Staying in Touch: Transglobal Language and Literacy Practices

• In Event: 32.083 - Roundtable Session 12
  In Roundtable Session: 32.083-1 - Conceptualizing Time: The Case of Immigrant Students

Abstract

Objective: This paper explicitly references both time and space to explore how language and literacy practices associated with global communication extend across multiple spaces and modalities and across time.
Theoretical Frame: Blommaert (2010) argues for a sociolinguistics of mobility, which he describes as “language in motion” (p. 5). Blommaert is concerned with actual language used in real sociocultural, historical, and political contexts. He argues that oral and written languages operate within vertically layered scales that offer differential access to power. These “indexical distinctions” (p. 5) act to “convert linguistic and semiotic differences into social inequities and this represent the ‘normative’ dimensions of situated language in use” (p. 6). In short, language and literacy practices operate within spaces that involve norms, expectations, values, assumptions, and “conceptions of what counts as proper and normal (indexical) language use and what does not” (p. 6).
Methodology: In this paper, we explore not only language as it moves around the globe, but also language across time. Initial coding of interview data and field notes using NVivo alongside analyses of artifacts, highlighted identity construction and literacy/language learning across time for children’s whose families have immigrated to the United States. Codes highlighting online literacy practices, home literacy practices, and international communication with family members inform this paper.
Results: The full data set includes a vast range of language and literacy practices that involve global communication across the families. For example, we witnessed a Moroccan mother who learned to rely on the Internet to stay connected with family and friends in Morocco and access Islamic texts written in Arabic. She has recently extended her internet practices to include Craig’s List, where she uses her emerging English abilities to access material goods that her limited budget would not otherwise allow. A Tibetan mother uses a Tibetan calendar to coordinate her life with family members in Tibet and the Internet to stay connected. A Mexican family was introduced to Skype by one of the graduate students involved in the project and was able to see and communicate with family members in real time for the first time in three years. This “language in motion” (Blommaert, 2010, p. 5) has resulted in a novel set of multilingual online practices that have respective values in various spaces (i.e., homes, schools, communities, religious organizations, native countries) based on established norms, expectations, values, and assumptions.
Significance: This paper presents a grounded analysis of global communication informing understandings of everyday practices for immigrant families and providing evidence of sophisticated language and literacy practices.

Author

• Catherine F. Compton-Lilly, University of South Carolina