Understanding Refugee-Background Students: Language, Literacies and Lived Experiences
About this ebook
This edited book presents stories and research focusing on literacies and language learning practices – across multiple modalities – in refugee communities from different countries, including Afghanistan, China, Iran and Myanmar, among others.
The chapters draw upon sociocultural perspectives on literacies, which emphasize the wide range and multiple literacies that bilinguals or multilinguals use in their real-life contexts. The authors engage with a wide range of commonly occurring questions in research and teaching with refugee communities, from how researchers can ethically engage refugees in research projects to how refugee background students can be supported in sharing their stories, and from how home languages can be maintained in the classroom to how refugee background students engage in language learning within their own families and communities.
Together the chapters underscore the importance of recognizing refugee-background students and families as multilingual learners whose skills enrich educational spaces.
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About the author
Bee Chamcharatsri is a Professor in the Department of Language, Literacy, and Sociocultural Studies and the Department of English at the University of New Mexico, USA. His research interests include second language writing, emotions, identity, and arts-based research.
Aijuan Cun is an Associate Professor in the Department of Language, Literacy, & Sociocultural Studies at the University of New Mexico, USA. Her research interests focus on family literacy practices of children and families with immigrant and refugee backgrounds, community literacy and multimodality.
Chatwara Suwannamai Duran is an Associate Professor at the University of Houston, USA, where she teaches Sociolinguistics and Applied Linguistics classes. Her ethnographic research focuses on multilingualism and literacies among immigrants and refugee-background families.
