Negotiating funds of knowledge and symbolic competence in the complementary school classrooms

Abstract

Global migration has had significant impact on the traditional configuration of the classroom role set. The language teacher may be teaching a group of learners with highly mixed interests, abilities, learning histories and exposures to the target language, while the language learner may be confronted with so many different models of the target language that notions of native, first, second and foreign languages become blurred. This article deals with a specific language classroom context, where the traditional role set of the teacher and the learner, and the power relations implied in such a role set, is being challenged by the socio-cultural changes that are going on simultaneously in the community and society at large. Using the theoretical concepts of funds of knowledge, symbolic competence and translanguaging, this article investigates how teachers and pupils in the complementary schools for Chinese children in Britain utilise and negotiate the discrepancies in their linguistic knowledge and socio-cultural experience in the learning and construction of language, cultural values and practices, and identity through co-learning.

Keywords:

• funds of knowledge
• symbolic competence
• translanguaging
• complementary schools
• Chinese

Acknowledgements

Some of the examples were collected as part of an ESRC-funded project Investigating Multilingualism in Complementary Schools in Four Communities, RES-000-23-1180 and AHRC project SGDMI/PID134128. The research team of the ESRC project consisted of A. Creese, T. Baraç, A. Bhatt, A. Blackledge, S. Hamid, Li Wei, V. Lytra, P. Martin, C.-j. Wu and D. Yağcıoğlu-Ali. The AHRC project was led by Zhu Hua.