A scoping review of research on adolescents’ multilingual literacy in schools

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Friday 11:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: The Agency of Language

Abstract

Contemporary literacy scholarship acknowledges the benefits and importance of young people drawing on diverse linguistic resources to accomplish academic reading and writing tasks. However, schools have often been spaces of linguistic oppression for multilingual learners, especially in the aggressively monolingual U.S. context. This scoping review gathers empirical research about adolescents’ multilingual literacy (k = 219 studies), guided by PRISMA standards. Analysis of studies’ research context, terms used by researchers to classify multilingualism, and studies’ data sources was conducted by hand coding and with NVivo queries. Results indicate the persistence of language separation ideologies, ambiguity definitions of multilingualism across the data corpus, and an emergent trend of monolingual data sources for a multilingual student population.

Authors

• Thea Williamson, Old Dominion University

• Brielle Donlan, Old Dominion University