Linking Church and School: Language and Literacy Practices of Bilingual Latina/o Pentecostal Students

• In Event: 18.027 - Everyday Learning: Leveraging Nondominant Youth Language and Culture in Schools

Abstract

This paper examines how Mexican and Central American Immigrant Pentecostal church socialized children and youth to language and literacy practices. In particular, I focus on how readings of the Bible mediated the children and youth’s language and literacy development in Spanish while socializing them to morality. I suggest how this approach to reading of texts in church can be leveraged for classroom learning.

Theoretical Framework: I draw from theories of language socialization (Garrett & Baquedano-Lopez, 2002; Schieffelin & Ochs, 1986) and cultural modeling (Lee, 2006) to examine how language and literacy practices are embedded in larger cultural contexts. Language socialization focuses on how processes of language and cultural acquisition occur in everyday interaction. Novices are socialized to values, beliefs, norms, skills, and knowledge by more expert members to and through language. The cultural modeling framework complements the language socialization paradigm by identifying how to leverage students’ home and community knowledge and skills for the development of specific school literacy practices.

Methods and data sources: This paper draws from a larger multi-year ethnography of a Sunday school at the Pentecostal church. The corpus of data includes participant observation fieldnotes, video recordings of the Sunday school lessons, and interviews with the children and youth. Data analysis included open and focused coding of fieldnotes, videotape logs, and transcripts of interviews. In addition, I used discourse analysis to examine key segments of the audio and video recordings that illuminated how religious texts were read, discussed, and interpreted.

Findings: Children and youth assiduously read the Bible both in church and out of church. The Sunday school teachers led student read-alouds and discussions of the Bible that helped to build community among the children and youth and that socialized them to morality. Although it was not the direct goal of the Sunday school teachers to build students’ language and literacy skills, the readings developed the students’ vocabulary in Spanish as well as their comprehension skills. In addition, class discussions about the readings afforded the students’ opportunities to assert their own interpretations of the authoritative religious texts. Resisting the church’s rigid perspectives, they built arguments using evidence from the Bible. In these ways, the students gained language and literacy skills that can be leveraged in public schools to meet state literacy standards.

Significance: By documenting the knowledge and skills Latino/a students gain in their Pentecostal church, this study addresses the dearth of educational research examining culturally and linguistically diverse students in religious spaces. In addition, this study can inform classroom practices and pedagogies.

Author

• Lucila D. Ek, University of Texas at San Antonio