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    Multilingual Literacy
    Multilingual Literacy
    Multilingual Literacy
    Ebook487 pages6 hours

    Multilingual Literacy

    By Jasper Rubin and Anat Stavans

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    This book investigates multilingual literacy practices, explores the technology applied in different educational frameworks, the centrality of multilingual literacy in non-formal, informal and formal educational contexts, as well as its presence in everyday life. Thematically clustered in four parts, the chapters present an overview of theory related to multilingual literacy, address the methodological challenges of research in the area, describe and evaluate projects set up to foster multilingual literacy in a variety of educational contexts, analyze the literacy practices of multilinguals and their contribution to language and literacy acquisition. This volume aims to initiate a change in paradigms, shifting from structured and conservative problematizations to inclusive and diverse conceptualizations and practices. To that end, the book showcases explorations of different methodologies and needs in formal and non-formal educational systems; and it serves as a springboard for developing multivocal participatory spaces with opportunities for learning and identity-building for all multilinguals, across different settings, languages, ages and contexts.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMultilingual Matters
    Release dateJan 21, 2021
    ISBN9781800410718
    Multilingual Literacy

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      Multilingual Literacy - Esther Odilia Breuer

      1 Multiple Approaches to Understanding and Working with Multilingual (Multi-)Literacy

      Esther Odilia Breuer and Elke Van Steendam

      Interlingual and intercultural communication is a phenomenon that has taken place from the very beginning of mankind. If it had not been for humans’ inherent urge to travel, to settle in and to adapt to new geographical as well as social-cultural contexts, a continent like Europe would not have been able to develop and harness the many different cultures that interact with and enrich each other, as it does today.

      In this constant process of migration, multilingualism has always played an important role. Yet, participants in the process did not have the ambition of acquiring languages at expert linguistic levels – an ambition (quite frequently) cherished by learners in educational and administrative evaluation systems today (Lambert, 1975). People found individual ways of interpreting and/or getting ideas across with the help of signs and gestures and by borrowing words and other forms of communication from the other languages very flexibly. When one realised that the other language provided more adequate vocabulary for a specific idea, one borrowed a word and adapted it in phonology and grammar to one’s own language (Attila, 2017). This is still visible in the high number of loan words from Latin or Greek in European languages, and nowadays it is popular to take over English expressions, sometimes even if terms are already at hand in one’s first language(s) (L1) in order to show that one is up to date. In this process, the original semantics and grammatical notion of the word might be changed, as happened, for example, in German with pseudo English words like ‘Handy’ for mobile phone, or ‘Public Viewing’ for watching football on screen(s) in open places (Finamore, 1998; Pöllmann, 2012). In other words, interaction between languages is actively taking place in various contexts, thus illustrating that ‘the idea that monolingualism is the human norm is a myth’ (Thomason, 2001: 31).

      Multilingualism also plays a crucial role in literacy. Today, people utilise the medium of written language more than ever, not only in business and education, but also in private contexts and for routine life activities. Reading and writing (in different languages) have become exceedingly more crucial skills for people if they want to participate in social activities (Corral-Robles et al., 2017). Literate exchange in this process may not be reduced to writing and reading words, but it ‘involves constructing and navigating multiplicity, manipulating and critiquing information and representations in multiple media, and using diverse technologies (print, visual, digital) in composing multimodal texts’ (Archer & Breuer, 2015: 1). In many cases, it is a means not only of transporting information, but also of building and expressing one’s identity. These processes make elaborate use of cultural as well as autobiographical factors, they are very individual, and it is important to encourage and foster them by promoting multilingual (multi-)literacy elaborately. Some possibilities and considerations are introduced in this book.

      Since the terms of multilingualism as well as of (multi-)literacy are defined differently across the academic fields (see Donahue, this volume), we will briefly describe in the introduction how these broad and widely discussed concepts are understood by the authors in this book, before giving a concise overview of what is presented in the different parts and chapters.

