Learning together: creating a community of practice to support English language learner literacy

Abstract

This qualitative case study examines an after-school, bilingual family literacy programme that brought together several groups to form a community of practice (CoP) that worked to support the literacy development of English language learners and their families. We explored the following question: How do parents, teachers, students, and other school personnel interact within an after-school family literacy programme and learn from each other as a CoP? Our findings show that family literacy nights offered opportunities for collaboration between different CoPs that did not exist during the regular school day. They suggest that participating in family literacy nights can be an important way to connect various school-based groups to one another and to linguistically diverse families, creating a CoP united by participants' shared interest in literacy development.

Keywords:

• community of practice
• family literacy
• English language learners
• language minorities
• bilingualism
• teaching methods

Notes

1. All names are pseudonyms.

2. That is, LT did not utilise a critical approach (or what Edwards [2003] and Edwards and Turner [2009] would call an ‘incorporation’ approach) that also acknowledged, celebrated, and incorporated home-based literacies (Rodriguez-Brown, 2009).

3. The previous year Kathleen, Octavia, Matthew, and Gina had met with all families together in one bilingual room and had decided it might be more effective to provide bilingual assistance to Spanish-speaking families in one room and to run the session for the remaining families (who spoke a first language other than Spanish or who were English-dominant) in English in another room.

4. DRAs were a reading test used in the district to measure students' instructional levels in reading. DRA levels indicated students' reading levels along a developmental reading continuum and showed how their levels corresponded with grade level benchmarks for the beginning and end of grades 1–3. The DRA was administered in September and May, to track students' progress during the year.