Multilingual Literacy

Esther Odilia Breuer, Eva Lindgren, Anat Stavans, Elke Van Steendam, Esther Odilia Breuer, Anat Stavans, Elke Van Steendam

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781800410718
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book investigates multilingual literacy practices, explores the technology applied in different educational frameworks, the centrality of multilingual literacy in non-formal, informal and formal educational contexts, as well as its presence in everyday life. Thematically clustered in four parts, the chapters present an overview of theory related to multilingual literacy, address the methodological challenges of research in the area, describe and evaluate projects set up to foster multilingual literacy in a variety of educational contexts, analyze the literacy practices of multilinguals and their contribution to language and literacy acquisition. This volume aims to initiate a change in paradigms, shifting from structured and conservative problematizations to inclusive and diverse conceptualizations and practices. To that end, the book showcases explorations of different methodologies and needs in formal and non-formal educational systems; and it serves as a springboard for developing multivocal participatory spaces with opportunities for learning and identity-building for all multilinguals, across different settings, languages, ages and contexts.

1 Multiple Approaches to Understanding and Working with Multilingual (Multi-)Literacy

Esther Odilia Breuer and Elke Van Steendam

Interlingual and intercultural communication is a phenomenon that has taken place from the very beginning of mankind. If it had not been for humans’ inherent urge to travel, to settle in and to adapt to new geographical as well as social-cultural contexts, a continent like Europe would not have been able to develop and harness the many different cultures that interact with and enrich each other, as it does today.

In this constant process of migration, multilingualism has always played an important role. Yet, participants in the process did not have the ambition of acquiring languages at expert linguistic levels – an ambition (quite frequently) cherished by learners in educational and administrative evaluation systems today (Lambert, 1975). People found individual ways of interpreting and/or getting ideas across with the help of signs and gestures and by borrowing words and other forms of communication from the other languages very flexibly. When one realised that the other language provided more adequate vocabulary for a specific idea, one borrowed a word and adapted it in phonology and grammar to one’s own language (Attila, 2017). This is still visible in the high number of loan words from Latin or Greek in European languages, and nowadays it is popular to take over English expressions, sometimes even if terms are already at hand in one’s first language(s) (L1) in order to show that one is up to date. In this process, the original semantics and grammatical notion of the word might be changed, as happened, for example, in German with pseudo English words like ‘Handy’ for mobile phone, or ‘Public Viewing’ for watching football on screen(s) in open places (Finamore, 1998; Pöllmann, 2012). In other words, interaction between languages is actively taking place in various contexts, thus illustrating that ‘the idea that monolingualism is the human norm is a myth’ (Thomason, 2001: 31).

Multilingualism also plays a crucial role in literacy. Today, people utilise the medium of written language more than ever, not only in business and education, but also in private contexts and for routine life activities. Reading and writing (in different languages) have become exceedingly more crucial skills for people if they want to participate in social activities (Corral-Robles et al., 2017). Literate exchange in this process may not be reduced to writing and reading words, but it ‘involves constructing and navigating multiplicity, manipulating and critiquing information and representations in multiple media, and using diverse technologies (print, visual, digital) in composing multimodal texts’ (Archer & Breuer, 2015: 1). In many cases, it is a means not only of transporting information, but also of building and expressing one’s identity. These processes make elaborate use of cultural as well as autobiographical factors, they are very individual, and it is important to encourage and foster them by promoting multilingual (multi-)literacy elaborately. Some possibilities and considerations are introduced in this book.

Since the terms of multilingualism as well as of (multi-)literacy are defined differently across the academic fields (see Donahue, this volume), we will briefly describe in the introduction how these broad and widely discussed concepts are understood by the authors in this book, before giving a concise overview of what is presented in the different parts and chapters.

1.1 Multilingualism

The last few decades have witnessed a radical change in how linguistic, social, political, business and pedagogical studies as well as administration view multilingual communication. Initially considered to be merely the degree of language proficiency someone had acquired in expressing themselves in another language than their first, second, third or fourth language, competencies were evaluated exclusively by comparing them to a native speaker’s level of proficiency. Hence, teachers have tended to focus on linguistic errors produced during multilingual speech or text production, thereby perhaps unintentionally hindering the opportunities that lie in the language learner’s burgeoning network for constructing meaning. Likewise, linguists and sociologists have drawn attention to the extent to which multilingual communication does not always meet the expectations from the L1 community, not to question or discredit multilinguals’ efforts, but rather to understand the processes behind language acquisition in order to develop methods that help to improve L2/L3 speakers’ performance in the target language.

