Examples Of Transnational Literacies

By Author: Jordon
Total Articles: 91
Comment this article

We propose that integrating transnational and community literacies into the instruction provided to both ELLs and mainstream students will accomplish the following four goals. First, this approach makes it possible for teachers to better understand the life worlds of their students and to build more meaningful relationships with them. Second, the inclusion of transnational and community literacies in schools can help students from all backgrounds learn about the diverse composition of their communities. Third, bringing transnational and community literacies into the classroom makes it possible to build upon students' prior knowledge. Fourth, when these practices are incorporated into the curriculum, ELL youth can become more fully engaged in language, literacy, and content area learning. We elaborate on each of these points in this section.

Our first goal is that teachers become more familiar with their students' cultural and linguistic backgrounds. We agree with Vibram Five Fingers other literacy researchers (e.g., Auerbach, 1989; Early & Gunderson, 1993) who have argued ...
... that minority students are more likely to make progress in school when teachers understand and incorporate their home and community literacy practices as opposed to attempting simply to impose school-like practices (e.g., book reading) in the home. Familiarity with the documents and other literate forms found within students' communities allows teachers to learn about their social, cultural, economic, and political lived realities. For example, when the local branches of national and multinational bank chains advertise the international transfer of funds without cost or commission, this reflects diplomatic, historic, and economic arrangements between the U.S. and other countries. To give a specific figure, at last count workers in the U.S. sent an average of 46 billion dollars per year to countries in Latin America; nevertheless, due to diplomatic relations, restrictions are placed on sending these types of funds to Cuba (Cave, 2008).

Other statistics are also informative. For instance, one in every three households in Mexico receives some funds through remittances (De la Garza & Pachon, 2008). Moreover, between one half and two thirds of immigrants living in the U.S. send remittances to family members living in Latin America (Hohmann, 2008). Financial institutions charge from 1 to 10% for such transactions, a significant amount of money in many household economies. An understanding of the literacy practices involved in sending remittances can help teachers appreciate an activity in which many of the families of ELLs make use of reading and writing for meaningful purposes. By identifying, studying, and incorporating these texts, both teachers and students can learn more about the economic connections that bind ELLs and their families to their countries of origin and how these connections are maintained using written language (Luke, 2007; see Figures 1 and 2 for examples).

Our second goal for the use of transnational and community literacies in schools is to provide a way for students from a variety of backgrounds to learn more about one another. During our field trip to a local immigrant neighborhood, we collected a set of literate artifacts that involved food products, including a range of items that are familiar to members of specific communities yet unknown to others. For example, in an international supermarket serving members of Asian and Latino communities, we took the photograph seen in Figure 3. These images and Vibram Fivefingers Shoes accompanying texts present the following items: tomatillos, epasote, berdolaga, and guazontle. While these spellings are in some cases unconventional, they can be found throughout Mexico, along with several variations. For example, guazontle is at times spelled huazontk, and epasote is more commonly seen written as epazote. What is interesting about the unconventional orthography is that the words are derived from the Nahuatl language rather than from Spanish and, for this reason, are typically written in a variety of ways. Students could learn from discussion around these texts that Nahuatl was the language of the Aztecs, the lingua franca of much of Mesoamerica at the time of the Spanish invasion, and also that it is still spoken by more than one and a half million people in Central Mexico and, due to migration, in the United States.