editora Hucitec.) and on the notion of language ideology (Woolard 1998, Introduction. In Bambi B. Schieffelin, Kathryn A. Woolard & Paul V. Kroskrity (eds.), Language ideologies practice and theory, 3–47. Oxford: Oxford University Press; Kroskrity 2004, Language ideologies. In Alessandro Duranti (ed.), A companion to linguistic anthropology, 496–517. Blackwell Publishing), this paper addresses language ideologies expressed by participants of an Academic Writing course taught to undergraduate students majoring in English and Portuguese in a public university in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The data from which participants’ language ideologies are interpreted come from two literacy events that integrate a wider set of literacy practices (Street 2000, Literacy events and literacy practices. In Marilyn Martin-Jones & Kathryn E. Jones (eds.), Multilingual literacies: Comparative perspectives on research and practice, 17–29. Amsterdam: John Benjamin’s, Street 2009, Ethnography of writing and reading. In David R. Olson & Nancy Torrance (eds.), The Cambridge handbook of literacy, 329–345. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) in which participants engaged in Moodle, the virtual learning environment of the course. Concerning students’ positions, the analysis depicts how they entextualize ELF scholars’ language ideologies to either (re/de)construct their own standard native-based language ideology about English or to reinforce this same ideology. The paper also examines the stance adopted by the professor in her responses to students’ writings in terms of both her ideological alignment with theories that challenge the role of the native speaker as English expands worldwide and her resistance to naïve and romantic views of this expansion.

Visual accounts of Finnish and Greek teenagers’ perceptions of their multilingual language and literacy practices

AbstractThis paper uses visual methods to explore how teenagers in two different European countries (Finland and Greece) personally relate to their first language and to English, which is widely used in the everyday lives of young people in both countries. Our data comprise sets of self-made visualizations in which 14- to 16-year-old teenagers depict their personal relationship to their first language (Finnish/Greek) and to English. Theoretically and methodologically, we subscribe to socio-culturally oriented research on (foreign language) literacy and language learning and recent studies on multilingualism. Overall, by offering a detailed account of the variety of representation forms and meaning-making symbols employed by our participants in their visual products, our analysis in this paper highlights the common but also diverse perceptions, values and attitudes that young people from two different European contexts bring to their practices and their encounters with English and other languages in their lives. By revealing the personal meanings and values attached by teenagers to English, our analysis also provides indirect insights into the multiple ways English is locally encountered, appropriated and drawn upon by young people in two different countries to serve their own purposes.

The African Storybook and Language Teacher Identity in Digital Times

The African Storybook (ASb) is a digital initiative that promotes multilingual literacy for African children by providing openly licenced children's stories in multiple African languages, as well as English, French, and Portuguese. Based on Darvin and Norton's () model of identity and investment, and drawing on the Douglas Fir Group's () framework for second language acquisition, this study investigates Ugandan primary school teachers’ investment in the ASb, its impact on their teaching, and their changing identities. The study was conducted in a rural Ugandan school from June to December 2014, and the data, which focus on one key participant, Monica, were drawn from field notes, classroom observations, interview transcripts, and questionnaires, which were coded using retroductive coding. The findings indicate that through the ASb initiative and its stories, Monica and other teachers began to imagine themselves as writers, readers, and teachers of stories, reframing what it means to be a reading teacher. Teachers’ shifts of identity were indexical of their enhanced social and cultural capital as they engaged with the ASb, notwithstanding ideological constraints associated with mother tongue usage, assessment practices, and teacher supervision. The authors conclude that the enhancement of language teacher identity has important implications for the promotion of multilingual literacy for young learners in African communities.

Mexican university teacher-researchers’ biliteracy beliefs and practices

AbstractThere has been a growing interest in describing higher education academic literacy. In our study, literacy is conceived as multi-layered phenomena, multiple in its character, denominated “multiliteracies” (Cope & Kalantzis, 2013). Furthermore, within the multiliteracies frame, multilingual literacies (Martin-Jones & Jones, 2000) are distinguished and discussed in the present paper, in particular the development of biliteracy in local academic settings. This paper explores connections between the teachers’ perceptions on literacy, teachers’ own biliteracy development as publishing authors and researchers. The research draws on the data obtained through a questionnaire applied in the first phase of the project to 100 participants from three public universities from northern, central and southern part of Mexico, which was completed by analysis of narratives gathered through interviews from a reduced sample of participants (31). The results seem to indicate that language teachers-researchers perceive their L2 literacy in wider terms, beyond mere reading-writing skills development and decodification of the text, which seems to be apparent in academics with higher academic credentials.

Languages in adult literacy: Policies and practices in Education for All and beyond

Linguistic diversity characterizes many countries with large literacy needs. Meeting these needs will require a multilingual approach based on learning initial literacy in the learner’s mother tongue, with other languages used subsequently. This article identifies five major challenges in implementing multilingual programmes and traces the international policy developments over the 15 years of the EFA period. Four case studies—Mexico, Morocco, Papua New Guinea, and Senegal—illustrate a range of policies with differing approaches and levels of commitment to providing multilingual literacy opportunities. The article concludes with six policy orientations to guide action as part of the post-2015 agenda.