The purpose of enhancing language competencies is, of course, a sensible one, as multilinguals often still experience disadvantages because of linguistic errors or because of behaviour that differs from the expectations in the L1 culture’s standards (Cummins, 1981). However, the developed and executed standardised ways in which languages have been mediated to different groups of learners (e.g. migrants, children growing up in another language) have been deemed to be highly ‘inefficient in meeting the linguistic needs of this population’ (Randolph, 2017: 275). In the educational contexts language learners have only rarely been understood as people who have already formed a fundament of complex linguistic, cultural and social systems in which they can communicate without effort and which could be used for facilitating the language learning process. Instead, first language skills and knowledge have been considered to be interfering factors in the processes of learning a new language and ‘assimilating’ to another culture. Using the first language(s), therefore, was sometimes shunned in education, and every element that did not fit the social or cultural standards of the target community was banned.

One of the consequences of this ‘subtractive’ (Lambert, 1975) monolingual view on multilingualism has been that heritage languages in many countries are not taught in obligatory classes at school. Children out of these communities often do not acquire literacy in their own first language. Because of this, they experience more difficulty in learning to read and write on a high level, and quite frequently, the feedback they get on their performance in the target language again focuses on the ‘negative’ aspects. This is even the case when teachers themselves do not consciously perceive themselves as evaluating the learners’ performance in the subtractive manner (Fairclough, 2005). Negative feedback, however, understandably does not add to the pupils’ motivation to participate in class. A consequence of this is that they feel (like) outsiders (Cummins, 1981; Gomolla, 2012), and their lack of engagement at school confirms teachers’ and society’s expectations.

This vicious circle underlines the proposition that language and its evaluation are central factors to the concepts of power (Fairclough, 2015). The negative feelings associated with school have a longterm effect on the future perspectives of the multilingual pupils, as is demonstrated in the higher education context: we find a comparatively high dropout rate of students with an L2 background, which is frequently not the effect of the L2 students’ inability to think logically, but rather the result of the manifested (and mostly unreasonable) lack of self-confidence and the belief that they are not able to meet the demands made of them, caused by their experiences of not being evaluated fairly at school (cf. Burger & Groß, 2016; Fairclough, 2015).

Using the evaluation of language correctness and culturally ‘correct’ approaches to tasks and settings as indicators for – among others – intelligence and adaptability to social settings, as was and is done in the subtractive approach, impedes the chances and large possibilities inherent in multilingualism. Parents’ ‘belief that in becoming bilingual or bicultural one dulls his [= a child’s] cognitive powers and dilutes his identity’ (Lambert, 1975: 11) led parents living in L2 contexts to raise their children not in their own first languages but to provide exclusively the community’s (= the major) language to their children. The intension was to give them the best possible future options, but this strategy did not succeed. To the contrary, people with this kind of ‘pseudomonolingual’ background often face the problem of feeling lost between the cultures they could mutually belong to (see below).

In the last decades, the awareness of the weaknesses of the subtractive approach has grown not only in the field of science, but also in applied pedagogy, educational politics and among the general public. People understand that intercultural exchange with people from different linguistic backgrounds in the globalised world is a gain for all participants, and this understanding calls for a change in working with multilingualism (Grosjean, 2010). One important step in doing this is to understand multilinguals not as the ‘sum’ of two and/or more languages, but as a unique entity. Even on the purely linguistic level, tests show that languages in multilinguals do not exist next to each other, but that all languages an individual has ever learned form a productive network. When creating messages, the conceptual structure activates the whole network inside the brain – parts of it being on a higher level of activity, parts of it on a lower level, depending on different factors (vocabulary size, but also context and topic) (Abutalebi & Green, 2007; Green, 1986, 2008). Errors in performance are then no signs of low language competencies, but rather a visualisation of how languages ‘cooperate’ in the process of generating meaning, using the whole network for dealing with these demands (Breuer, 2015; Cook, 1995; de Bot, 1992; de Bot et al., 2007; Van Dijk, 2003).