      1.1 Multilingualism

      The last few decades have witnessed a radical change in how linguistic, social, political, business and pedagogical studies as well as administration view multilingual communication. Initially considered to be merely the degree of language proficiency someone had acquired in expressing themselves in another language than their first, second, third or fourth language, competencies were evaluated exclusively by comparing them to a native speaker’s level of proficiency. Hence, teachers have tended to focus on linguistic errors produced during multilingual speech or text production, thereby perhaps unintentionally hindering the opportunities that lie in the language learner’s burgeoning network for constructing meaning. Likewise, linguists and sociologists have drawn attention to the extent to which multilingual communication does not always meet the expectations from the L1 community, not to question or discredit multilinguals’ efforts, but rather to understand the processes behind language acquisition in order to develop methods that help to improve L2/L3 speakers’ performance in the target language.

      The purpose of enhancing language competencies is, of course, a sensible one, as multilinguals often still experience disadvantages because of linguistic errors or because of behaviour that differs from the expectations in the L1 culture’s standards (Cummins, 1981). However, the developed and executed standardised ways in which languages have been mediated to different groups of learners (e.g. migrants, children growing up in another language) have been deemed to be highly ‘inefficient in meeting the linguistic needs of this population’ (Randolph, 2017: 275). In the educational contexts language learners have only rarely been understood as people who have already formed a fundament of complex linguistic, cultural and social systems in which they can communicate without effort and which could be used for facilitating the language learning process. Instead, first language skills and knowledge have been considered to be interfering factors in the processes of learning a new language and ‘assimilating’ to another culture. Using the first language(s), therefore, was sometimes shunned in education, and every element that did not fit the social or cultural standards of the target community was banned.

      One of the consequences of this ‘subtractive’ (Lambert, 1975) monolingual view on multilingualism has been that heritage languages in many countries are not taught in obligatory classes at school. Children out of these communities often do not acquire literacy in their own first language. Because of this, they experience more difficulty in learning to read and write on a high level, and quite frequently, the feedback they get on their performance in the target language again focuses on the ‘negative’ aspects. This is even the case when teachers themselves do not consciously perceive themselves as evaluating the learners’ performance in the subtractive manner (Fairclough, 2005). Negative feedback, however, understandably does not add to the pupils’ motivation to participate in class. A consequence of this is that they feel (like) outsiders (Cummins, 1981; Gomolla, 2012), and their lack of engagement at school confirms teachers’ and society’s expectations.

      This vicious circle underlines the proposition that language and its evaluation are central factors to the concepts of power (Fairclough, 2015). The negative feelings associated with school have a longterm effect on the future perspectives of the multilingual pupils, as is demonstrated in the higher education context: we find a comparatively high dropout rate of students with an L2 background, which is frequently not the effect of the L2 students’ inability to think logically, but rather the result of the manifested (and mostly unreasonable) lack of self-confidence and the belief that they are not able to meet the demands made of them, caused by their experiences of not being evaluated fairly at school (cf. Burger & Groß, 2016; Fairclough, 2015).

      Using the evaluation of language correctness and culturally ‘correct’ approaches to tasks and settings as indicators for – among others – intelligence and adaptability to social settings, as was and is done in the subtractive approach, impedes the chances and large possibilities inherent in multilingualism. Parents’ ‘belief that in becoming bilingual or bicultural one dulls his [= a child’s] cognitive powers and dilutes his identity’ (Lambert, 1975: 11) led parents living in L2 contexts to raise their children not in their own first languages but to provide exclusively the community’s (= the major) language to their children. The intension was to give them the best possible future options, but this strategy did not succeed. To the contrary, people with this kind of ‘pseudomonolingual’ background often face the problem of feeling lost between the cultures they could mutually belong to (see below).

      In the last decades, the awareness of the weaknesses of the subtractive approach has grown not only in the field of science, but also in applied pedagogy, educational politics and among the general public. People understand that intercultural exchange with people from different linguistic backgrounds in the globalised world is a gain for all participants, and this understanding calls for a change in working with multilingualism (Grosjean, 2010). One important step in doing this is to understand multilinguals not as the ‘sum’ of two and/or more languages, but as a unique entity. Even on the purely linguistic level, tests show that languages in multilinguals do not exist next to each other, but that all languages an individual has ever learned form a productive network. When creating messages, the conceptual structure activates the whole network inside the brain – parts of it being on a higher level of activity, parts of it on a lower level, depending on different factors (vocabulary size, but also context and topic) (Abutalebi & Green, 2007; Green, 1986, 2008). Errors in performance are then no signs of low language competencies, but rather a visualisation of how languages ‘cooperate’ in the process of generating meaning, using the whole network for dealing with these demands (Breuer, 2015; Cook, 1995; de Bot, 1992; de Bot et al., 2007; Van Dijk, 2003).

