Literacy and literacy practices: Plurilingual connected migrants and emerging literacy (original) (raw)
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Texts, Talk and Technology: The Literacy Practices of Bilingually-Educated Students
Trabalhos em Linguística Aplicada, 2016
It is widely recognized that to be literate in today's world requires conscious, creative and critical deployment of language (and other semiotic devices) for different social purposes, contexts and audiences (FREEBODY & LUKE, 1990, 2003). This notion of literacy as social practice (BARTON & HAMILTON, 2000; STREET, 1995) has been extended to include the idea of multiliteracies (NEW LONDON GROUP, 1996; KALANTZIS & COPE, 2012), in recognition of the roles technology and digital text use and production play in young people's lives. However, the literacy practices of primary school-aged students, as they enact them in their daily in-school and out-of-school lives, remain under-investigated. This is particularly the case with bilingually-educated students whose literacy practices, involving texts, talk and technology, are deployed across languages. The research reported here investigated the literacy practices and language use of 68 students at three primary schools in Melbourne,...
2014
Introduction In the past quarter of a century, things digital have changed numerous aspects of our lives – and language use is no exception. With the use of email, the world wide web, mobile technologies, and digitally mediated ways of communication, a new domain of language use has entered the lives of most of us – namely, what I call “digital language use” below. A lot of it is oral, mediated by mobile phones and voice-over-IP (like Skype, for instance), but a great part of it is written and involves both reading and writing (such as emailing, texting, instant messaging, blogging etc.). In fact, it is estimated that through the use of these ways of digital communication, we read and write more today than before their advent (Baron 2008: 183). This makes especially written forms of digitally mediated communication a highly important new aspect of language use that should be the focus of concern for sociolinguists, educators working in bilingual education, and, indeed, all professio...
This review of research offers a synthesis and analysis of research studies that address issues of language and literacy practices and learning in transnational contexts of migration. We consider how theoretical concepts from transnational migration studies, including particular Boudieusian-inspired concepts such as transnational social field, capital, and habitus, as well as sociolinguistic studies of language and transnational space, might inform and extend the field of literacy research. We mobilize these concepts in relation to each other as interpretive frames for discussing an emerging body of empirical studies that address various aspects of language and literacy practices as they are intertwined with issues of cross-border relations and mobility. Studies reviewed examine practices in families and communities, practices among youth and within educational settings, and practices with transnational media (broadcast and digital communications). We argue that as a whole these studies show the important role of language and literacy practices in constructing and maintaining social relations across borders, and in how migrants navigate and position themselves in various social fields within and across national boundaries. We consider the intergenerational process in the family in mediating participation in these social practices, how language ideologies at multiple scale levels influence family and youth practices, and the variable ways in which institutional structures of schooling position the transnational affiliations and linguistic resources of migrant students.
Issues and Trends in Learning Technologies
Changes in digital landscapes have complex effects on the meaning-making that they mediate (Thorne et al., 2015). There is a growing interest in examining the daily digital literacy practices of today's multilingual young adults and adolescents, who are going to become the generation of future global communicators (Kim, 2016). Addressing current scholarship on multilingual digital literacy, this article examines 20 empirical studies on multilingual young adults and adolescents (ages 12-29) and their vernacular digital literacy practices beyond the classroom. Drawing upon multimodality and translanguaging perspectives that recognize literacy practices as ideological constructions produced within social contexts and across semiotic resources, the article identifies five emerging themes in research focusing on daily digital literacy practices of multilingual youths: recognizing cultural and linguistic diversity, exploring and constructing multifaceted identities online, leveraging technological affordances for communicating, gaining social support in virtual communities, and developing global citizenship through online intercultural exchanges. This article concludes with implications to support critical multilingualism and multimodality in language and literacy classrooms.
Young People’s Emerging Multilingual Practices: Learning Language or Literacy, or Both?
Educational Linguistics, 2019
Research on language learning (or development) and research on literacy are usually seen as two separate strands of enquiry. Researchers of language learning very often work under the label SLA, second language acquisition. Their focus might be on learners, on learning (processes or outcomes), or on teachers; they focus on languageas oral or written, received or produced. Most often the focus is on languages other than the first/native language, traditionally labelled as the second or foreign language. Researchers of literacy, however, focus on reading or writing; on the reception or production of written texts. Their focus is very often on the first language or the second language and rarely, if ever, on foreign languages. The labels of first, second and foreign language are, however, becoming inaccurate and inadequate in describing most of our language use and learning today, especially in multilingual contexts, and so researchers are beginning to question the relevance of these terms (see e.g. Lo Bianco 2014). At the same time, learners and learning contexts are becoming increasingly varied, and making a distinction between the concepts of language and literacy is becoming more difficultand perhaps unnecessary. It is indeed increasingly common to see researchers using language and literacy together, as one entity, in research questions, article titles, and argumentation (I have done this myself). Connecting these two concepts is, however, done as a default, without any explication as to the nature of the connection. Keeping these concepts separate is at least partly due to the epistemological questions of what language and literacy are. Firstly, language can be conceptualized as a system and as structures which take spoken or written form, and accordingly, we may understand
Computers and Composition, 2019
Writing research has yet to fully explore multilingual, transnational students' literacies as negotiated across formal, informal, and digital spaces and as mediated by semiotic and identity resources mobilized across local and translocal contexts. This study draws on theoretical concepts of polycentricity and scale (Blommaert, Collins, & Slembrouch, 2005a, 2005b; Canagarajah & De Costa, 2016) to examine one Chinese international student's literacies across an honor-designated first-year writing class and WeChat (a popular social networking smartphone application). Based on detailed tracing of the student's literacies, this study examines her language and identity practices as mediated by local and translocal semiotic resources distributed across spaces and times. In connecting WeChat and the writing classroom as two centers of Morgan's multilingual work, this study provides a nuanced account of spaces as semiotic resources that operate with normative values that legitimize certain language practices while constraining others. Through juxtaposing the students' self-sponsored literacies on WeChat to school-sponsored literacies expected in FYW, it complicates current accounts of digital literacies as expanding opportunities for literacy learning by suggesting ways in which the mobility of literacies might be constrained by power differentials that position spaces and language practices in hierarchical orders.
In most of the literature concerning children’s digital literacy practices it is claimed that there is a mismatch between children’s creative out-of-school use of digital media and the dreary literacy reality of school; the suggestion is that the school experience should be enriched following children’s out-of-school practices. In this chapter data from quantitative and qualitative research concerning translocal digital writing by Greek children is used to question this dominant thesis. The critique focuses on three issues: (1) on a clear trend for overgeneralization, based mainly on data from the English speaking world; (2) on the emphasis on vernacular literacies, underestimating the children’s full range of literacies, and, (3) on a significant silence with respect to the historical dimension in studying contemporary communication phenomena.