Literacy Practices of Refugee Families: Collaborative Case Studies

Abstract

There is limited research concerning literacy practices of Syrian and Burmese refugee students and their families in the U.S. To help address this gap, drawing upon New Literacy Studies, this qualitative study explores the social literacy practices of Syrian and Burmese refugee families and how these practices are situated in wider cultural contexts. Primary data include ethnographic interviews, and secondary data include observations, artifacts provided by the participants, and informal conversations. Based on data analysis, a significant common theme across data corpus– religious literacy practices – is generated. Findings illustrate that religious literacy practices play a significant role and contribute to participants reading and writing development. Findings further illustrated how families engaged with domain specific practices in multiple ways in the local community to meet the needs of culturally relevant literacy practices in their everyday lives. This study contributes to existing literature with refugee students and literacy education. It also calls attention to empower the students’ culturally relevant access and agency in both home and adopted land contexts.

Notes

1 Even though there are different terms used to describe students whose first language is not English (e.g., ELs, ELLs, ESL), we use the term English as a New Language (ENL) in this study to indicate that the participants who are ENLs speak multiple languages and have multiple identities.