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This qualitative thesis study explores the influences of social networks and social support on the literacy engagement of seven high school students from a multicultural, multilingual, and economically disadvantaged urban neighbourhood in a large, diverse North American city. Guided by Ecological Systems Theory (Bronfenbrenner, 1979, 2005), at thre...
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... A socially supportive space also is one in which multilingual writers are not allowed to 'fall between the cracks,' as illustrated by the case of Elisa, a quiet, well behaved ESL student whose teacher "took her for granted" (Valdés, 2001, p. 87); Elisa's model behavior actually worked against her in that the teacher did not spend much time with her and had no sense of how Elisa's language skills were or were not progressing. This 'falling through the cracks' occurs when a student could benefit from direct assistance yet does not seek it out or make her needs known in any way or is not visibly at the top or bottom of the class-teachers may actually praise these students for behaving in class, although this silence more often renders the student invisible to the teacher or to other adult sources of support . 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 On the other hand, in a recent study I conducted with multilingual adolescents in a large city in Canada (Wilson, 2012c), students found supportive socioliterate relationships primarily with teachers and tutors who reached out to them. A Jamaican-Canadian tenth-grader who resembled students I had seen in my teaching career who were 'falling through the cracks' developed a strong relationship with his English teacher as an eleventh-grader, which contributed to a renewed interest in writing and school: ...
... From these specific examples, we see that socioliterate interactions appear to influence the 'writing engagement' of multilingual adolescent writers, which I define as taking up a writing activity in a positive, effortful, goal-directed manner (see Wilson, 2012c). The traditional conception of literacy engagement is that students are 'engaged' either when they are actually doing a literacy activity and/or are using strategies to complete an activity (for example, see Guthrie, Alao, & Rinehart, 1997). ...
Drawing on an understanding of literacy as social practice, this chapter reviews published studies on adolescent literacy in order to explore the social relationships that appear to influence the writing activities, practices, and skills of multilingual high school students. These relationships are described according to the three ecosystems most germane to teenagers—home, school, and neighborhood—and the specific influences of the reported relationships on students’ writing are discussed.
Spotlighting the challenges and realities faced by linguistically diverse immigrant and resident students in U.S. secondary schools and in their transitions from high school to community colleges and universities, this book looks at programs, interventions, and other factors that help or hinder them as they make this move. Chapters from teachers and scholars working in a variety of contexts build rich understandings of how high school literacy contexts, policies such as the proposed DREAM Act and the Common Core State Standards, bridge programs like Upward Bound, and curricula redesign in first-year college composition courses designed to recognize increasing linguistic diversity of student populations, affect the success of this growing population of students as they move from high school into higher education.
