"We Can't Write It in Journal": An Analysis of a Young Multilingual's Classroom Journal Writing

• In Event: Moving Toward the Public Good: Collaborative Research on the Complexities of Multilingual Writing

Abstract

There has been a deficit-oriented discourse on multilingual students from immigrant households in the U.S. due to current educational policies that limit the use of their important linguistic and cultural resources (Durán, 2017). A deep body of language and literacy research has challenged such perspective and illustrated the ways in which these students actively deployed their linguistic and cultural backgrounds as their educational resources (Gallo & Link, 2015). However, relatively few studies investigated young multilinguals, particularly in preK-3 grade levels. In this paper, I propose to address this gap by examining young multilingual children’s language and literacy practices in their classroom journal writing activity. I situate this study within theoretical frameworks that view language and literacy as social practices. Such a practice view affords me a perspective to examine how multiple literacies are socially situated in a particular way in a particular time and space (Street, 1984) and to examine what way of writing is considered appropriate in a classroom context.
This year-long ethnographic study was conducted in a kindergarten classroom in an elementary school located in the largest, urban school district in a Midwest state. Half of the students in the classroom are immigrant children whose home languages are other than English. As a participant-observer, I held multiple positionalities in this research as a teacher, a grown-up, and a friend of young children in this classroom. For students’ journal writing activity in the classroom, a template was provided and it was largely composed of two parts: text in the lined section and illustration in the white space (see Figure 2). Despite being able to choose what they write and about in the text section, children were strictly instructed to follow their template by including written text based on standard English writing conventions in the text section and graphic illustration in the illustration section. In order to provide a thick description, I focus on one multilingual immigrant student, Pennycheeu (self-chosen pseudonym) who migrated from India to the United States when she was two. Data sources include participant-observation and fieldnotes and video recordings documenting classroom interactions as well as student work products during this writing activity. Following procedures described in Bloome, Carter, Christan, Otto, and Shuart-Faris (2005), I transcribed video recordings and analyzed the transcripts, fieldnotes, and student work products.
Findings show that Pennycheeu negotiates the norms of the classroom journal writing in a strategic way. Although she recognized Hindi as inappropriate to use in the text-based writing section (see Transcript 1), Pennycheeu transformed the normative usage of the written form of Hindi to graphic illustration (see Figure 2 & 3). Pennycheeu responded to the assigned task by drawing upon her cultural and linguistic resources in ways that are legitimate in participating in the journal writing activity. From a participant-observer’s perspective, this young child’ multimodal and multilingual practices in an English only classroom indicate challenges in terms of building a collaborative relationship with the participants and teachers for multilingual writers’ public good.

Author

• Jungmin Lee, The Ohio State University - Columbus