Towards a holistic and multi-layered perspective in analysing (multilingual) youth literacy practices
Rothoni, A., Koutsogiannis, D., Antonopoulou, S., & Konstantinidis, A.
In recent literature there has been an increasing interest in the understanding and analysis of multilingual children’s communicative practices within a new global reality. Such research has over the years highlighted the communicative practices within local and translocal networks that adolescents of multilingual backgrounds develop by using online media (Lam, 2014) and on the ways youth draw upon various linguistic and multimodal resources to (re)define their identities (Lam & Smirnov, 2017; Androutsopoulos, 2015).
In this presentation, we argue that multilingual youth literacy practices can be best understood within an approach which brings to the foreground two interrelated dimensions: in the first, literacy practices are seen through a holistic, post-digital perspective, according to which literacy practices are embedded in youth’s everyday life worlds (in- and out-of-school, leisure, hobbies etc.). The second places emphasis on investigating literacy practices through a transcalar perspective, meaning that it aims to account for the multi-layered and polycentric reality that inevitably shapes literacy practices. For the purposes of our argument, we draw on data from 40 interviews with children (aged 10-15) who left Greece with their families during the period of the financial crisis (2008-2018) and settled in Australia and Germany.
As the analysis of these sets of data indicates, a variety of aspects of the above two dimensions penetrate and explain children’s literacy practices, such as: (a) the new global reality in many aspects of everyday life such as the economy, people’s mobility, the language market, the circulation of pop culture products and global discourses around youth, (c) the lack / availability of digital resources in the different languages as young people engage in their literacy practices, (d) parents’ strategies and beliefs about their children’s literacy practices and (e) the way that all these are integrated in young people’s agency, ideologies and personal aspirations.
References
Androutsopoulos, J. (2015). Networked multilingualism: Some language practices on Facebook and their implications. International Journal of Bilingualism, 19(2), 185–205.
Lam, W.S.E. (2014). Literacy and capital in immigrant youths’ online networks across countries. Learning, Media and Technology 39 (4), 488-506.
Lam, W.E. & Smirnov, N. (2017). Identity in mediated contexts of transnationalism and mobility. In S. Thorne & S. May (Eds.), Language, Education and Technology (pp. 1-13). Cham: Springer.
