Reframing School Literacy as Communication With Real Audiences: Affordances for Linguistically Diverse Students

• In Event: 61.018 - The Power in the Word: Critical and Conscious Examinations of Text

Abstract

An ethnographic study of a linguistically diverse continuation high school’s physical science class’s efforts to fundraise and promote their skateboard building project demonstrates how students’ communication with the real world enhanced their language and literacy learning. The preliminary findings show that the students’ communication with real audiences for real purposes created a more expansive landscape for language and literacy learning: increasing their use of dialogue, multiliteracies, multimodalities, and student-driven metalanguage, while also expanding the range of roles for students within this landscape. The new construct of Amplified Communication Events is proposed in order to encourage more research about this type of language and literacy learning.

Author

• Sarah Rapp, University of California - Santa Cruz