Breuer (2015), for example, showed that students who wrote academic papers in English as a foreign language used their L1 linguistic network very actively to maintain fluency in the writing process. The participants frequently made subconscious use of L1 grammar, L1 orthographic rules and/or an L1 understanding of the academic genre. Although this method resulted in texts that contained a considerable number of linguistic errors, the L1 supported the students in using writing for thinking, generating ideas and finding ways to get the message across to the readers (Breuer, 2016; Galbrath, 1999, 2009; Menary, 2007). That they did not resort to the L1 for support in writing relatively simple English texts, which they also had to do, stresses that using the complete linguistic network can be an efficient method of dealing with higher cognitive demands imposed by more difficult tasks (e.g. Poulisee & Bongaerts, 1994; Van Weijen, 2008; Wolfersberger, 2003). As is also shown in other chapters in this volume, the results underline that censoring the ‘intrusion’ of languages other than the target one can have negative effects on linguistic and cognitive performance as well as a negative impact on creating a voice of one’s own.

In this book, we therefore understand a multilingual person as a very complex and multi-faceted unique identity (cf. Stavans & Hoffmann, 2015). Education should support multilingual people and allow them to dwell on their dense and elaborate network of possibilities for communicating, and for generating an identity that is based in the multilingual contexts. The specific linguistic and cultural bases included in this process may be very diverse. Still, multilingual persons who are given the chance to decide for themselves which aspects of which language and culture to incorporate and how to adapt and connect them makes them create an identity they are proud to present. Only if this is possible they are able to present the richness and potential that is offered to and offered by them. The first language forms the basis for the further development in the linguistic as well as cultural and social systems. Education (formal as well as informal) therefore should not suppress it but needs to encourage that it is adequately developed (Cummins, 1979; see Machowska-Kosciak, this volume). When multilingual persons are provided with a variety of words, grammatical codes, genres, narratives, cultural offers etc. in their first language their prospects to learn more languages grow, and they are able to settle themselves into their various communities.

An interesting approach of how to make active use of (such) linguistic networks in an unguided (and often scorned) form is interlanguaging as is done by a number of young L2-speakers. By consciously adding L1 elements to the community’s major language, they (subconsciously) accept and use their linguistic potential for creating and stressing the flexibility of their identities and the fact that it is neither necessary nor constructive to ban all linguistic and cultural specificities of the language and culture they are brought up in at home, but to combine those with the ones of the country they live in. In Germany, for example, Turkish-German youths developed the ‘Kanak Sprak’ (=kanak-language; ‘Kanake’ having been used as a humiliating word for a foreign person, ‘Sprak’ is a non-formal/dialect word for ‘Sprache’). Kanak Sprak sounds like a Turkish-German mixture, that is playing with linguistic features imputed to L1-Turkish young people. Their language makes visible that its users experience a loss of identity in that they are ‘the Germans’ when visiting their Turkish relatives, and ‘the Turkish’ in their German (home-)context. The artificial interlanguage that they developed to demonstrate this loss of identity works according to the same principles as learner’s interlanguages. They include ‘some of the characteristics of [the learner’s] first language, some of the second language they are in the process of learning, and some features that are a natural part of nearly all language-learning experience’ (Rafoth, 2015: 71).

It is telling that this way of (sarcastically) simulating linguistic problems which are either expected from L2 speakers or on which they received negative feedback by teachers or other L1-speakers, was taken up as a form of protest by some groups of L1 German youths in order to demonstrate their own feeling of being outsiders in the German society, for instance due to disadvantages they experience and perceive because of their educational backgrounds. Multilinguals thus introduced an interesting approach (of how) to use multilingualism productively in order to create an identity – also to monolinguals (Cornelsen, 2017).

The mock of the subtraction view taken by the speakers of these interlanguages supports the same position that the authors in this book represent: multilingualism does not impede development but offers chances and possibilities for communication and for creating and strengthening identity and self-esteem, which can only work if we abandon and discard the subtractive approach and understand multilingualism as more than the acquisition of another language. Multilingualism stands for the capacity to act in different linguistic, social and cultural contexts – no matter the level of accuracy: it is a ‘multi-competence’ that we should all strive to acquire (Cook, 1992). A multilingual person is not only better at getting their message across by making use of their linguistic potential, they may also be better at successfully reacting and adopting to different situations and to different contexts. Since multilinguals have competencies in a variety of linguistic systems, in diverse forms of communication and know as well as understand the views different cultures might take of various problems and situations, they have the ability to flexibly adjust their behaviour to the needs of the circumstances. They evaluate what the situation asks for by analysing different factors in the communication (words, tone, mimic, gestures, background etc.) and react accordingly.

