Languages and Literacies in Translocation

2012 ◽  
Vol 44 (4) ◽  
pp. 364-395 ◽  
Author(s):  
Allison Skerrett
Keyword(s):  
Adolescent Girl ◽  
Literacy Practices ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Border Crossing ◽  
Language And Literacy ◽  
The World ◽  
Multiple Languages

Transnational youth represent an increasing demographic in societies around the world. This circumstance has amplified the need to understand how youths’ language and literacy repertoires are shaped by transnational life. In response, this article presents a case study of a Mexican adolescent girl who immigrated to the United States and continued to participate in life in Mexico. It examines shifts in her multiple language and literacy practices that she attributed to transnational life and the knowledge she acquired from transnational engagements with languages and literacies. Data include interviews of the young woman, observations of her in a variety of social contexts, and literacy artifacts that she produced. Research on transnational youths’ language and literacy practices and theories of multiliteracies and border crossing facilitate analysis. Findings include that language and multiliteracy practices shift in interconnected ways in response to transnational life and engagements with multiple languages and literacies foster transnational understandings. Accordingly, attending to transnational youths’ multilingual as well as multiliterate practices can deepen understandings of how people recruit multiple languages, literacies, and lifeworlds for meaning making. Implications of this work are offered concerning the features of a transnational curriculum that can both draw from and build up the language and literacy reservoirs of transnational youth.

Multimodal Literacy

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathy A. Mills ◽  
Len Unsworth
Keyword(s):  
Digital Media ◽  
Literacy Practices ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Digital Images ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Mobile Technologies ◽  
Language And Literacy ◽  
Multimodal Literacy ◽  
Multimodal Texts ◽  
Making Meaning

Multimodal literacy is a term that originates in social semiotics, and refers to the study of language that combines two or more modes of meaning. The related term, multimodality, refers to the constitution of multiple modes in semiosis or meaning making. Modes are defined differently across schools of thought, and the classification of modes is somewhat contested. However, from a social semiotic approach, modes are the socially and culturally shaped resources or semiotic structure for making meaning. Specific examples of modes from a social semiotic perspective include speech, gesture, written language, music, mathematical notation, drawings, photographic images, or moving digital images. Language and literacy practices have always been multimodal, because communication requires attending to diverse kinds of meanings, whether of spoken or written words, visual images, gestures, posture, movement, sound, or silence. Yet, undeniably, the affordances of people-driven digital media and textual production have given rise to an exponential increase in the circulation of multimodal texts in networked digital environments. Multimodal text production has become a central part of everyday life for many people throughout the life course, and across cultures and societies. This has been enabled by the ease of producing and sharing digital images, music, video games, apps, and other digital media via the Internet and mobile technologies. The increasing significance of multimodal literacy for communication has led to a growing body of research and theory to address the differing potentials of modes and their intermodality for making meaning. The study of multimodal literacy learning in schools and society is an emergent field of research, which begins with the important recognition that reading and writing are rarely practiced as discrete skills, but are intimately connected to the use of multimodal texts, often in digital contexts of use. The implications of multimodal literacy for pedagogy, curriculum, and assessment in education is an expanding field of multimodal research. In addition, there is a growing attention to multimodal literacy practices that are practiced in informal social contexts, from early childhood to adolescence and adulthood, such as in homes, recreational sites, communities, and workplaces.

scholarly journals The Emergence of transnational awareness among children in immigrant families

2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-33 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine Compton-Lilly ◽  
Jieun Kim ◽  
Erin Quast ◽  
Sarah Tran ◽  
Stephanie Shedrow
Keyword(s):  
Literacy Practices ◽  
Funds Of Knowledge ◽  
Immigrant Families ◽  
The United States ◽  
Collective Case Study ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
Physical Barriers ◽  
Over Time