      Breuer (2015), for example, showed that students who wrote academic papers in English as a foreign language used their L1 linguistic network very actively to maintain fluency in the writing process. The participants frequently made subconscious use of L1 grammar, L1 orthographic rules and/or an L1 understanding of the academic genre. Although this method resulted in texts that contained a considerable number of linguistic errors, the L1 supported the students in using writing for thinking, generating ideas and finding ways to get the message across to the readers (Breuer, 2016; Galbrath, 1999, 2009; Menary, 2007). That they did not resort to the L1 for support in writing relatively simple English texts, which they also had to do, stresses that using the complete linguistic network can be an efficient method of dealing with higher cognitive demands imposed by more difficult tasks (e.g. Poulisee & Bongaerts, 1994; Van Weijen, 2008; Wolfersberger, 2003). As is also shown in other chapters in this volume, the results underline that censoring the ‘intrusion’ of languages other than the target one can have negative effects on linguistic and cognitive performance as well as a negative impact on creating a voice of one’s own.

      In this book, we therefore understand a multilingual person as a very complex and multi-faceted unique identity (cf. Stavans & Hoffmann, 2015). Education should support multilingual people and allow them to dwell on their dense and elaborate network of possibilities for communicating, and for generating an identity that is based in the multilingual contexts. The specific linguistic and cultural bases included in this process may be very diverse. Still, multilingual persons who are given the chance to decide for themselves which aspects of which language and culture to incorporate and how to adapt and connect them makes them create an identity they are proud to present. Only if this is possible they are able to present the richness and potential that is offered to and offered by them. The first language forms the basis for the further development in the linguistic as well as cultural and social systems. Education (formal as well as informal) therefore should not suppress it but needs to encourage that it is adequately developed (Cummins, 1979; see Machowska-Kosciak, this volume). When multilingual persons are provided with a variety of words, grammatical codes, genres, narratives, cultural offers etc. in their first language their prospects to learn more languages grow, and they are able to settle themselves into their various communities.

      An interesting approach of how to make active use of (such) linguistic networks in an unguided (and often scorned) form is interlanguaging as is done by a number of young L2-speakers. By consciously adding L1 elements to the community’s major language, they (subconsciously) accept and use their linguistic potential for creating and stressing the flexibility of their identities and the fact that it is neither necessary nor constructive to ban all linguistic and cultural specificities of the language and culture they are brought up in at home, but to combine those with the ones of the country they live in. In Germany, for example, Turkish-German youths developed the ‘Kanak Sprak’ (=kanak-language; ‘Kanake’ having been used as a humiliating word for a foreign person, ‘Sprak’ is a non-formal/dialect word for ‘Sprache’). Kanak Sprak sounds like a Turkish-German mixture, that is playing with linguistic features imputed to L1-Turkish young people. Their language makes visible that its users experience a loss of identity in that they are ‘the Germans’ when visiting their Turkish relatives, and ‘the Turkish’ in their German (home-)context. The artificial interlanguage that they developed to demonstrate this loss of identity works according to the same principles as learner’s interlanguages. They include ‘some of the characteristics of [the learner’s] first language, some of the second language they are in the process of learning, and some features that are a natural part of nearly all language-learning experience’ (Rafoth, 2015: 71).

      It is telling that this way of (sarcastically) simulating linguistic problems which are either expected from L2 speakers or on which they received negative feedback by teachers or other L1-speakers, was taken up as a form of protest by some groups of L1 German youths in order to demonstrate their own feeling of being outsiders in the German society, for instance due to disadvantages they experience and perceive because of their educational backgrounds. Multilinguals thus introduced an interesting approach (of how) to use multilingualism productively in order to create an identity – also to monolinguals (Cornelsen, 2017).

