Sfi students' investment in their basic literacy development in a second language : Literacy practices in the students' everyday lives and in education

Abstract

This licentiate thesis focuses on Sfi students (municipal adult education in Swedish for immigrants) with limited opportunities to participate in formal education prior to their immigration to Sweden, and their basic literacy development in Swedish as a second language. The overall aim of the research project is to identify experiences of literacy among the students, in their everyday lives as well as within the school setting, in order to explore how the students’ participation in different literacy practices provide a foundation for their investment in their own literacy development. Linguistic ethnography is employed as the overarching methodological approach, and the empirical data was produced through classroom observation, ethnographic shadowing and stimulated recall interviews. As a means of emphasizing the students’ perspectives on literacy and analyzing them in terms of investment, the emic approach has been particularly important. Drawing on examples of literacy events in the empirical data, literacy practices were analyzed. Understood in a broad sense, the concept of literacy here includes the use of a wide repertoire of semiotic resources, languages and technologies, as described within the field of New Literacy Studies (NLS, Barton, 2007). In addition to NLS, the theoretical frame used in the project was transliteracy (García, 2020; Canagarajah, 2013), critical literacy (Martin-Jones, 2007) and theory of investment (Norton, 2000; Darvin & Norton, 2021). The results show that the knowledge, experiences and needs of the students are often marginalized by a deficiency perspective on their abilities as well as an ethnocentric view of functional literacy. In their everyday lives, the students’ various communicative purposes required them to use a multifaceted repertoire of interrelated abilities, modalities and semiotic resources, which differ significantly from those emphasized and utilized in the classroom setting. Through theoretical perspectives on investment, a tension between the students’ agency, on the one hand, and the dominant institutional understanding of how written language should be used and developed, on the other hand, is thereby made visible (see Norton & Darwin 2015, 2020).