In the past, physical barriers such as geography and distance limited global communication. In this paper, we explore how young children in immigrant families engage in transnational literacy practices. Specifically, we explore the transnational funds of knowledge that result from those experiences. This three-year longitudinal collective case study involves ten children from immigrant families who have come to the United States from around the world. The students entered the study in four-year-old kindergarten, grade 1 or grade 2. Each year, we collected observations, spoken data and student-created artefacts (e.g. writing samples, maps, photographs). Data sources were designed to highlight the various spaces that the immigrant families occupy or have occupied over time (i.e. home/neighbourhood/ school; native country/country of residence). Our reading and rereading of coded data across the sample led us to focus on families’ digital transnational practices and children’s transnational awareness. We argue that these funds of knowledge should be recognized in classrooms and schools and that they have the potential to contribute to the nurturing of cosmopolitan perspectives for all children.

scholarly journals Understanding multilingual young adults and adolescents' digital literacies in the wilds: Implications for language and literacy classrooms

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Yiting Han
Keyword(s):  
Young Adults ◽  
Digital Literacy ◽  
Virtual Communities ◽  
Literacy Practices ◽  
Linguistic Diversity ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Language And Literacy ◽  
Emerging Themes ◽  
Technological Affordances

Changes in digital landscapes have complex effects on the meaning-making that they mediate (Thorne et al., 2015). There is a growing interest in examining the daily digital literacy practices of today’s multilingual young adults and adolescents, who are going to become the generation of future global communicators (Kim, 2016). Addressing current scholarship on multilingual digital literacy, this article examines research on digital literacy practices of multilingual young adults and adolescents beyond the classroom. Drawing upon multimodality and translanguaging perspectives that recognize literacy practices as ideological constructions produced within social contexts and across semiotic resources, the article identifies five emerging themes across the research. These themes are: recognizing cultural and linguistic diversity, exploring and constructing multifaceted identities online, leveraging technological affordances for communicating, gaining social support in virtual communities, and developing global citizenship through online intercultural exchanges. This article concludes with implications to support critical multilingualism and multimodality in language and literacy classrooms. 

The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and Contemporary Global Literature

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Pacific Islands ◽  
The United States ◽  
Global Studies ◽  
East Europe ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
The World ◽  
North And South America ◽  
Multiple Languages ◽  
North And South

This book considers the global responses Woolf’s work has inspired and her worldwide impact. The 23 chapters address the ways Woolf is received by writers, publishers, academics, reading audiences, and students in countries around the world; how she is translated into multiple languages; and how her life is transformed into global contemporary biofiction. The 24 authors hail from regions around the world: West and East Europe, the Middle East/North Africa, North and South America, East Asia and the Pacific Islands. They write about Woolf’s reception in Ireland, France, Italy, Germany, Poland, Estonia, Russia, Egypt, Kenya, Mexico, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, the United States, China, Japan and Australia. The Edinburgh Companion is dialogic and comparative, incorporating both transnational and local tendencies insofar as they epitomise Woolf’s global reception and legacy. It contests the ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ binary, offering new models for Woolf global studies and promoting cross-cultural understandings.

scholarly journals Successful Schools, Stagnant Education

2015 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 144-152
Author(s):  
Saulat Pervez
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Private Education ◽  
The United States ◽  
Successful Schools ◽  
Muslim World ◽  
Urban Centers ◽  
Relevant Concept ◽  
The World

With so much focus on illiteracy, we sometimes forget the dire stateof affairs in our urban centers with regard to education. Educationin the Muslim world has increasingly regressed into an exercise ofrote learning, a mass of discrete knowledge, and a frenzied race towardwhat we deem “useful” skills. By showing the ground realityin private education in Karachi, Pakistan, this article strives to highlightthe cyclical and future-oriented trends in schools that are inimicalto the very spirit of education. In doing so, it emphasizes theneed to adopt thinking as the primary skill taught to students inschools, with everything else encompassed within its fold. WhileKarachi is a case study here, the importance of creating thinkingcultures within schools is a crucial and very relevant concept toschools everywhere in the world, including the United States.