      The mock of the subtraction view taken by the speakers of these interlanguages supports the same position that the authors in this book represent: multilingualism does not impede development but offers chances and possibilities for communication and for creating and strengthening identity and self-esteem, which can only work if we abandon and discard the subtractive approach and understand multilingualism as more than the acquisition of another language. Multilingualism stands for the capacity to act in different linguistic, social and cultural contexts – no matter the level of accuracy: it is a ‘multi-competence’ that we should all strive to acquire (Cook, 1992). A multilingual person is not only better at getting their message across by making use of their linguistic potential, they may also be better at successfully reacting and adopting to different situations and to different contexts. Since multilinguals have competencies in a variety of linguistic systems, in diverse forms of communication and know as well as understand the views different cultures might take of various problems and situations, they have the ability to flexibly adjust their behaviour to the needs of the circumstances. They evaluate what the situation asks for by analysing different factors in the communication (words, tone, mimic, gestures, background etc.) and react accordingly.

      1.2 Literacy

      It is clear that language is one of the central points in multilingualism. The extent to which it influences our way of thinking is widely discussed in different schools (e.g. Bakhtin, 1986; Jackendoff, 2007; Oksaar, 2003; Vygotsky, 1962). Although many cognitive processes take place without the active use of language but use all kinds of information stored in long-term memory, language and the governing of language have an influence on thinking especially in abstract thought. Both become dominant when people work with their own thoughts and the thoughts of others in the field of literacy, which has traditionally been understood as the ability to read and write (in one’s mother tongue) (cf. Barton, 2007). To this very day, literacy is quite frequently associated with a print-based, formalised, monolingual and monolithic ability of ‘encoding and decoding written language’ (Stavans & Hoffman, 2015: 255). Also the UNESCO definition of literacy according to which literacy is ‘the ability to identify, understand, interpret, create, communicate and compute, using printed and written materials associated with varying contexts’ departs from predominantly printed and written materials.

      However, even in this (reduced) view of seeing literacy as working with words written down, one has to keep in mind that literacy is more than information encoded in graphemes. In monoas well as in multilingual contexts, we have to deal with texts in multiple forms using ‘standards and norms specifying what is expected and considered appropriate in a particular type of written discourse’ (Schneider, 2012: 1027). Different situations ask for different forms of literate actions and forms (Swales, 2004) and it is important for individuals to acquire and use a ‘repertoire of situationally appropriate responses to recurrent situations’ (Berkenkotter & Huckin, 1995: ix).

      Readers of academic texts, for example, expect very dense and logically structured texts and are appalled by texts with no clear statement or with a missing or only a vague connection between abstract, introduction, main part and conclusion (Maingueneau, 2002). The same readers would be annoyed if they read a crime novel and got the information about the murder and the culprit presented in a logical, chronological order. When we write professional emails, we need to be clear, straightforward, rather formal but much more concise than in the academic context (Breuer & Allsobrook, 2019), and when we write messages in private chats, we use emojis, emoticons and other forms of visual tags for transporting meaning (see Stavans et al., this volume). Different forms of texts also pose different cognitive demands on readers and writers. How individuals perceive these demands may vary elaborately: for an academic writer, composing appropriate texts for a tabloid paper might be very demanding and vice versa because wording, tone, topics, writer-reader relationship, the target-groups etc. are not common to them.

      In a multilingual context, the cognitive demands of producing and understanding texts are extra high. Again, it is not (solely) the linguistic factor that plays a crucial role. It is also culture, social conventions, forms of communication, of argumentation etc. that are relevant for successful reading and writing in multilingual contexts. The principles of the target community and their way of interpreting genres might sometimes infringe on the principles of one’s native community’s positions. Forms and in parts even the goals of the academic genre, for instance, vary exceedingly even in such a small geographical area as Europe (Galtung, 1981; Kaplan, 1966; Thielmann, 2009): While in one culture, the most important goal for writers is to convince the reader of their ideas (‘knowledge selling’), it is important in other cultures to let readers participate in the way the ideas were developed by the writers (‘knowledge telling’) (Swales & Feak, 1994; Yakhontova, 2002). The readers’ task in the first setting is to grab and evaluate the central ideas presented in the texts, in the second setting, it is the readers’ task to follow the (in parts elaborate, and branched) paths of thinking the authors went, to test this mental journey and to make out wrong or U-turns. These meta-differences are manifested in, for example, structure, choice of content, style and forms of referencing.

