Kelleen Toohey

Changing Perspectives on Good Language Learners

Language and culture are no longer scripts to be acquired, as much as they are conversations in which people can participate. The question of who is learning what and how much is essentially a question of what conversations they are part of, and this question is a subset of the more powerful question of what conversations are around to be had in a given culture. (McDermott, 1993, p. 295)

A Multilingual Child's Literacy Practices and Contrasting Identities in the Figured Worlds of French Immersion Classrooms

In this paper, we explore the intersection of practice, identity, resources and literacy central to the New Literacy Studies and recent second language research informed by sociocultural theories of learning and language. Drawing on the construct figured worlds of literacy that describe how representations of literacy practices invoked in relation to certain people frame their social position and the construction of their identities, we discuss literacy practices and teacher discourse documented in our classroom research. We present data excerpts that illustrate how a multilingual child is variously constructed as ‘literate child’ in the figured worlds of elementary school French Immersion classrooms. In particular, we consider how her literacy practices are shaped and her identities mediated in different ways socially, materially and linguistically. We argue that the mediation of her identities in classroom literacy activities is tied to teacher expectations of her future educational progress. Finally, we suggest that partnerships between researchers, educational practitioners and policy makers aimed at documenting classroom literacy practices may highlight how interpretations of multilingual childrens identities can serve to fix or change their social relations and educational paths.

Critical Pedagogies and Language Learning: Critical pedagogies and language learning: An introduction

Advocates of critical approaches to second language teaching are interested in relationships between language learning and social change. From this perspective, language is not simply a means of expression or communication; rather, it is a practice that constructs, and is constructed by, the ways language learners understand themselves, their social surroundings, their histories, and their possibilities for the future. This collection assembles the work of a variety of scholars interested in critical perspectives on language education in globally diverse sites of practice. All are interested in investigating the ways that social relationships are lived out in language and how issues of power, while often obscured in language research and educational practice (Kubota, this volume), are centrally important in developing critical language education pedagogies. Indeed, as Morgan (this volume) suggests, “politically engaged critiques of power in everyday life, communities, and institutions” are precisely what are needed to develop critical pedagogies in language education. The chapters have varying foci, seeking to better understand the relationships between writers and readers, teachers and students, test makers and test takers, teacher–educators and student teachers, and researchers and researched. The term critical pedagogy is often associated with the work of scholars such as Freire (1968/1970), Giroux (1992), Luke (1988), Luke and Gore (1992), McLaren (1989), and Simon (1992) in the field of education. Aware of myriad political and economic inequities in contemporary societies, advocates have explored the “social visions” that pedagogical practices support (Simon, 1992), and critiques of classroom practices in terms of their social visions have been common and longstanding in critical educational literature.1 Feminist critiques have also considered classroom practice and have identified ways in which the relationships and activities of classrooms contribute to patriarchal, hierarchical, and dominating practices in wider societies (e.g., Davies, 1989; Ellsworth, 1989; Gaskell, 1992; Spender, 1982; Walkerdine, 1989). In second language education, critiques of classroom practices in terms of the social visions such practices support are relatively recent but are increasingly being published in major venues.2

Learner Autonomy as Agency in Sociocultural Settings

Second language learning literature (and discourse in other fields) often constructs learners as individuals who act, think, and learn in accordance with innate, specifiable characteristics, independently of the social, historical, cultural and political-economic situations in which they live. From this perspective, these ‘autonomous’ learners have variable motivations, learning styles, cognitive traits, strategies and personality orientations that are seen as causal of their success or failure in language learning. We have seen particular interest in specifying the characteristics of successful language learners (e.g. Naiman et al., 1978). More recently, however, as Canagarajah (2003) points out, there has been a ‘social turn’ in our literature that places emphasis on the ways in which sociocultural factors and larger societal processes are involved in the construction of individuals and their learning (Hall, 1993, 1995; Rampton, 1995; Auerbach, 1997; Pavlenko and Lantolf, 2000; Pennycook, 2001). Another thread in this discussion has related to learners’ agency, their embodied experiences, and their individual histories situated in sociocultural contexts (e.g. Benson, Chik and Lim, this volume).

