Children in Immigrant Families Becoming Literate: A Window Into Identity Construction, Transnationality, and Schooling

This original book offers a meaningful window into the lived experiences of children from immigrant families, providing a holistic, profound portrait of their literacy practices as situated within social, cultural, and political frames. Drawing on reports from five years of an ongoing longitudinal research project involving students from immigrant families across their elementary school years, each chapter explores a unique set of questions about the students’ experiences and offers a rich data set of observations, interviews, and student-created artifacts. Authors apply different sociocultural, sociomaterial, and sociopolitical frameworks to better understand the dimensions of the children’s experiences. The multitude of approaches applied demonstrates how viewing the same data through distinct lenses is a powerful way to uncover the differences and comparative uses of these theories. Through such varied lenses, it becomes apparent how the complexities of lived experiences inform and improve our understanding of teaching and learning, and how our understanding of multifaceted literacy practices affects students’ social worlds and identities.

Children in Immigrant Families Becoming Literate is a much-needed resource for scholars, professors, researchers, and graduate students in language and literacy education, English education, and teacher education.

Yao-Kai Chi is a scholar of language learning and learning identities and has a Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA.

Catherine Compton-Lilly is the John C. Hungerpiller Chair in the College of Education at the University of South Carolina, USA.

Dana Hagerman is an Assistant Professor of Language and Literacy at the Reading Recovery Center for Literacy at National Louis University, USA.

Laura Hamman-Ortiz is an Assistant Professor of TESOL and Teacher Education and the Coordinator for the Undergraduate Program in Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CLD) Education at the University of Northern Colorado, USA.

Jieun Kim is an Adjunct Professor at Trinity International University, USA.

Sun Young Lee is Assistant Professor of Education at Wichita State University, USA.

Kristin Papoi is a Clinical Assistant Professor and the Program Director for the Masters of Arts in Teaching at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA.

Erin Quast is an Assistant Professor of Elementary Literacy at Illinois State University, USA.

Stephanie Shedrow is an Assistant Professor of Teacher Education at St. Norbert College, USA.

Brooke Ward Taira is Assistant Professor of Literacy Education at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, USA.

Bingjie Zheng is a researcher in sociolinguistics and bi/multilingual education, and has a Ph.D. in Second Language Acquisition Program from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA.