Community literacy club and family language policymaking initiatives for biliteracy development

Reading & Writing

 
 
Field Value
 
Title Community literacy club and family language policymaking initiatives for biliteracy development
 
Creator Guzula, Xolisa Molate, Babalwayashe
 
Subject Education, Applied Linguistics biliteracy; pedagogic translanguaging; family language socialisation; family language policy; family multilingualism; third spaces
Description Background: Our article analyses two case studies that show an urban South African family and members of a community literacy club engaging in grassroots initiatives as family and community language policymakers and planners for bilingual and biliteracy development.Objectives: The main aim is to describe and analyse the initiatives taken by both community members of the literacy club and family members in challenging separate bilingualism, monoglossic, and anglonormative ideologies.Method: The researchers used linguistic ethnographic methods to collect data and primarily draw on image data, a written text at the literacy club, as well as transcribed data from observational data.Results: The research findings point to the critical role that communities and families play in developing and maintaining children’s home language, as well as desire and uses of more than one language to develop children’s biliteracy.Conclusion: We view children’s biliteracy development in the community and the family as rooted in the sociocultural through a process of drawing from a rich linguistic knowledge and vocabulary that is learned in context.Contribution: Our contribution to the field is in highlighting policymaking from below and how policymaking from above needs to meet language policymaking and planning from below. We also contribute to understandings of simultaneous biliteracy as opposed to separate and sequential biliteracy.
 
Publisher AOSIS
 
Contributor New Generation of Academic Professionals (NGAP)
Date 2025-09-30
 
Type info:eu-repo/semantics/article info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion — —
Format text/html application/epub+zip text/xml application/pdf
Identifier 10.4102/rw.v16i1.569
 
Source Reading & Writing; Vol 16, No 1 (2025); 12 pages 2308-1422 2079-8245
 
Language eng
 
Relation
The following web links (URLs) may trigger a file download or direct you to an alternative webpage to gain access to a publication file format of the published article:

https://rw.org.za/index.php/rw/article/view/569/1479 https://rw.org.za/index.php/rw/article/view/569/1480 https://rw.org.za/index.php/rw/article/view/569/1481 https://rw.org.za/index.php/rw/article/view/569/1482
 
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Rights Copyright (c) 2025 Xolisa Guzula, Babalwayashe Molate https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
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