Language and literacy in Motion: Children negotiating a multiliterate identity in the age of superdiversity.

Author(s):

Nayr Ibrahim(presenting / submitting)

Conference:

ECER 2017

Network:

31. LEd – Network on Language and Education

Format:

Paper

Session Information

31 SES 09 A, Multilingual Children, Language Development and Research Methods

Paper Session

Time:

2017-08-24

13:30-15:00

Room:

W4.24

Chair:

Ana Sofia Pinho

Contribution

Where adults go, children follow. The reality of a globalized world, characterised by the mobility of people, goods and knowledge, across physical and virtual spaces and time (Blommaert, 2010, Vertovec, 2007), has had a significant impact on children’s experiences of language, literacy and identity. Children are not peripheral to, but constitute an integral part of these transnational, translocal experiences. Policy-makers, educators and researchers need to listen to children in order to understand how they make sense of these multilingual experiences inside and outside of national education spaces.

There is a growing interest in language in education policies and practices, for example, the official introduction of foreign languages at primary level (Enever, 2011, Murphy, 2014), early language learning in pre-primary (Mourão and Lourenço, 2014), mother tongue-based multilingual education in developing countries (McIlwraith, 2013) and the numerous long-standing bilingual programmes in North America (Garcia, 2009). At a first glance, this language mosaic seems to pave the way for participation in the fast-moving, interconnected world of ‘super-diversity’ (Vertovec, 2007), where a multiple language repertoire is an advantage. Ultimately, this requires schools to mirror the dynamic, hybrid, and transnational linguistic repertoires of multilingual speakers. However, according to Garcia et al. (2006)34), ‘very few schools are building on the variability, hybridity and sense-making processes that characterise out-of-school multilingual practises today’.

The majority of schools continue to support the one-language-one-nation paradigm (Young, 2014.), ignoring the reality of complex multi-layered societies and excluding children’s diverse languages and ensuing multilingual identities. Consequently, children are caught between the ‘monolingualist and monoculturalist ideologies’ (Lüdi and Py, 2009) that may dominate their various language communities and the multilingual realities they experience in the diverse sociocultural contexts they inhabit. In this polarized linguistic space, how do children build their multiliterate repertoires and negotiate a solid multilingual identity?

This paper is part of a wider doctoral thesis that includes thirteen trilingual and triliterate children aged five to seventeen, living and learning in France. These children have a bilingual French-English profile with a third heritage language. They developed their trilingualism in bilingual homes, in the community and through education. Literacy experiences, initiated in the home and mediated by the parents, are consolidated in multiple school contexts: mainstream French school; an out-of-school English literacy course; and heritage language programmes.

As a result of their multiple literacy experiences, children make references to personal, interactional, cultural spaces in their narrative and semiotic productions as they explain, justify and affirm their identity. This paper focuses on how children use their multimodal research tools to express their fluid identity as they move between fixed/monolingual and hybrid/multilingual spaces: they appropriate the symbols in their environment to negotiate a multilingual/multiliterate identity; and they develop linguistic repertoires that reflect their spatio-temporal journeys and linguistic histories. Ultimately, their narrative, pictorial and artifactual productions suggest some agency and appropriation of these multilingual experiences.

This paper is embedded in sociolinguistic, socio-cultural and social constructionist considerations in the acquisition of multiple languages, literacy development (Street, 1984, 1995) and identity construction (Pavlenko and Blackledge, 2004). This study also draws on spatial theories where place is theorized as concrete, and culturally and geographically indexed and symbolically and metaphorically referenced to certain ideologies, worldviews and ways of being. Language, space and identity have been displaced in the world of superdiversity. Blommaert’s sociolinguistics of mobility decouples language from place and describes language in motion as a ‘a process in which linguistic resources are in a state of translocality’ (Moriarty, 2014). Comber (2016), describes place as ‘the physicality and materiality of the resources humans use for semiosis’ and Massey (2005) sees space as relational, changing, ‘spatio-temporal events’ which require ongoing negotiation.

Method

From a methodological perspective this qualitative study uses a multi-method approach to eliciting and analysing data, which constitute children’s oral, written, pictorial and artifactual productions. It is based on the Mosaic Approach (Clark, 2004), which espouses a participatory and multimodal investigation of children’s lived experience. Children are viewed as social actors in their own right, able to use their unique knowledge to express what it means to be a child in their particular multilingual circumstances. It respects the communicative styles of the child participants via images, words, and symbolic objects. The data collection tools were chosen to reflect children’s unique ways of communicating and creativity in conveying meaning. Data collection is multi-method in nature and includes verbal and non-verbal tools: • group interviews with children and face-to-face interviews with parents; • children’s written and pictorial representations, constituting multimodal/plurisemiotic (Melo Pfeifer and Schmidt, 2012)10) creations, integrating writing and drawing; • physical artifacts (Phal and Rowsell, 2010), which anchor children’s imaginary in the concrete world and connect their lived experience to a specific learning context. These artifacts, chosen to represent their three languages, were physical objects that children brought to the interview, and/or drawings or descriptions thereof. Initial findings emerging from children’s interviews were categorised for three recurrent and overlapping themes, i.e. children’s reference to person, place and experience. Children’s oral narratives were analysed from a content perspective. Their written and pictorial productions used a semiotic analytical approach, keeping in mind that ‘where image is combined with writing […], meanings are distributed across modes’ (Mavers 2009, 263). Children’s objects were analysed using Pahl and Rowsell’s theory of artifactual literacies, linking ‘literacy, multimodality and material culture’ (2010, 2). As the embodiment of lived experience, objects create links with people, places and experiences across time and space and connect to children's everyday lives and cultural histories. Yet objects are not static, one-dimensional entities - children imbue their objects with personalized multilingual stories, creating possible sites for identity performance, for negotiating identity positions and negating a forced conformity to a narrow language-national link. These overarching themes were then categorized into fixed (unique and narrow) and hybrid (overlapping and complex) spaces, as children negotiate their identity between two polarized perspectives: affirming a narrow language-ethnicity or language-national link, and the inevitable multilingual and multimodal interaction in hybrid spaces. These multiple performances create a triangulation of data (oral, written, pictorial and artifactual) that supports children’s multifaceted self-representations.

