Journal of Asian Pacific Communication - Volume 19, Issue 1, 2009

In this paper, we report the findings of our qualitative inquiry conducted with two male and two female sojourner students in their early teens living in the United States. Sojourner students, an under-researched population in literacy studies, refers to expatriate children who reside and study abroad for a number of years because of their parents’ jobs and who anticipate eventual return to their home country. Our participants were Japanese sojourner students. Drawing on multiple sources of data, including the students’ literacy logs that documented their reading and writing activities in Japanese and English, interview transcripts, and literacy artifacts, we investigated what kind of literacy practices they engaged in outside school and what developing bilingual and biliterate competences meant to them as individuals. Our findings indicate that (a) although the four students spent much time on academic literacy in Japanese and English outside school, they also had active literate lives of their own; and (b) gender affected not only how they perceived their competencies in the two languages but also how they allocated their time outside school to engage in literacy practices in each language. While there is little investigation of this student population from the perspective of gender, we suggest that it is an important issue to take into account in future research.

Drawing on a sociocultural perspective of genre as a social action situated in a particular context, this study examined the functions and genres of four second-grade ESL (English as a Second Language) children’s English writing at home and at school. The two boys and two girls were born and raised in Canada, speaking English at school and with their siblings, and Cantonese at home with their parents. A total of 67 pieces of school writing and 54 pieces of home writing were collected over a five-week period. Findings show that home writing exhibit a wider range of functions and genres than school writing. The study suggests that teachers should be aware of the value of the writing opportunities and contexts bicultural children have at home and, therefore, incorporate such home experiences into classroom teaching to enrich the process of literacy development.

This paper examines how the development of print literacy practices was approached at a Chinese heritage language school in the Southwest of the United States. More specifically, it investigates the roles of instructors and parents in the development of literacy among heritage language learners of Mandarin. The study explores two contrasting approaches to literacy instruction which occurred in both the classrooms and homes of the learners, where many literacy activities took place. The findings indicate that the learners’ literacy development was determined by many factors, such as the instructors’ and the parents’ own learning experiences, their perspectives on literacy, and the approaches they adopted in both classroom and home settings. The study also reveals that instructors and parents conceptualized an important link between socializing the learners into traditional Chinese values and the promotion of their literacy development.

The number of students who speak a language other than English at home has significantly increased in various Anglophone (i.e., English-dominant) countries in recent decades. As the student populations in these countries’ schools have become more linguistically and culturally diverse, concerns about language minority students’ language and literacy development have also increased. Researchers have documented the literacy practices of various linguistic and cultural groups at home and/or in the community. This paper portrays the literacy practices of Korean-American students, in particular the population of immigrant adolescents. Drawing upon case studies of four Korean immigrant students, the study described in this paper reveals that these middle school students enjoyed reading and writing for pleasure at home in Korean as well as in English (the main language of their formal schooling), although there existed differences among them in terms of the degree to which they used the languages and the activities they engaged in. Their literacy practices were necessarily accompanied by ethnic and cultural identity formation.

The emergence and significance of transnational adolescents at school and in society have recently been recognized, and yet, little is known about how their transnational lived experiences affect their literacy learning and identity construction. Thus, the study reported in this paper explored transnational literacy options and practices that two Korean transnational adolescents had experienced and addressed how their online literacy practices served them while negotiating their transnational identities. The findings show that the participants engaged in multiple literacy practices and forged transnational identities through online activities involving “creating and constructing a transnational and transcultural community” and “communicating via instant messaging.” The findings suggest that we should re-conceptualize the teaching and learning of students who share multilingual, transnational lived experiences and that we should re-examine what it means to be good, educated students and global citizens in the 21st century.

The importance of students’ identity development has increasingly been acknowledged in the fields of second language acquisition and literacy research. In the cases of two populations receiving growing attention in the research literature, English Language Learners (immigrant students learning English in school settings) and Heritage Language Learners (students attempting, informally or formally, to learn or further develop a language other than English that is spoken in the home environment), identity construction is an especially complicated process. These students move between two environments, one where the native language and culture are represented and another where a second or target language and its culture are engaged. Determining where and with whom they affiliate academically, culturally, linguistically, and socially is an ongoing process. This article describes a qualitative study of four Asian adolescent English Language Learners who participated in an after school literacy club where, through reading multicultural literature and responding to the literature and each other through face to face discussions and electronically via a Wiki site within a Read, Talk, and Wiki (RTW) format, they also engaged in a process of identity construction. The article examines how the RTW club created an important space in which this process occurred and how the students made use of this setting.