We just held our session ‘Supporting Multilingual Education in Early Childhood: Linguistic Anthropological Approaches’. Organized by Jennifer Reynolds (USC) and Amy Kyratzis (UCSB), the session examines the issue of how early childhood educators can be supported in sustaining and leveraging children’s expertise as a legitimate and generative means to expand linguistic repertoires and associated forms of knowledge production. The Zoom recording and documents will available through June 2022 to conference participants.
literacy socialization
Advanced Methods Institute at OSU
The College of Education and Human Ecology (EHE) and the EHE Office of Research, Innovation, Collaboration’s (ORIC) QualLab are sponsoring a virtual, 3-day institute. The Advanced Methods Institute: Advancing Culturally Responsive Research and Researchers runs Wednesday, June 2 through Friday, June 4. I will moderate a panel, Breaking it Down: A Conversation about How Qualitative Scholars Advance Culturally Relevant Research and lead a topical lunch discussion, Linguistically and Culturally Responsive Research. #OSUAMI2021
Invited talk for New Literacy Studies Forum
This past weekend I gave an invited talk as part of a panel ‘Multilingual Communities in Ethnographic Perspectives’. This panel was part of a series of Literacy Talks organized by the New Literacy Studies Forum/Kajian Literasi Baru. Also presenting was my former advisee Dr. Artanti Sari, who gave a wonderful presentation grounded in her dissertation research with Indonesian-Muslim families who migrated to the US and used online digital telecommunication technology to socialize their children into languages, literacy, and religion.
LSHSS article is out!
A new publication based on my research with Monique Mills (U of Houston) is out! Perceptions of Black Children’s Narrative Language: A Mixed-Methods Study reports on our mixed-methods study, which addressed two aims. First, we examine the impact of language variation on the ratings of children’s narrative language. Second, we identify participants’ ideologies related to narrative language and language variation. The article is part of a special issue of Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, Serving African American English Speakers in Schools Through Interprofessional Education & Practice. You can listen to guest editor Monique Mills talk about the issue and the development of strategies for speakers of African American English.
Navigating Languages, Literacies, Identities paperback out
The paperback version of Navigating Languages, Literacies and Identities: Religion in Young Lives is now available. The edited volume, which was first published in 2016, showcases research at the interface of religion and multilingualism, offering an analytical focus on religion in children and adolescents’ everyday lives and experiences. My chapter in it, ‘Moving across languages, literacies and schooling traditions’, is based on my work in northern Cameroon and Central Ohio.
SLRF 2020 colloquium
Members of the Expanding Repertoires research team just presented a great colloquium at the Second Language Research Forum (SLRF) 2020, ‘Scientific language and literacy practices of bilingual families with young children’. Grace Kim organized the colloquium and presented a paper, and Somin Kim and Minseok Choi presented papers. I was the chair and provided an introduction to the Expanding Repertoires project, within in which the reported research was conducted. We had a great turn-out and dynamic discussion. This was my first all-online conference.
Navigating Languages, Literacies, and Identities
The edited volume Navigating Languages, Literacies and Identities: Religion in Young Lives has come out! Edited by Vally Lytra, Dinah Volk, and Eve Gregory, the volume showcases innovative research at the interface of religion and multilingualism, with an analytical focus on religion in children and adolescents’ everyday lives and experiences. I have a chapter on my research in northern Cameroon and Central Ohio.
Sirad Shirdon awarded Hancock scholarship
My advisee Sirad Shirdon has been awarded a scholarship from the Dr. Charles R. Hancock Graduate Scholarship Fund in Urban Education. She will use the scholarship for her research on Kindergarten readiness among Somali children in Central Ohio. Sirad plans to take an ethnographically informed approach to the study of parent, school, and community understandings of Kindergarten readiness and how these understandings are enacted in practice. This study will build on Sirad’s work on my longitudinal study of language and literacy socialization and development among Somali immigrant-refugee children in the early elementary grades.
Suresh Canagarajah redefining literacy as translingual
Suresh Canagarajah, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor in Applied Linguistics, English, and Asian Studies at Pennsylvania State University, is visiting OSU for two days. He will give a public talk ‘Redefining Literacy as Translingual‘ on February 6, 2014, 4:00 pm – 5:30 pm in Denney Hall 311. Friday he will join the Graduate Interdisciplinary Seminar in Literacy Studies to discuss the connections between literacy, translation, and global Englishes in the twenty-first century.
AAA Panel on Language and the Immigrant Experience of Children and Youth
I just participated in a double panel, ‘Language and the Immigrant Experience of Children and Youth’ at the 2013 Meeting of the American Anthropological Association. Organized by Inmaculada M. García-Sánchez (Temple University) and sponsored by the Society for Linguistic Anthropology, the panel brought together language ethnographers to examine the experiences of immigrant children and youth (Somali, North African, Vietnamese, indigenous Mayans, Romanians, Turkish, Iranian, Mexican) in an integrated fashion and in a number of cross-cultural settings. My paper “Making African storybooks culturally relevant and culturally marked in a Kindergarten classroom in a Somali-centric school” examines the use in read alouds of storybooks that depict Africa and Africans in Kindergarten in a charter school that serves primarily the children of Somali refugees who have resettled in a large US midwestern city.