This article presents data from a collection of yearlong case studies on resident multilingual writers’ college admissions essays. The focal student in this piece revealed the challenges that such ...writers face in presenting themselves to college admissions officers. Exploring these cultural and linguistic conflicts, this analysis uses Goffman's performance theories, which argue that writers (re)construct identities in response to changing social cues. Literacy educators, researchers, and policymakers can use these insights to help resident multilingual writers balance the demands of academic audiences with their preferred forms of representation.
•Some parents report a compensatory motive for fostering children's language skills.•Parents’ perception of children's need for support is reflected in children's skills.•Parents with and without ...compensatory motive report similar frequencies of HLE activities.•Compensatory motive affects the correlations between HLE activities and language skills.
The home literacy environment (HLE) in terms of providing frequent and high-quality access to oral and written language is a well-established, positive predictor of children's language and emergent literacy development. However, little is known about parents’ perception of children's needs for language support and how this perception in terms of a compensatory motive for fostering children's language skills relates to parents’ home-literacy practices, and their children's language skills. To examine these questions, we conducted a study with 193 preschool children and their parents. We assessed parents’ motive to foster their children to compensate for a perceived unfavorable language development, multiple indicators of the HLE, and children's language skills. Parents’ compensatory motive proved to reflect the needs of their children as children of parents reporting a compensatory motive displayed lower language skills than children of parents who indicated no such motive. However, parents with and without compensatory motive did not differ in terms of reported home-literacy practices. There were also differences concerning the correlational pattern between home-literacy practices and children's language development, with correlations being generally weaker and sometimes even negative in the compensatory group. The results suggest that the relationship between home-literacy practices and children's language development might be decidedly complex and less straightforward than often assumed.
In many countries, educational policies typically mandate school activities that promote a homogeneous and narrow range of academic literacies for all learners despite the diverse nature of human ...learning. This ethnographic case study examines how a 12‐year‐old Kenyan fourth‐grade student performing below average on all standardized tests used multiple invisible literacies while documenting his knowledge and life experiences in a rural context. Invisible literacies are covert meaning‐making literacy practices that are not privileged in the classroom. Examination of these practices shows a convergence between school and home literacies, suggesting a need for education stakeholders to identify literacies that are otherwise marginalized and to reposition multilingual learners in nondeficit ways by centering and integrating these literacies. This study demonstrates that a monolithic and monolingual approach to literacy, in isolation from other visual, oral, and practical forms of literacy used by multilingual rural students, denies such learners access to and development of literacy in general.
The author explores the possibilities that posthumanist thinking offers for amplifying our understanding of multimodality in children's literacies in school and beyond. Drawing on data from a ...five‐month case study on the multimodal literacy practices of six fifth‐grade students across home, community, and school settings, the author focuses on one 10‐year‐old student. The author uses the student's engagement with graphic novels as a starting place for considering what students’ entanglements with multimodal literacies beyond the classroom can teach us about multimodality in classrooms. The author first discusses multimodality as it is typically framed and then puts this framing into conversation with posthumanist perspectives on literacy learning to open up considerations of what counts as multimodality. Finally, the author discusses ways that thinking with posthumanist concepts such as affect, embodiment, relationship, movement, and place can enhance both multimodal literacy instruction and students’ engagement with literacy.
There is far more to the digital divide than meets the eye. In this article, the authors consolidate existing research on the digital divide to offer some tangible ways for educators to bridge the ...gap between the haves and have‐nots, or the cans and cannots. Drawing on Aldous Huxley's notion of a “brave new world,” some digital divide approaches and frameworks require debunking and are strongly associated with first‐world nations that fail to account for the differential access to technologies that people who live in poverty have. Taking a closer look at current realities, the authors send out a call to teachers, administrators, and researchers to think more seriously and consequentially about the effect the widespread adoption of technologies has had on younger generations and the role of the digital on knowledge creation and on imagined futures.
This study explores children's agency in shared book reading sessions with parents and its relation to family literacy characteristics, parents' literacy practices with children and children's print ...knowledge. Research participants were 142 Czech children, ages 3-6, and their parents. Parents rated their children's agency and the attributes of the home literacy environment in a questionnaire. The data shows that children in the sample exerted agency in shared book reading situations, some of them extensively. Out of the four components of agency, children's manifestations of volition in shared book reading appeared to be the most extensive, followed by asking questions, imitating reading and monitoring parents when they were reading to them. Overall, the results indicate that literacy-aimed activities, which the parents carry out with their children, relate to children's agency more than literacy qualities of the home, like the number of children's books, children's exposure to literacy, or parental education.
We examined the bidirectional relations between home literacy environment, reading interest, and children’s emergent literacy and reading skills in a sample of 172 English‐speaking Canadian children ...(Mage = 75.87 months) followed from Grade 1 to Grade 3. Results of cross‐lagged analysis revealed that the reading comprehension activities (RCA) at home positively predicted children's reading skills at the end of Grade 2 and the reading skills negatively predicted the RCA in Grade 3. Parent‐rated reading interest was bidirectionally related to reading skills, whereas child‐rated reading interest was only predicted by earlier reading skills, but not vice versa. These findings suggest that parents are sensitive to their children’s reading performance and modify their involvement accordingly.
A teacher educator shares how a school community engaged family in parent–child interactive reading experiences around big ideas found in diverse literature to deepen inclusion beyond the classroom.
Associations between home literacy environment and children's reading ability are often assumed to reflect a direct influence. However, heritability could account for the association between parent ...and child literacy-related measures. We used data from 101 mother/father/child triads to consider the extent to which associations between home literacy and children's reading fluency could be accounted for by parental reading fluency. Although home literacy correlated significantly with children's reading, no variable predicted significant variance after allowing for parental reading, except the number of books in the home. By incorporating measures of heritable parental traits into studies investigating home environment effects, we can start to identify which variables are correlates of parental traits and which might play a causal role in fostering children's development.
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