Newly arrived young people as writers in and outside of school – Insights from recent research in Norway

This talk is part of the 2016-17 MOSAIC Seminar Series 

Speaker: Dr Joke Dewilde, Postdoctoral Fellow (2015-2018) Faculty of Educational Sciences, University of Oslo, Norway

In this talk, Dr Dewilde presents insight from his recent research with newly arrived young people in Norway, focusing specifically on how they construct themselves as writers in and outside of school. The study is a linguistic ethnography of a reception class for young people with little previous schooling. In his presentation, he will talk about three of the young people: Khushi, Mohammed and Neda. The data consists of field notes, transcriptions of semi-structured interviews and naturally occurring interaction, as well as a variety of texts written by the young people.

Theoretically, Dr Dewilde drews on the notions of “linguistic repertoires” (Busch, 2015) and “transnational literacies” (Warriner, 2012), which consider speakers’ practices, rather than single language systems, and allows us to reflect on mobility, migration and transnational networks.

References

Busch, B. (2015). Expanding the notion of the linguistic repertoire: On the concept of Spracherleben - The lived experience of language. Applied Linguistics, 1-20. 

Warriner, D. (2012). Multilingual literacies. In M. Martin-Jones, A. Blackledge, & A. Creese (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of multilingualism (pp. 508-520). Oxon: Routledge.