Becoming a Student: Identity Work and Academic Literacies in Early Schooling

Abstract

In this article I argue that both sociocultural theories and those that address academic literacies must be invoked to adequately understand language and literacy development in schools. Through exploring the histories, school lives, and viewpoints of two kindergarten students, I show how identity work negotiated in classroom interactions can afford or deny access to the language and practices of school. My argument views language and literacy development as a socialization process and classrooms as complex ecological systems-spaces where multiple discourses and languages come into contact, interacting in complex ways. For children to acquire school-affiliated identities, they must acquire the language as well as the behaviors, attitudes, resources, and ways of engaging needed to recognizably display the identity of a successful student. The findings show that for these children, the ability to engage successfully with academic literacies was distinct from their ability to engage successfully in social interactions. Their language and literacy development was not necessarily determined by economic and cultural capital nor by their social status within the classroom. The study challenges researchers and teachers to re-envision viable classroom ecologies that provide access to school languages and literacies.

'I don't ever want to leave this room': benefits of researching 'with' children

“…Younger children have less experience with formal tests and tasks used in this type of research, and their performance is therefore often compromised. Qualitative and ethnographic studies on the other hand employ indepth-descriptions to highlight the complexities of individual learner trajectories and explore the roles that individual variables such as identity or motivation play ( Hawkins 2005, Toohey 2000. Overall, to our knowledge, all of this research, both in ESL and EFL contexts, share one important feature: the research questions are always conceived from adult perspectives, satisfying adult curiosity and motivated by an adult agenda.…”

Staging Linguistic Identities and Negotiating Monolingual Norms in Multiethnic School Settings

“…He (2003) criticizes the idea of L2 learners as being a homogenous group, and examines the interactional processes through which learners in classroom interactions adopt or are positioned into varied speech roles within classroom interactions. In an ethnographical study of individual L2 learners in an English elementary classroom, Toohey (1998) similarly demonstrated, how the teacher's notions of learning (and language learners' abilities) led to constructions of a positive or problematic learner identity for each child, which in turn shaped the learning affordances the teacher made available to each child (cf., Hawkins, 2005).…”

“The In-between Crowd”: Contrasting Representations of Minority Language Students

“…This focus on the social orientation of learning is found as well in second language research; several researchers have emphasised the role of sociocultural context in language teaching and learning (see, for example, Lantolf, 2000;Hawkins, 2005;Kramsch, 2000;Lotherington, 2003). The emergence of sociocultural perspectives on language, typified by the understanding that meanings are negotiated within diverse social contexts, indicates an important new direction for theorists and practitioners in the field of second language use (Miller, 2004a, p. 290).…”