      Both (and other) ways of argumentation are sensible and should be evaluated as being equally matched across the globe (cf. Hunma, 2016). However, the acceptance of different approaches to the academic genre is low; in academic journals, mono-cultural standards are applied, and the missing flexibility of academic readers in approaching texts from other cultures (beside the criticism of linguistic factors when writing in the lingua franca English) leads to articles being rejected in international journals, although the editors explicitly state that texts from contexts other than L1 English contexts are more than welcome (cf. Armstrong, 2011; Mur Dueñas, 2014). Academics sometimes give up putting too much effort into writing texts in the lingua franca English, which will not be appreciated for other than content reasons. As a consequence, findings and knowledge of experts may never reach the international readership. This also takes place in other contexts, such as in professional development. In this view, it is important to shift the monoto a multi-perspective in our approach to language and literacy.

      The multi-perspective does not halt at different genres and ways of forming texts. The picture of literacy as writing down and reading written words respectively has changed drastically in the past decades. The increasingly more globalised, rapidly evolving and superdiverse world as well as the ‘digital turn’ (cf. Mills, 2010; Ronan, 2015) with its new and continuously evolving digital communication channels, has challenged the more traditional view on literacy as a monolithic, fixed, stable, individual entity with a focus on reading and writing words. Literacy has been defined anew (although not necessarily at school or at university where teachers and lecturers often evaluate texting, Instagram etc. not as ‘real’ literate actions). In the new paradigm, literacy is interpreted as multiliteracy. Multiliteracy incorporates, among others, multimodal text production and reception, including ‘different semiotic dimensions of representation’ (Archer & Breuer, 2016: 1), like oral, audio, visual, interactive elements and a combination of all possibilities.

      Similar to multilingualism, this shift of paradigm is actually not new since texts (and writing systems) have always drawn immensely on pictures and visual elements to get meaning across (e.g. old bibles or children’s books). Viewing literacy exclusively as dealing with graphemic representations of phonology has thus been another very subtractive view taken over in education. In the second half of the last century and most prominent with the New Literacy and New Literacies movement sparked off by the New London School in the nineties (1996), a more flexible, multiperspective, dynamic view on literacy has been taken up again. This perspective understands literacy as being socially constructed through various forms of interactions which are in a constant flux. Image, gesture, gaze, speech and posture, which are visual forms of communication, are included in this view on literacy as are written words and formulated sentences. The inclusion takes a step away from the ‘deficit view’ (Hunma, 2016: 169) that was and often still is taken when evaluating texts exclusively by applying texting conventions. The result of the latter’s emphasis on words and orthography may hinder students, for example, from applying critical and innovative thinking in educational and other settings. It gives them the feeling that focusing purely on applying the taught textual principles is the only path to take, while content or formulating one’s own ideas is not central to literacy. Literacy thus has not offered any chances of expressing and creating identity to writers and readers (similarly to the subtractive view taken on multilingualism).

      As stated above, writing conventions are grounded in specific languages and specific ideologies. This also becomes visible in the way we deal with multimodal elements. What, how, and with which implements teachers and pupils draw in the classroom, for example, is grounded in the conventions of the culture in which it is located (Kress, 2009; Simpson, 2016), and so is our interpretation of the products, and with this the feedback given to multilingual writers with different background cultures and ideologies to the created visuals. The challenge for society and education is, therefore, to incorporate and to create spaces (cf. Lyngfelt, 2017) where learners can draw on and fully exploit their multilingual multiteracies both inside and outside of the classroom. In the ideal case, learners are invited to draw on their full repertoire of the linguistic and literacy systems they have at their disposal in and outside of the classroom (cf. Cummins’ (2000) model for classroom education), and pedagogues should invite creativity and include multimodality in literacy in their teaching approaches (Wedin, this volume). If done properly, not only the students learn from the teachers but the teachers also learn from the students about different ways of expressing themselves for example with the help of new media. Students may use pictures, music, mime or any other form of multiliterate technologies, making them often the experts in this context. For students from ethnic minorities whose languages do not have a high social status, a form of inclusive and interactive teaching would help them to use literacy for giving themselves a voice, strengthening their identity and with this, enhancing their social standing and their future perspectives.

