Immigrant Learners and Their Families: Literacy To Connect the Generations. Language in Education: Theory & Practice 84 (original) (raw)
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Bridging Home and School Literacy Practices: Empowering Families of Recent Immigrant Children
Theory Into Practice, 2009
This article reports on a family literacy program that began with the creation and implementation of a Welcome Center in an elementary school in the Southwest United States. This center was intended to be a place where recent immigrant students and their families, teachers, as well as other community members, came together to participate in literacy activities. While serving the intended purposes, the Welcome Center also proved to be a useful venue for the recent immigrant students and their families to develop language and literacy. Overall, this report points to the need for schools to provide explicit spaces and planned opportunities for newcomers to meaningfully enter in dialogue with their new linguistic and cultural communities.
South African Journal of Education, 2011
Major sociocultural contexts of learning such as families, communities and schools are imbued with power, and power favours some more than others. Given that schools are important sites of social and cultural reproduction, one of their major tasks is to teach learners to be literate. However, literacy is often viewed only as schooled literacy in the dominant language, and the role of the home has been undervalued in the past. In this paper I examine, through a sociocultural lens, the role played by the home and community in literacy learning. Through data elicited from observations of family interactions and conversations, as well as interviews with family members in two immigrant households, I examine their home and community literacy practices and ask how these practices intersect with schooled literacy. I conclude that immigrant children have far greater language and literacy skills than presumed, and that schools need to recognize language and literacy practices that children engage in at home and in the community, and emphasize that social justice for all requires educational shifts.
Literacy practices among immigrant children
This paper investigates literacy socialization of one Polish immigrant adolescent attending both Polish heritage language school and English mainstream post-primary school in Ireland. The focus is on how second language literacy socialization goals affect this young person’s identity negotiation through his literacy practices as he grows up in multilingual environment and try to find his place in a new country and society. A particular focus is on second language literacy socialization and one’s emotional world. This study examines the ways in which emotions are being recognized and displayed through literacy practice. This paper is a part of the longitudinal study (5 years) involving four students and their families, some of whom also attended Polish weekend schools in addition to mainstream secondary schools. The theoretical and analytical approach combines Ethnography of Communication approach to data collection and field work (participant home and school observations, audio-recordings of children’s interactions with their peers, their teachers and parents, open-ended interviews, children’s samples of written work) with Discourse Analysis approaches (Duff, 1995; Davis & Harre 1990, Harre & Langenhove, 1999, Ochs & Capps, 2001).
Culturally appropriate pedagogy in a bilingual family literacy programme
Researchers have documented bilingual family literacy programmes in terms of their structure and programming as well as their effect on children's language and literacy development and parents' ability to support such development within the home. What is missing from the discussion is a description of how facilitators mediate understanding within the programme. The purpose of this article is to describe how facilitators working with Karen and Iranian families mediated parents' understanding of the key concepts within the parent-only segment of a bilingual family literacy programme for immigrant and refugee families in western Canada. Drawing principally from observational field notes at two sites of the programme, we describe the activities and instruction that took place during the introduction to the session, Rhythm, Raps and Rhymes. Supporting data were drawn from a larger 3-year study. Our findings indicate that the facilitators at both sites mediated the parents' understanding of the benefits of rhythm and rhyme to early literacy by using culturally familiar and relevant content delivered in both the first language of the community and in English, and by drawing from culturally familiar pedagogical practices. Results of this study have implications for the delivery of family literacy programmes within culturally diverse communities.
Research in the Teaching of English, 2017
This article describes an after-school family literacy program as a model of multiliterate collaboration under and against English Only and anti-immigrant conditions. The model reveals how state politics surrounding language, ethnicity, and citizenship may interact with the activity systems of family literacy programs to redefine what counts as sanctioned language and literacy learning within school spaces. This article details the findings of a qualitative study and includes the goals and curriculum of the program, as well as the recruiting mechanisms, participants, participant feedback, and participant experiences. Findings from the study reveal the role of parental investment in language and literacy learning, language co-construction, and honoring of all languages, cultures, and experiences. This family literacy model contributes to literacy studies by offering possibilities for future school-sponsored, multiliterate family literacy research collaborations to draw from and extend the language and literacy practices and funds of knowledge of ELL students, parents, teachers, and literacy scholars working within English Only and anti-immigrant contexts. Parents and their children sat side-by-side in a tight circle with journals in hand. Elianita, 1 a second grader, sat in a chair at the front of the room and read the opening lines from her narrative describing her parents' support for her schooling: " My parents help me with my homework whenever I need it. They help me be smart and study. They teach me to be special and to try my best with my school work. " Next, Brenna, also a second grader, took the chair and read her piece about her mother and stepfather's support for her as a young writer: " My mom is nice by helping me spelling words I don't know and my step dad helps me write. They both want me to get my words right. " Then, Guadalupe, Brenna's mother, read from her narrative describing advice she had received from her friend, Jeanni, who she had met upon her arrival to the United States from Mexico. Guadalupe's story described the ways Jeanni's friendship and mentoring had empowered her to continue her education and to lay a foundation for her daughter's success: " Jeanni me ayudó a fortalezer mi interior a creer que el futuro de mis hijas se hace con cada día, trabajando en equipo con José y buscando los recursos disponibles para lograrlo. " (Jeanni helped me strengthen my inner self to believe my daughter's future is forged day by day, working as a team with José, and seeking the resources to achieve it.)
