Critical literacy practices with bilingual immigrant children: multicultural book club in an out-of-school context

Author(s):  
Youngji Son
Folios ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 111-125
Author(s):  
Camila Chaves Barrera ◽  
Claudia Marcela Chapetón

This paper reports the pedagogical experience of creating a book club to foster the reading of short stories from a critical literacy perspective at a high school in Bogotá, Colombia. The Book Club arose as an after-school program where students, who were interested in the proposal, were free to join. First, the paper presents the fundamental concepts that guided the implementation. Then, it describes the central elements of the pedagogical experience: context, curricular platform, procedures, and activities. The final discussion centers on the role of a critical literacy approach that encouraged participants to go beyond concerns about the grammatical and linguistic aspects of the foreign language to focus on meaning-making. Also, to concentrate on responding and transacting with the texts while engaging in dialogic interactions that allowed them to share background knowledge, life experiences, social and individual issues of their realities and interests, and most importantly, enjoy the act of reading in a foreign language as it was seen as a social-situated practice.


2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-131
Author(s):  
Elisa de las Fuentes Gutiérrez

AbstractThis article presents the results of a pilot study carried out based on texts from 15 immigrant children aged 6 to 9 years, who are learning Spanish in situations of immersion in the Communities of Madrid and Castilla-La Mancha. The aim is to understand how these students try to integrate into the school context and especially to determine whether the development of written expression during the early years of primary education allows them to carry out more complex linguistic actions aimed at communication, such as expressing positive attitudes towards the recipient. These actions may reveal the need to communicate and, therefore, the need to learn the language in order to integrate. The texts were taken from the ESCONES Corpus and were collected in a prior study on lexical retrieval and auditory perception in the development of communicative skills in children aged 6 to 9. The analysis carried out considered the vocabulary used, syntactic complexity and the use of linguistic actions in the different grades and found that the development of written expression may allow students to better express actions related to manifesting positive feelings and attitudes towards their interlocutor.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
John G Dickie

<p>An investigation of sites, uses and practices for literacy in the lives of Pasifika students Lower test scores on school measures of literacy for Pasifika students than for the majority of students in New Zealand are a cause for concern. As part of a wider attempt to address this problem the Ministry of Education has argued that teachers need to be better informed of out-of-school literacy practices. This thesis considers what can be learned when this guidance is followed and it investigates students' social and cultural uses of literacy in family and community settings. It explores the argument that knowledge of these out-of-school literacies will inform teachers and through incorporation (McNaughton, 2002) teachers may be able to make effective connections for students to school literacy. A sociocultural perspective is used to investigate the social and cultural practices of the students while the study also uses Cremin's (1976) concept of configurations of sites to consider how learning is mediated for students in different settings. Rogoff's (1995) three planes of analysis provide a tool to examine students' practices at the community, interpersonal, and personal levels. The investigation sought the students' own perspective of how they appropriate knowledge about literacy as they collected information with cameras and journals on their own practices. The participants were 14 Pasifika students aged 11 and 12 years (mostly Samoan) as well as three adult Samoan church representatives and teachers from the students' school. Students' photos were used to elicit rich description in semi-structured interviews and interview schedules were also used with students and adult participants. The findings illustrate how the students were socialised into particular practices that are contextualised in the sites of family, church and neighbourhood. They reveal that for the students there was both overlapping of values and conflict between their sites of literacy practice. The complementarities occurred most strongly between family and church and a valued feature of the students' practice was the use of Samoan language. The most common conflicts were those related to popular culture and they occurred between the sites of family, church and school on the one hand and neighbourhood sites on the other as well as within family sites. The thesis argues that awareness of the complementary and conflicting features is essential for teachers in understanding the complexity the students face in choosing their paths among two cultures. This knowledge enables teachers to incorporate aspects of out-of-school literacy into school practice and to draw on those in the students' backgrounds who may facilitate students' literacy acquisition.</p>


2021 ◽  
pp. 1086296X2110522
Author(s):  
Katie Sciurba

In response to anti-Black policing in 2020 that led to the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, Black children and teens turned to poetry as a means to channel their self-described terror, rage, pain, horror, tiredness, and need for change. Reminiscent of the poetry of the Black Arts Movement and works published in The Black Panther newspaper, these poems, many of which call for a “revolution,” are reflective of young people’s critical engagements with the world and the word. With critical literacy as a framework, I engage in critical discourse analysis to determine how the young poets reimagine literacy as they protest anti-Black policing and racism. By focusing on young people’s own grassroots literacy initiatives, which call for the reimagination of blackness and whiteness, and demand truth, justice, and reimagined futures, I demonstrate how educators can reimagine literacy practices to center students’ criticalities and prioritize racial justice.


Author(s):  
So Jung Kim

With heightened emphasis on critical literacy pedagogies, attention to critical literacy for young children (CLYC) has rapidly increased. Yet, there is a paucity of studies examining CLYC in bilingual settings, particularly in Pre-K contexts. Utilizing a qualitative case study design, the current study examined how early critical literacy can be implemented as a medium to help young bilinguals critique texts and develop critical perspectives about race and gender. The study was conducted in a kindergarten classroom at the Korean Language School in a Midwestern city in the US. The data were collected over a semester using multiple collection sources including audio/video recordings, observational field notes, interviews, and children's artifacts. Findings suggest the potential of early critical literacy practices in bilingual contexts to open critical conversations about race and gender with young children. The study also provides teachers with tips on how to create supportive literary environments for young bilingual children.


2019 ◽  
pp. 1303-1321
Author(s):  
So Jung Kim

With heightened emphasis on critical literacy pedagogies, attention to critical literacy for young children (CLYC) has rapidly increased. Yet, there is a paucity of studies examining CLYC in bilingual settings, particularly in Pre-K contexts. Utilizing a qualitative case study design, the current study examined how early critical literacy can be implemented as a medium to help young bilinguals critique texts and develop critical perspectives about race and gender. The study was conducted in a kindergarten classroom at the Korean Language School in a Midwestern city in the US. The data were collected over a semester using multiple collection sources including audio/video recordings, observational field notes, interviews, and children's artifacts. Findings suggest the potential of early critical literacy practices in bilingual contexts to open critical conversations about race and gender with young children. The study also provides teachers with tips on how to create supportive literary environments for young bilingual children.


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