Plurilingual Identity Positioning of Newcomer Children with Emerging Print Literacy

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe participants in this study are newcomer students in Grades 4 to 6 who arrived in elementary schools with emerging print literacy not having had the right to learn to read and write before migrating to North America. The purpose of this research is to understand who these students are. Employing a humanizing methodological design, I utilized critical and collective case studies to work with the students in co-creating oral and written texts. Each of the three case studies took place at different school sites and included four to six students and their teachers. Three key components of the students’ plurilingual identities are users of multiple named languages, English-only writers, regional migrators, and cultural plurality. This research shows how policy and researchers can use more inclusive language to talk about this group of newcomers as well as the multi-dimensional identities and languages the students bring to the classroom.KEYWORDS: Identitylimited prior schoolingnewcomerplurilingualrefugeewriting AcknowledgementsThis article draws on research supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Additional informationFundingThe work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.Notes on contributorsKatie BrubacherKatie Brubacher is currently an Assistant Professor in Elementary Education specializing in language and literacy at the University of Alberta. She completed this research as part of her dissertation at the University of Toronto. Katie has almost 20 years of teaching mainly with multilingual children but also with adults.