      For exploiting students’ multilingual multiliteracies and cultural identities, formalised, institutionalised education embodied by teachers, should embrace learners’ home environment and their community (see Kirsch, this volume; Bergman Deitcher et al., this volume). As learning and education are a joined responsibility, formal education instances should comprise parents, home environment, peers and other social communities in which the students participate. It is at the crossing of the formal and non-formal education systems where individuals breed their literacies in diverse ways for different communicative purposes in the classroom, at home, in the community, in different media and even across geographic boundaries. As Ronan (2015: 234) puts it: ‘[o]ne way to bridge ... out-ofschool literacy with school-based conventions of reading and writing is to identify [and create] an alternative space for learning, where both school and home practices intersect to create new literacy hybrids and transformative learning practices’. A setting can be created in which, for example, the internet can offer a space – a ‘new digital, textual landscape’ (Davies, 2006: 62; Melo-Pfeifer, this volume) that includes various online (e.g. Facebook) and offline realities (home, school, sports clubs …), and which can invite participants from other geographical and cultural contexts, thus creating a platform for expressing oneself. It would work as a precious space for all to learn from each other.

      1.3 The Book

      Approaching multilingual literacy in a variety of forms and contexts as well as outlining its richness is the venture taken in this book. The volume consists of four parts that focus on different aspects important for dealing with multilingual literacy. Part 1 takes a look at the meta-level of multilingual literacy: an overview on theoretical views and their distinction, as well as descriptions of which aspects we as scientists need to keep in mind when analysing the processes and the individuals’ actions, cautioning us not to forget that we ourselves are part of ideologically and culturally coined communities. Additionally, the part outlines some of the challenges inherent to research on multilingual multiliteracy and provides researchers and teachers alike with approaches, guidelines and instruments to conduct such research. Parts 2 and 3 describe and evaluate projects that were set up to foster multilingual literacy in the educational context, taking a look at different ages and various educational contexts. In Part 2, it is shown how projects were done in non-digitalised settings, as well as which problems multilingual readers and writers might meet in the educational contexts. Part 3 then further elaborates on the advantages and challenges of applying new technologies in the educational context. Finally, the chapters in Part 4 analyse the literate interactions of multilinguals outside the classroom and how those influence the acquisition of language and literacy competencies. Also the limits of the proposed universality of multimodal elements for multilingual communication will be presented.

      In the following, the chapters will be outlined in more detail.

      In Chapter 2 Donahue introduces the readers to the terminology and theoretical frameworks used in the context of research on multilingual literacy. Five prominent linguistic models in the context of multilingual diversity are outlined: the models of plurilinguism, of translingualism, of metrolingualism, of cosmopolitanism and of heteroglossia. All of these models discuss linguistic diversity, focusing on different aspects. The different approaches clarify that our view on multilingualism has an impact on how we approach teaching literacy and evaluate the production and the reception of texts in multilingual contexts. Social activism and social justice also depend on the view taken. If teachers and society consider literacy as an empowering factor, it is crucial that this is considered in teaching multilingual literacy, thus stressing the opportunities of learning from each other. If literacy of multilingual students in its diverse forms is considered a danger for inappropriate language use rather than as an opportunity, we all miss the chance of broadening our understanding of different fields. It is, therefore, crucial not only for multilingual students and adults but also for the wider society to change our ways of teaching literacy, and for doing more research on the challenges as well as on the chances of multilingual literacy in different contexts.

