Language Immersion Students' Concepts of Writing and Multilingualism

• In Event: 41.084 - Roundtable Session 16
  In Roundtable Session: 41.084-13 - Youth's Identity Work in Diverse Multilingual and Multicultural Contexts

Abstract

Language immersion education settings aim to provide diverse groups of students with a bicultural and bilingual education. Yet immersion programs in the United States face a number of challenges in supporting and sustaining students’ bilingualism and biliteracy (Other & Author, 2013; Palmer, 2008; Valdes, 1997). For example, schools are often required by the state to measure students’ academic knowledge and literacy skills on standardized tests designed for monolingual-English speakers. In effect, students’ true multilingual abilities are not taken into consideration. Further, we rarely hear directly from students in language immersion schools about their literacy experiences. As such, we need more information about how multilingual children are developing language and literacy in their schools (Norton & Toohey, 2011; Orellana & D’warte, 2010; Other & Author, 2014; Reyes, 2012). As part of a larger project investigating the writing development of four students at a Spanish immersion school, this comparative case study asks: How do children conceptualize writing and multilingualism across their visual, written, and spoken narratives of literacy?

To interpret how students from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds (Spanish, Turkish, and English) are developing as writers, my conceptual framework draws from literacy-and-identity studies, which suggest that students’ achievement and their engagement at school is linked to how well they can negotiate between their own socio-cultural identities and the implicit power relations within schools to develop attitudes about themselves as academically competent (Cummins, 2012; Ladson-Billings, 1995; Norton, 2000). Specifically, the construct of investment developed by Norton, (2000) offers a frame for explaining the link between societal power relations and language learners’ academic engagement with their respective languages. Following other recent studies of literacy-and-identity, I also draw from positioning theory which considers identities as the collection of stories we tell about ourselves and our experiences (Harre, et al., 2009). Using child-centered interview methodology (cf. Kendrick & McKay, 2002, 2004; Orellana, 2009; Rogers & Elias, 2012), I developed semi-structured interview questions and asked students to create a range of multimodal texts including idea maps, time-lines, poems and self-portraits to elicit their stories of reading and writing.

Data analysis was guided by qualitative methods (Merriam, 2009) and methods of critical discourse analysis (Gee, 2011; Fairclough, 1995; Martin & White, 2005; Martin-Beltran, 2013; Rogers & Elias, 2012), multimodal analysis (Kress, 2011; Norris, 2004) and narrative analysis (Bamberg, 2004; Gee, 2011; Labov, 1982). Analyses demonstrate that children told different kinds of stories across their interview responses and identity texts. Interview responses revealed how children’s developing views about themselves as writers was linked to their investment in each language or how they were positioned within a community of language users. In creating their identity texts, students composed multilingual and multimodal stories that focused on their interests and capabilities as writers. Implications for immersion programs are discussed, specifically the ways in which writing instruction can enhance children’s opportunities to fully draw from their linguistic and meaning-making repertoires.

Author

• Angela Layton, University of Missouri - St. Louis