Building Bridges: Making Space to Connect Identities in a Newcomer Multilingual Classroom with Writing
Loading...
Links to Files
Permanent Link
Collections
Author/Creator
Author/Creator ORCID
Date
2023-05
Type of Work
Department
Doctoral Studies in Literacy
Program
Doctor of Education (Ed.D.) Contemporary Curriculum Theory and Instruction: Literacy
Citation of Original Publication
Rights
Abstract
The purpose of this dissertation was to explore ways for multilingual students to draw on their background knowledge and culture during writing instruction. In addition, I wanted to investigate how newcomer multilingual students (Canagarajah, 2013) understood and assessed their writing, the relationship between students’ self-assessments, their writing identities, as well as their understanding of who a writer was. Multiple linguistic repertoires (Garcia, 2009) and writing (Casanave, 2002; 2003) are effective and beneficial resources to empower multilingual students. This practitioner research (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009) using case study methods (Stake, 1995; Yin, 2018) in a literacy support class helped me, the teacher and researcher, evaluate my own teaching, and explore the writing identities of the whole class (16 participants total), with four focal participants who were sixth grade newcomer multilingual students. The research questions helped me investigate ways to accommodate students’ needs as writers, explore varied assessments, and discover the relationship between self-assessments (Andrade, 2019), writing identities and students’ understanding of writers. The qualitative study data included interviews, writing samples and conferences about those samples, portfolio review conferences, teacher generated artifacts and reflections, as well as students’ self-assessments and classroom audio recordings. Findings from the study showed that by accommodating students’ needs as writers in a space that allowed the fluidity of languages and use of multimodalities (McCarthey & Garcia, 2005; Pacheco & Smith, 2015) most students felt motivated to write, and believed they were learning writing in English. Conferences and self-assessments helped multilinguals learn about themselves as writers in diversified ways, expressing their understanding of their writing, and of their writing identities as complex and seeing growth as writers (Skerrett, 2013). Students became more aware of their needs as writers, tried different ways of helping themselves when facing challenges, and understood writing could be improved with revisions.