      As becomes apparent from quite a few chapters in the volume and an increasingly growing body of research, educational approaches taking advantage of immigrant learners’ writing and reading skills and learning strategies they acquired in their country of origin are very promising (cf. Brizić, 2006; Ezhova-Heer, 2011; Knapp, 1997). Following theories on cross-linguistic influence and interdependencies in the language acquisition process, ideally second language education builds on migrant learners’ textual competence and foreign language skills already in place and transfers these to learning the second language. To investigate if and how this could be done in a German context, the Language Awareness – Identifying Multilinguals’ Potential (LAWA) study presented by Budde and Prüsmann in Chapter 3 was set up. To select a group of ‘suitable’ immigrant learners with a specific level of textual competence and linguistic ability for the study the researchers developed an instrument to have learners verbalise abstract concepts and reflect on their problemsolving. By analysing data from a small sample of learners and by homing in on one learner in particular the authors explain how they tapped into immigrant learners’ language-related learning ability and textual competence. The study illustrates the need for developing and testing new instruments for research into multilingual literacy in general and the potential of the LAWA-questionnaire in particular.

      Another interesting view on the research of multilingual literacy and the methodological challenges it poses is presented by Norlund Shaswar in Chapter 4. In the chapter, the author presents a fine-grained analysis of the communication in interviews between a researcher, an interpreter and an interviewee. Norlund Shaswar illustrates how the interpreter takes the role of a co-researcher, co-constructing meaning for the researcher who does not master the interviewee’s language. However, involving interpreters as co-researchers would mean involving them deeply in the research process, which is difficult in a small-scale study with limited funding. The analysis of the interviews shows that the interpreter’s role in the meaning-making process is substantial, and in many ways not constructive, since he mainly considers himself a collaborator to the interviewee rather than to the researcher-interviewer. He interprets the researcher’s culturally and theoretically influenced view on literacy negatively, transmitting an image of the researcher as a person not to be trusted to the interviewee. Only after the interviewee gets to know the researcher (and the researcher’s language) better, and meets her more than once without the interpreter, does the relationship and consequently, also the interviews become productive and goaloriented. Norlund Shaswar illustrates how an interpreter’s cultural views can have a significant impact on the outcome of studies and provides the reader with guidelines on how to engage the interpreter as co-researcher in small-scale qualitative studies on multiliteracy and to keep cultural misunderstandings and tension in the triadic interviewer-interpreterinterviewee to a minimum.

      One way to approach teaching multilingual literacy is by adopting a Dynamic Systems and Complexity Theory (DSCT)-perspective, stressing its dynamic, non-linear, adaptive and interdependent nature. In Part 2, Jessner, Malzer-Papp and Allgäuer-Hackl (Chapter 5) propose this approach for working with children in Austrian kindergartens and elementary schools whose first language is not the official language German. The children in their study have different multilingual profiles, depending on the number of first languages they have acquired and the age at which they acquire(d) a second or third language. The DSCT-approach foregrounds the specific environment of these multilingual children (growing up with several languages), which quite frequently results in mutually interactive influences on a linguistic and cognitive level. Such a transformative and holistic approach embracing multilingualism and multicompetence is in the authors’ point of view crucial for the development of new educational approaches, in a preschool context and beyond. Not only does the chapter provide readers – experts and non-experts alike – with a framework to approach multilingualism in (preschool) education from but it also offers an insight into multilingual literacy and diversity in Austria, which is not that different from the situation in other European countries which were faced with several migration waves the past two decades.

      Registers, genres, and speech acts often function in one’s native culture differently from how they are formed and produced in a second language (L2) target language. The understanding of literacy, therefore, has an effect on how people perceive themselves as well as on the way in which they are perceived by the community with and in which they interact, and it can influence a person’s aptness to take active part in the literary practice of the L2-community. Machowska-Kosciak (Chapter 6) showcases how multilingual literacy can affect the negotiation of identity in writing, more specifically the expression of the writers’ emotions. In a long-term study, the researcher analysed how a Polish immigrant in Ireland was taught to communicate in the written form in a variety of contexts in his first and in his second language English. Socialisation in the Polish community sometimes proved to be at odds with the target community’s values, identities and social positions. The Polish immigrant presented in this case study, for example, is criticised at school for not writing enough. The teacher criticising him fails to see that this evaluation may be due to the fact that the writer feels he is not able to express his emotions in the target language as fluently as in his first language. The inability to express oneself is not so much the effect of insufficient practice but rather the result of cross-cultural settings that dictate how one expresses oneself in the written text. Multilingual literacy, therefore, needs to be analysed and taught, keeping the social components of written texts in mind, otherwise problems in intercultural communication might be mistaken for linguistic weaknesses, whereas

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