English Language Learners' Changing Roles and Participation Structures in Expansive Learning Cycles for Language and Literacy Development

• In Event: 25.052 - Designing Activity Systems to Support the Communities of Practice and Community Engaged Learning

Abstract

This ethnographic case study explores adolescent ELLs’ ways in which they learn language and develop literacy over one and a half academic years based on the framework that language learning and literacy development occur in social interactions in and across various contexts using the tools of activity systems. Changing roles, responsibilities and interactions in various social contexts are essential for human learning and development, and particularly for language and literacy development, from a CHAT (Cultural-Historical-Activity-Theory) perspective. In this presentation, I will show how adolescent ELLs learn language and develop literacy as language learners, teachers, researchers, and social activists by engaging themselves in multiple roles in the interacting activity systems by appropriating semiotic tools, languaging, verbalizing, materializing and publicizing across contexts.

Author

• Heeok Jeong, Stephen F. Austin State University