Integration in Isolation: Newcomer Immigrants in Sweden Negotiate Identity, Language, and Literacy

• In Event: Ecologies and Identities in Second Language Learning

Abstract

This presentation interrogates the nature of new language learning among newly-arrived immigrant and refugee students within a linguistically isolated urban school in Sweden. Analyzed through an ecology of language framework (Creese, Martin & Hornberger, 2008; van Lier, 2004), data suggest that students were peceived as both separate and transitory, which was evident in the phsyical placement of students within the school, social relations between newly-arrived and first and second generation immigrant students, and within the curriculum. In turn, students relied on linguistic and educational tools origin to pursue multilingualism in this environment as a means of making sense of and navigating school and community linguistic ecologies.

Author

• Liv Thorstensson Davila, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign