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

Abstract

This study analyzes the participation of a Venezuelan immigrant child in social reading and writing practices carried out during literacy activities in a 5th-grade class at a public elementary school and at the Literacy Laboratory (LAL/UFMG). The theoretical framework is grounded in New Literacy Studies (Street, 1984; 2014), which conceive of literacy as a social practice (Barton; Hamilton, 1998). It also aligns with the concepts of “languaging” (Bloome; Beauchemin, 2016; 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 study adopts a case study with an ethnographic perspective. Data collection included participant observation, field notes, audio and video recordings, interviews with the family, and the child’s multimodal productions. For the analysis, we explored the concepts of languaging and personhood to understand how the immigrant child uses Spanish and Portuguese in daily life to communicate, integrate, and position themselves within the relationships they establish with other social actors in the observed contexts. The results demonstrate that the child’s participation in social literacy practices is shaped by their migratory experiences and bilingual repertoire. Through languaging, the Venezuelan child plays an active role, validates the pronunciation of Spanish—referred to in the community as “Venezuelan”—reconfigures positions of participation, and reaffirms the family’s linguistic 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.