Families at a Disadvantage: class, culture and literacies
British Educational Research Journal, 1998
This paper addresses the issue of diverse literacies, and the problems of privileging a dominant form of literacy at the expense of those from non-mainstream cultures. It uses data from a family literacy project to illustrate how the actual literacy practices of working-class families and communities can be incorporated into learning programmes. It argues that whilst familiarity with the dominant forms of spoken and written language is a vital ingredient in adults’ and children's communicative functioning, it should not be the unchallenged objective of education. Instead opportunities to legitimate the vernacular literacies of the home and community should be sought. In so doing deficit views of families at a disadvantage can be replaced by views that positively value the home culture to the benefit of both the home and the school.
International Encyclopedia of Education, 2022
Family literacy education has arguably created change, ranging from a focus on sustaining informal family interactions among parents and children driven by the need to eliminate intergenerational cycles of poverty to more formal and federally funded programs driven by legislative definitions that advance traditional literacy skills, life skills as well as problemsolving skills deemed necessary to enhance opportunities for both parents and children in families to overcome challenges posed by illiteracy. Yet, a persistent concern lingers that family literacy programs can do much more to balance the development of programs with an adequate emphasis on the community and cultural practices of families of color, a dynamic critical to enhancing teachers' capacity to support parents and children in and beyond schools, both in the United States and across the globe. To advance this argument in this chapter, we discuss family literacy and its evolution over time, taking into consideration local and global realities of families, and particularly, families of color. Following this, we describe family literacy implementation and programming in the U.S. followed by a discussion of the same across the globe, highlighting the ways in which these initiatives may have potentially deterred the economic or social realities of families of color even while perceived as advancement. Subsequently, we discuss long-standing efforts to examine and support the literacies of families of color, pointing to key indicators that characterize these research and community practices. Finally, we identify key insights gleaned from our discussion by presenting certain culturally relevant literacy practices that can sustain the literacies of families of color and proposing a way forward for the field. [Published in the section on Literacies and Languages edited by David Yaden and Theresa Rogers for Tierney, R. J., Rizvi, F. & Ercikan, K (Ed.), International Encyclopedia of Education, Oxford: Elsevier.]
This chapter analyzes the transgenerational transfer of literacy ideologies, values and assumptions through family literacy interactions. Using a case study approach, we analyze how a Mixteco -Mexican father’s and daughter’s perceptions about themselves and each other evolve as they co-construct bilingual literacy events. Biliteracy has been defined as “any and all instances in which communication occurs in two or more languages in or around writing” (Hornberger, 1990, p. 213). From this perspective, biliteracy is much more than the sole act of reading and writing; it encompasses comprehension of a text through dialogical interactions. Dialogues around texts are an intrinsic part of Retrospective Miscue Analysis (RMA; Goodman & Marek, 1996), a research tool that asks readers to retrospectively reflect on their oral reading behaviors. RMA is based on a constructivist model of reading in which readers use psycholinguistic strategies that include sampling, predicting, and confirming, and linguistic cues that include graphophonic, syntactic and semantic cues to construct meaning.
The Pedagogical Practices of an Immigrant Parent-Maintaining Heritage Language in the Home Context
2021
The maintenance of heritage language is essential to immigrant children’s linguistic, cultural, and social development. While there is a large body of literature on heritage language, how heritage language is practiced at home remains largely unknown. Engaging in an autobiographical narrative inquiry, I tell and retell stories of our pedagogical practices in the home context. I seek to bridge the research gap with new understandings of the “parent knowledge” immigrant parents bring to bear in heritage language education. I invite you into my home and immigrant family’s language journey to witness the efforts, challenges, and rewards of learning heritage language.