The Women of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe Reservation

2019 ◽  
pp. 87-104
Author(s):  
Claradina Soto ◽  
Toni Handboy ◽  
Ruth Supranovich ◽  
Eugenia L. Weiss
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Indigenous Communities ◽  
The United States ◽  
Indigenous Women ◽  
Future Generations ◽  
The World ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Cheyenne River

This chapter describes the impact of colonialism on indigenous women with a focus on the experience of the Lakota women on the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe Reservation in South Dakota. It explores the experiences of indigenous women as related to history, culture, intrapersonal violence, and internalized oppression. A case study of a Lakota woman is provided as an example of strength and triumph in overcoming adversity and being empowered despite the challenges of marginalization faced by many Native Americans in the United States and indigenous women throughout the world. The chapter discusses how readers can be advocates and actively engage in decolonizing and dismantling systems of oppression to protect future generations and to allow indigenous communities to heal and revitalize.

Henry Carter Adams: A Case Study in the Emergence of the Social Sciences in the United States, 1850–1900

1968 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-197 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. W. Coats
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Higher Education ◽  
United States ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Academic Profession ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
European Counterpart

Few scholars would nowadays question the importance of the United States in the world of learning; but the process whereby that nation attained its present eminence still remains obscure. Among the cognoscenti, it is generally acknowledged that American scholarship had come of age by the early 1900s, whereas fifty years earlier there had been only a handful of American scholars and scientists of international repute, and the country's higher education lagged far behind its European counterpart. Yet despite the recent popularity of intellectual history and research in higher education, which has produced a veritable flood of publications touching on various aspects of this theme, the heart of the process—the emergence of the academic profession—is still inadequately documented and imperfectly understood.

scholarly journals (I)literate Identities in Adult Basic Education: A Case Study of a Latino Woman in an ESOL and Computer Literacy Class

2011 ◽  
pp. 25
Author(s):  
Juan Pablo Jiménez
Keyword(s):  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
Adult Literacy ◽  
Computer Literacy ◽  
Basic Education ◽  
Literacy Practices ◽  
Adult Basic Education ◽  
The United States ◽  
Literate Identities ◽  
Speakers Of Other Languages

Adult Basic Education (ABE), namely English to Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) in the United States has been understood and assessed as the mastering of skills increasingly aimed at meeting the demands of the workplace. This ethnographic case study examines how the literacy practices a Latino woman engages in through her participation in an ABE-ESOL class relate to her developing identities of mother, student and citizen. Using Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), the findings demonstrate the contextual nature of adult literacy, showing how learners appropriate available tools and texts and enact purposeful and meaningful literacy practices, which traditional ABE assessment dismiss or do not account for. Implications for adult literacy pedagogy and research are discussed.

scholarly journals Intertextuality and the Construction of Meaning in Jazz Worlds: A Case Study of Joe Farrell’s “Moon Germs”

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-71
Author(s):  
Andrew J. Kluth
Keyword(s):  
Meaning Making ◽  
Jazz Improvisation ◽  
The World ◽  
Construction Of Meaning ◽  
Opening Paragraph ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
Ways Of Being

(Opening paragraph): In this article, I invoke the concept of intermusicality as defined by Ingrid Monson and develop its role in meaning-making in musical worlds. Her groundbreaking book, Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction (1996) offers a sophisticated criticism of jazz improvisation and the construction of meaning therein. In doing so, it explores methods by which to nuance and/or rupture traditional historiographies that construct the jazz canon. More than intermusicality, though, I look to a more general intertextuality as a hermeneutic window disruptive to the “great man” histories that have so often heretofore constructed the jazz tradition. I argue that the notion of intertextuality is particularly useful in mediating questions of essentialism in jazz (racial or otherwise) with considerations of practical competency and an artist’s particular situatedness in that body of texts. Working against positivist taxonomies resultant in definitions of what is/is not jazz, this perspective leaves space for the refiguring work of novelty and experimentation requisite therein. This resonates with Steven B. Elworth’s (1995) claim: “Far from being an unchanging and an easily understood historical field, the jazz tradition is a constantly transforming construction” (58). In my suspicion of linear ideas of history and “progress” (and therefore, telos), I prefer to interrogate and ratify instead the complicated relationship of novelty to tradition. The negotiation of these meta-categories is at the heart of the work improvising musicians do; combining disparate ways of being in the world with musical ideas and practices to create new musico-sociocultural wholes.

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