How to be young and how to belong: An identity-in-practice perspective on language and literacy learning

Abstract

Based on Higgins’ (20011) call for an expanded view on language learning that considers he relations between identity construction and language development in the light of contemporary globalization processes, in this presentation, we examine how a group of multilingual students negotiate ethnolinguistic identity during a literacy task, where they have been encouraged to include different linguistic and multimodal resources.

Data consists of detailed transcriptions of a video recording of three multilingual students' group work which is part of a longitudinal research project on literacy and linguistic diversity (2008-2018) (Author 1, 2019). In analyzing the students’ (aged 14-15) peer interaction, we draw on studies of talk-in-interaction examining the use of categories as they are made relevant, oriented to, and negotiated during conversation (Antaki & Widdicombe, 1998).

The analysis shows how the adolescents in their talk and embodied practice draw on and play with their heteroglossic semiotic resources to explore discourses around multilingualism and multiculturalism. During this exploration they reflect on their own social, local, and translocal experiences examining possibilities for forming hybrid identities and establishing and affirming social relationships. In that way, the school-framed literacy activity evolves into a performative investigation of difference, sameness, and in between-ness.

Our analysis calls for a perspective on multilingualism that does not use pre-established and monolithic categories to understand student identity and interaction. Instead, it argues for the importance of paying attention to students’ different orientations and affiliations to language and the ways they create links between language and social identifications to better create opportunities for students to integrate their multilingual and multimodal experiences into their literacy learning.