1.2 Literacy

It is clear that language is one of the central points in multilingualism. The extent to which it influences our way of thinking is widely discussed in different schools (e.g. Bakhtin, 1986; Jackendoff, 2007; Oksaar, 2003; Vygotsky, 1962). Although many cognitive processes take place without the active use of language but use all kinds of information stored in long-term memory, language and the governing of language have an influence on thinking especially in abstract thought. Both become dominant when people work with their own thoughts and the thoughts of others in the field of literacy, which has traditionally been understood as the ability to read and write (in one’s mother tongue) (cf. Barton, 2007). To this very day, literacy is quite frequently associated with a print-based, formalised, monolingual and monolithic ability of ‘encoding and decoding written language’ (Stavans & Hoffman, 2015: 255). Also the UNESCO definition of literacy according to which literacy is ‘the ability to identify, understand, interpret, create, communicate and compute, using printed and written materials associated with varying contexts’ departs from predominantly printed and written materials.

However, even in this (reduced) view of seeing literacy as working with words written down, one has to keep in mind that literacy is more than information encoded in graphemes. In monoas well as in multilingual contexts, we have to deal with texts in multiple forms using ‘standards and norms specifying what is expected and considered appropriate in a particular type of written discourse’ (Schneider, 2012: 1027). Different situations ask for different forms of literate actions and forms (Swales, 2004) and it is important for individuals to acquire and use a ‘repertoire of situationally appropriate responses to recurrent situations’ (Berkenkotter & Huckin, 1995: ix).

Readers of academic texts, for example, expect very dense and logically structured texts and are appalled by texts with no clear statement or with a missing or only a vague connection between abstract, introduction, main part and conclusion (Maingueneau, 2002). The same readers would be annoyed if they read a crime novel and got the information about the murder and the culprit presented in a logical, chronological order. When we write professional emails, we need to be clear, straightforward, rather formal but much more concise than in the academic context (Breuer & Allsobrook, 2019), and when we write messages in private chats, we use emojis, emoticons and other forms of visual tags for transporting meaning (see Stavans et al., this volume). Different forms of texts also pose different cognitive demands on readers and writers. How individuals perceive these demands may ...

Table of contents

• Frontcover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Contributors
• 1 Multiple Approaches to Understanding and Working with Multilingual (Multi-)Literacy
• Part 1: Issues, Methods and Insights into Multilingual Literacy
• 2 Linguistic and Social Diversity, Literacy and Access to Higher Education
• 3 Studying the Learning of Immigrant Students with Limited German: A Proposal for Developing and Applying an Instrument for Selecting Suitable Research Participants
• 4 ‘I Should Really Interpret Word by Word for You’: Researcher, Interpreter and Interviewee Negotiating Roles, Responsibilities and Meanings in Two Multilingual Literacy Research Interviews
• Part 2: Formal Education Framework: Multilingual Literacy in Classroom Practices
• 5 Paving a New Way to Literacy Development in Multilingual Children: A DMM Perspective
• 6 ‘He Just Does Not Write Enough For It’ – Literacy Practices Among Polish Adolescents in Ireland
• 7 Construction of Identities in Diverse Classrooms: Writing Identity Texts in Grade Five
• Part 3: Formal Education Framework: Technology-Driven Multilingual Literacy in School
• 8 Developing Multiliteracies in Online Multilingual Interactions: The Example of Chat-Room Conversations in Romance Languages
• 9 Promoting Multilingualism and Multiliteracies through Storytelling: A Case Study on the Use of the App iTEO in Preschools in Luxembourg
• Part 4: Non-Formal Education: Multilingual Literacy at Home, in the Community and in Cyberspace
• 10 Multilingual Preschoolers’ Word Learning from Parent-Child Shared Reading of Informational and Narrative Books
• 11 Multilingual Literacy: The Use of Emojis in Written Communication
• 12 Building the Multilingual Literacy Bridge