Reading across languages and images: literacy practices, languaging, and personhood in a case study of a Venezuelan immigrant child

Abstract

The present study analyzes the reading and writing practices of a Venezuelan immigrant child investigating how she engages in the relations of languaging and how she constructs her personhood in a 5th-grade class at a public school and at the Laboratório de Alfabetização e Letramento (LAL/UFMG). The theoretical framework is based on the New Literacy Studies (Street, 1984; 2014), which conceives literacy as a social practice (Barton & Hamilton, 1998). It also articulates with the concepts of languaging (Bloome, 2019;  Beach, 2019; Bloome et al 2027) and personhood (Street, 1992; Bloome & Beauchemin, 2016), understanding language as situated social action and identity as a relational and dynamic construction. Methodologically, this work adopts a longitudinal ethnographic case study perspective over a three-year. The data collection included participant observation, field notes, audio and video recordings, interviews with the family, and the child’s multimodal productions. The analysis focused on two literacy events: a school project on the book Malala, the Girl Who Wanted to Go to School by Adriana Carranca, and a guided reading session of the book Soñadores by Yuyi Morales. The results show that children’s literacy is shaped by their experiences of migration and their bilingual repertoire. Through languaging, the Venezuelan children play an active role, validate the pronunciation of Spanish —referred to in the community as “Venezuelan”— reconfigure positions of participation, and reaffirm the family’s language policy of preserving the mother tongue. The legitimization of linguistic diversity in the school setting promoted a situated sense of belonging and ties between the school and the community.