Abstract Summary
The presentation addresses literacy pedagogy in the language of schooling and English in Norwegian Year 2 classrooms. Findings based on reports from classroom observations and teacher interviews are discussed with a focus on aspects of emergent multimodal and multilingual literacy and pedagogy and its implications for language teacher education.
Abstract :
Young learners today encounter and make use of a variety of literacies - traditional literacies at school, and new multimodal literacies often in their out-of-school contexts. In Norway, a framework for the development of basic skills has been established, in which the abilities to read, write and develop digital skills are central. At the same time, in the CEFR Companion Volume (2018), the traditional four language skills are replaced by four communicative language activities and strategies: reception, production, interaction, and mediation. In order to empower all learners to develop and use their literacy competence for learning and meaning-making at school and in constructive social action as citizens in their adult lives, literacy development is a vital issue from the very first years of primary education. With the growing number of multilingual and culturally diverse classrooms, the question is whether language teachers are prepared to enact literacy pedagogy that meets the needs of all their learners, facilitating both contextually appropriate and effective receptive, productive and interactive meaning-making processes.
This paper explores teachers’ literacy practices and aspects of emergent literacy in beginner education in a Norwegian educational context. Findings are presented based on the analysis of observation data from two multilingual Year 2 classes, along with follow-up interviews with the three teachers responsible for the literacy instruction in Norwegian and English. Green’s 3D model (1988, 1997) is used as an analytical lens with its operational, cultural, and critical dimensions of literacy. Relevant factors are the extent to which synergy affordances are targeted in the Norwegian and English classes, whether multilingual realities are recognised and explicitly activated, and the relationship between and weighting of procedural and propositional forms of knowledge. The paper ends with a discussion of implications for language teacher education towards more complexity-aware literacy pedagogy.
