ABSTRACT
This original book offers a meaningful window into the lived experiences of children from immigrant families, providing a holistic, profound portrait of their literacy practices as situated within social, cultural, and political frames. Drawing on reports from five years of an ongoing longitudinal research project involving students from immigrant families across their elementary school years, each chapter explores a unique set of questions about the students’ experiences, and offers rich data set of observations, interviews, student-created artifacts. Authors apply different sociocultural, sociomaterial, and sociopolitical frameworks to better understand the dimensions of the children’s experiences. The multitude of approaches applied demonstrates how viewing the same data through distinct lenses is a powerful way to uncover the differences and comparative uses of these theories. Through such varied lenses, it becomes apparent how the complexities of lived experiences inform and improve our understanding of teaching and learning, and how our understanding of multifaceted literacy practices affects students’ social worlds and identities.
Children in Immigrant Families Becoming Literate is a much-needed resource for scholars, professors, researchers, and graduate students in language and literacy education, English education, and teacher education.
Foreword by Guofang Li
Introduction
Chapter 1: A Theoretical Tapestry of Sociocultural and Sociomaterial Perspectives
Chapter 2: A Longitudinal Methodology
Chapter 3: Neoliberal Messages and Being a "Good" Reader: The Cases of Carlos, Felipe, and Elina
Chapter 4: Capital, Field and Emergent Bilingual Writers
Chapter 5: Being and Becoming Multilingual across Time
Chapter 6: Syncretic Literacy and Language Practices: The Case of James
Chapter 7: Sociomateriality and Becoming: Things and Doings across Time
Chapter 8: Conclusions
Appendix A: Introducing the Children