Disputes in Child L2 Learning

This article concerns how peer disputes are involved in classroom language learning. Drawing from data collected in a longitudinal study of six young English language learners in Canadian public school classrooms, the article shows how two girls (one of Polish background and one of Punjabi Sikh background) differentially engage in disputes. Disputes appeared to provide the Polish child with occasions to negotiate new meanings or to negotiate or display her powerful position in relation to classmates. By contrast, the Punjabi Sikh girl was often bested in disputes, and thus they were occasions on which her power and competence were displayed as subordinate to those of other children. Her opportunities for participation in activities and conversations in her classroom seemed concomitantly reduced. The article argues that teachers need to address questions of domination and subordination directly in classrooms. By recognizing the differential expertise of students, teachers might better assist students in speaking from powerful and desirable positions. If teachers were to approach assessment with the aim of discovering childrens competencies, they might be able to increase their understanding of practices that display students from a variety of positions.

Second Language Learners Making Video in Three Contexts

We describe videomaking projects in Canada, India , and Mexico in which second language learners were asked to show the children in the other countries what their lives were like. We consider how this form of expression might contribute to second language learning and allow children to make use of in and out-of-school resources. We also raise questions about the affordances and constraints of the videomaking process and explore how teachers might approach such multimodal literacy activities with children.

A Socio-cultural Perspective on School-based Literacy Research: Some Emerging Considerations

Much research on reading and writing in schools continues to focus on individual cognitive skills. In contrast, investigations of literacy-learning in out-of-school settings have often taken a socio-cultural perspective, situating reading and writing in social relations and cultural institutions. The last 20 years have seen a proliferation of studies documenting the ways in which printed texts are taken up in a wide variety of settings from after-school clubs and community-based adult literacy programmes to workplaces, the Internet, and ‘everyday life’. Increasingly, there have been calls for sociocultural literacy researchers to begin directing their attention to mainstream educational contexts. In this paper, we join in and seek to contribute to such calls by drawing out some of the complexities and caveats that also need to be kept in mind. After briefly reviewing what it means to define literacy and learning in relation to socio-cultural context, we explore some recent arguments for conceptual and methodological refinements. We then turn our attention to schools and to what a socio-cultural definition of literacy has to offer in terms of addressing diversity and educational inequity, and we draw out several issues that require closer consideration.

From the Ethnography of Communication to Critical Ethnography in ESL Teacher Education.

The TESOL Quarterly publishes brief commentaries on aspects of English language teaching. For this issue, we asked two teacher educators the following question: How has qualitative research informed your work in teacher education?

Videomaking as sociomaterial assemblage

In this paper, we present excerpts from ethnographic data collected when a diverse classroom of children, some of whom were multilingual and others monolingual in English, used iPads to make videos. We discuss the practices, social relations, objects and material conditions that emerged as the children engaged in this production, with special attention to one child participating in the process. Drawing on New Literacy Studies, theories of the material and the construct sociomaterial assemblage, and another construct, production pedagogies, we analyzed the particular interactions this child engaged in while videomaking. These theoretical lenses helped us identify the challenges she faced and some of her strengths that might have been obscured from view during classroom negotiation of textual language, but were revealed when she interacted with digital technologies and multimodal texts. Video production allowed her to position herself and be positioned as knowledgeable, creative and as a legitimate peer with something to contribute.

ESL Learners in the Early School Years

In this chapter, Toohey, Day, and Manyak discuss theoretical perspectives and empirical research that advance our understanding of the complex social processes involved in young children’s acquisition of ESL. In the first two sections, they examine post-structuralist and sociocultural theories of identity and of mediated practice, highlighting constructs that provide insight into children’s second language learning. In the last two sections, they review recent studies of young children’s ESL learning that have applied these theoretical perspectives. The studies reveal how learners’ identities, classroom practices, and learning resources interweave to inhibit or promote children’s acquisition of English.