Identity Texts: Cultivating Academic Literacy in a Newcomer Social Studies Class

• In Event: Knowing English Is Not Enough! Cultivating Academic Literacies Among Bilingual Learners

Abstract

Perspective and Purpose
Newcomer high school students must develop conversational ability and basic reading and writing skills in English at the same time they are developing oral and written academic language skills in subject-area classrooms. This double challenge of learning English and content must be taken on by teachers and students alike and successfully managed in a very short window of time while capitalizing on twenty-first century technologies.

Adolescent newcomers with low literacy skills have been found to benefit from Newcomer Programs (Boyson & Short, 2003; Schnur, 1999; Short, 2002). The focus is to help students acquire beginning English reading and writing skills before enrollment in regular content area classrooms. This traditional approach to the education of newcomer students separates English language development from content instruction because it is assumed that English language prociency is a prerequisite for subject matter learning. Yet, Harper and de Jong (2004) claim this is a misconception about teaching newcomers. In this paper, the authors describe students’ growing mastery of both English literacy and historical thinking, an academic literate practice for teaching and learning the social studies. The research question is: How does the writing of newcomer students reflect growing mastery of English literacy and historical thinking?

The paper is grounded on Cummins’ (2001) argument that learning occurs when teachers orchestrate the construction of interactional spaces where there is both cognitive and identity investment on the part of students. “Identity texts” highlight the important role of negotiation of identities in students’ learning. Classroom interactions with affordances for students to create identity texts, which showcase their intellectual, linguistic, and artistic talents challenge the devaluation of identity that many newcomer students experience in contexts that do not value their home languages, cultural resources, and transnational experiences. The purpose of this case study is to show how historical thinking and the creation of “identity texts” are effective ways of cultivating academic literacy in social studies education.

Methods and Data
Fieldnotes, audiotapes, and student written products were collected in a tenth grade class. The researchers coded transcripts of their fieldnotes, used selected episodes from transcripts for linguistic microanalysis, and coded all the students’ written artifacts. These different data were analyzed as Miles and Huberman (1994) suggest by noting patterns and themes, arriving at comparisons and contrasts. Initial coding reflected students’ positions as observers of race history in the U.S. but across time they positioned themselves as participants.

Educational Significance
Findings show that the creation and use of digitized documents and document based questions made the social studies curriculum relevant and meaningful to the newcomer students. Classroom practices elicited cognitive engagement and identity investment in the production of student writing. The choice to use (or not) the home language played a significant role in the creation of students’ identity texts. Findings agree with previous studies (Cummins 2005, 2006) that argue maximum identity investment on the part of students is key to optimal academic literacy development.

Authors

• Maria E. Franquiz, The University of Texas - Austin

• Cinthia S. Salinas, The University of Texas - Austin