Walk With Me

Effectively preparing teachers to work with culturally and linguistically diverse students has been a persistent issue in literacy teacher education in the United States for the past several decades. To prepare preservice teachers to work effectively with all students, including emerging bilinguals, and to engage in culturally sustaining pedagogies, this chapter presents a form of community mapping authors call “caminatas,” which was implemented in a short-term study abroad program for preservice teachers. Examples are provided of ways in which the caminatas promote culturally sustaining pedagogies for preservice teachers as well as increased understandings of teaching multilingual students through the five elements of revised indigenous framework. It is crucial to provide preservice teachers spaces for working with and alongside their students in local communities to build relationships and knowledge of how to develop culturally sustaining pedagogies with and for their students.

Using Materials in Refugee and Immigrant Adults' Heritage Languages in Instruction

There has been a shift in receiving countries and their education programs for adult immigrants around the world. A complete focus on immigrants' cultural integration and learning of the language of the country has shifted to an understanding that supporting heritage language maintenance benefits adults with little or no formal schooling in that language, including a more nuanced sense of identity, stronger second language (L2) and literacy learning, and confidence in supporting the schooling of the younger members of their communities. Teachers and tutors need, but lack, professional development focused on implementing instructional approaches that incorporate this new focus and on using reading materials in learners' languages. This chapter describes a new Online Heritage Language Resource Hub, which gives teachers, tutors, adult learners, and younger members of the community access to materials in hundreds of immigrants' languages. It also provides teachers ways to use the reading materials in the Hub in their classes with adult learners.

East-Asian Philosophical Concepts as Analytical Framework for Interpreting Non-Western Images in Children's Picturebooks

In contemporary Western cultures, picturebooks are a mainstream means for young children to first attend to print and start learning to read. The use of children's picturebooks has been reported as supporting intercultural awareness in children. Multiliteracies researchers suggest that other theoretical frameworks should be applied in addition to the semiotic approach of interpreting picturebooks, especially picturebooks from non-Western cultures. This chapter theorizes how Eastern philosophical concepts influence the meaning-making potential of illustrations in Eastern picturebooks. To do this, the authors first discuss the cultural constraints when applying a contemporary semiotic framework in analyzing non-Western images. The authors introduce a framework developed based on philosophical concepts that have influenced East-Asian art forms, particularly that of painting, to understand the Eastern artistic traditions. The chapter demonstrates how to apply this framework for interpretation of non-Western images to working with multicultural picturebooks.

Visual Literacy and Young Learners

This chapter explores visual literacy from theoretical and practical perspectives. Ideas of what is meant by visual literacy and why this is important are presented through a selection of studies. The impact that visual literacy may have on students' learning and development is further elaborated. A case study from a Norwegian first-grade classroom is included to shed light on the ways in which visual work in the classroom can be implemented. In addition, exemplars of students' written verbal and visual texts are thoroughly examined. A tendency in the material is that the illustrations are detailed and elaborate, and carry a distinct sense of the written text. Hence, the visual text may be understood as the more important text and may be vital in a child's literacy development.

Telecollaborative Storytelling

Telecollaborative multimodal storytelling has evolved into an innovative pedagogic design that fuses information technologies, semiotic repertoires, and modalities with cooperative learning, personal accounts, and academic content. Informed by social constructionism and poststructuralism, this chapter presents a semester-long virtual exchange with language learners and pre-service teachers in two universities and the format of this initiative with a focus on pedagogical suggestions. Not only did this collaboration transcend the classroom, but it provided a supportive environment for multiliteracy, disciplinary knowledge, and cross-cultural competency development and identity negotiation within traditional and virtual learning spaces. Co-authored multimedia ensembles, reflective writing, and teamwork can enable learners to generate meaningful narratives, forge reciprocal partnerships, engender social consciousness, and express themselves creatively across linguistic, cultural, and technology capital.

Emergent Literacy Development in Adult L2 Learners

Globally, many adults lack access to education due to gender, poverty, ethnic discrimination, political conflict, and geographic proximity. Moreover, many of these same adults may migrate at some point in their lives, needing to adapt to new linguistic settings. Oftentimes, such adults need to learn both an entirely new language and first-time literacy - not necessarily in their first language, but in the new language (L2) which they may not yet speak. By providing a robust overview of scholarship on emergent literacy acquisition in children and adults, this chapter heightens understanding of the complexity of acquiring literacy for the first time as an L2 adult migrant. The chapter provides practical guidelines on how teachers of L2 adults with emergent literacy can apply this knowledge in the classroom, focusing on three pedagogical areas - vocabulary acquisition, metalinguistic awareness, and academic socialization.

An Overview of Multilingual Learners' Literacy Needs for the 21st Century

The most common definition of literacy is the ability to read and write. However, for teachers working with multilingual learners, the development of literacy skills is much more complex than this simple definition would suggest. Notions of literacy in the 21st century have evolved in response to a number of societal changes, such as globalization, large-scale human migration, and advances in digital technologies. This chapter considers how these societal changes have influenced conceptions and practices of literacy. It provides a brief overview of some important theoretical considerations that inform understandings of literacy development for multilingual learners, including critical literacy, multiliteracies, multimodal literacy, and translanguaging, and explores current conceptions of literacy to help second and foreign language (SFL) teachers better understand how to meet the literacy needs of multilingual learners in the 21st century, offering practical suggestions for teaching from a multiliteracies perspective.

Creating Space for Dynamic Language Use

With English as an Additional Language (EAL) classrooms increasingly becoming culturally and linguistically diverse, the use of the students' home language(s) (HLs) can equip emergent bilinguals/multilinguals with the essential accoutrements that optimize their learning experience. To meet the realities and demands of contemporary classrooms, current research encourages teachers to make use of the students' entire linguistic repertoires and create space for a fluid and dynamic oscillation between the HL(s) and the target language (TL), which has been labelled as translanguaging pedagogy. Despite the constraints imposed by today's education policies, translanguaging is believed to have the potential to enhance the teaching of these students. Through the description of activities, this chapter discusses how taking up translanguaging theory can contribute towards fostering meaningful and affirming ways of teaching and learning EAL literacy.

Critical Literacy and Genre Pedagogy

This chapter helps teachers use genre for effective language learning in the increasingly linguistically and culturally diverse 21st-century language classroom. The chapter provides an overview of the history of the term genre across various academic disciplines and explains why critical knowledge of genres is a key literacy in the 21st century. It discusses current trends of use of genre in the language classroom and gives tips on how to use genre responsibly with multicultural, multiliterate, multilingual students, focusing in particular on the usefulness of critical literacy in linguistically and culturally diverse language classrooms. The chapter also highlights ways in which teachers can use genres to empower minority students—including those belonging to a linguistic minority—and to counteract bias in their classrooms.

Visual Literacy for Young Language Learners

Acquiring literacy skills for the 21st century requires learners to move beyond the traditional print literacy skills and to develop strategies for effective communication in predominantly visual environments. The chapter explores how teachers of young language learners may scaffold children's development of visual literacy in Content-Based Instruction (CBI) and thus prepare them both for comprehending and producing visual images and multimodal texts. The chapter first provides a framework for understanding visual literacy and then describes pedagogical strategies language teachers may apply to promote visual literacy in a young learner classroom. Finally, it highlights the role of visual images in CBI and gives examples of classroom activities that foster simultaneous development of visual literacy and foreign/second language (L2) communication skills for young learners.