Expected Outcomes

Children’s performance in the interviews, their pictorial productions and choice of symbolic objects ‘reflect a complex process in the development of their multilingual identity, which is mediated by relevant people with whom they interact in the different languages, concrete places where languages and cultures meet, and diverse linguistic experiences that constitute their subjective multifaceted world’ (Ibrahim, 2014). These three emerging themes of person, place and experience reflect children’s need to connect to language-in-place, yet simultaneously mirror their appropriation of language-in-motion (Blommaert, 2010). On the one hand, children refer to place as ‘already there’, populated by ideas, people, and meanings, which trigger the use of certain languages, discourses and practices. On the other hand, children’s explorations of place will impact on the identity of these places, as they are ‘inhabited, appropriated, shaped and (re)configured by occupants for the purposes of and during social activities’ (Blommaert et al., 2005). Ultimately, these linguistic resources, experiences and practices coexist in the hybrid space of children’s multilingual lives, and the concrete space of the multimodal research tools. Children’s references to place include: • countries, where children were born, where children have lived, and where children live presently. • formal and informal learning spaces, which have an impact on teachers’ classroom practice and professional identity. • cultural practices and artifacts, which, albeit stereotypical, demonstrate children’s ability to use their past and present environments to constitute their multilingual repertoire and negotiate a multilingual identity. • language as a symbolic space of becoming, and belonging to a world that would otherwise be confined to the boundaries of the nation state, therefore inaccessible to the outsider or the ‘other’. Children appropriate and negotiate their identity as they move in and out of these physical and virtual spaces, and endow these places with the symbolism of their multilingual living.

References

BLOMMAERT, J. 2010. The Socialisation of Globalisation, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. BLOMMAERT, J., COLLINS, J. & SLEMBROUCK, S. 2005. Spaces of multilingualism. Language & Communication, 25, 197–216. CLARK, A. 2004. The Mosaic Approach and Research with Young Children. In: LEWIS, V., KELLET, M., ROBINSON, C., FRASER, S. & DING, S. (eds.) The Reality of Research with Children and Young People. London: Sage Publications Ltd. COMBER, B. 2016. Literacy, Place, and Pedagogies of Possibility, Abingdon, Routledge. ENEVER, J. (ed.) 2011. ELLiE: Early Language Learning in Europe, London, UK: British Council. GARCIA, O. 2009. Bilingual Education in the 21st Century: A Global Perspective, Chichester Wiley Blackwell GARCIA, O., SKUTNABB-KANGAS, T. & TORRES-GUZMAN, M. E. 2006. Imagining Multilingual Schools: Languages in Education and Globalisation, New Delhi:, Orient Black Swan. IBRAHIM, N. 2014. Perceptions of identity in trilingual 5-year-old twins in diverse pre-primary educational contexts. In: MOURÃO, S. & LOURENÇO, M. (eds.) Early Years Second Language Education: International Perspectives on Theories and Practice. Abingdon: Routledge. LÜDI, G. & PY, B. 2009. To be or not to be ... a plurilingual speaker. International Journal of Multilingualism, 6, 154-167. MASSEY, D. 2005. For Space, London, Sage. MCILWRAITH, H. (ed.) 2013. Multilingual Education in Africa: Lessons form the Juba Language-in-Education Conference, London, UK: British Council. MELO PFEIFER, S. & SCHMIDT, A. 2012. Linking “Heritage Language” education and plurilingual repertoires development: evidence from drawings of Portuguese pupils in Germany. L1-Educational Studies in Language and Literature, 12, 1-30. MORIARTY, M. 2014. Languages in motion: Multilingualism and mobility in the linguistic landscape. International Journal of Bilingualism, 18, 457–463. MOURÃO, S. & LOURENÇO, M. (eds.) 2014. Early Years Second Language Education: International Perspectives on Theories and Practice, Abingdon: Routledge. MURPHY, V. A. 2014. Second Language Learning in the Early School Years: Trends and Contexts, Oxford, Oxford University Press. PAVLENKO, A. & BLACKLEDGE, A. 2004. Negotiation of Identities in Multilingual Contexts, Clevedon, Multilingual Matters. PHAL, K. & ROWSELL, J. 2010. Artifactual Literacies: Every Object tells a Story., New York, Teachers College Press. VERTOVEC, S. 2007. Super-diversity and its implications. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 30, 1024-1054. YOUNG, A. 2014. Looking through the Language Lens: Monolingual Taint or Plurilingual Tint? In: CONTEH, J. & MEIER, G. (eds.) The Multilingual Turn in Language Education: Opportunities and Challenges. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.

Author Information

Nayr Ibrahim (presenting / submitting)

British Council/University of Reading

Teaching Centre/Institute of Education

La Garenne Colombes

Search the ECER Programme

Search for keywords and phrases in "Text Search"
Restrict in which part of the abstracts to search in "Where to search"
Search for authors and in the respective field.
For planning your conference attendance you may want to use the conference app, which will be issued some weeks before the conference
If you are a session chair, best look up your chairing duties in the conference system (Conftool) or the app.