Abstract
This chapter explores how systemic functional linguistics (SFL) can contribute to secondary teachers’ effectiveness for teaching disciplinary literacies to refugee youth in the United States. The chapter describes the Milltown Multimodal/Multiliteracies (MMM) Collaborative, an SFL-based professional development partnership between a large public university and a high poverty urban school serving high proportions of refugee youth with limited or interrupted formal education from Guatemala, Iraq, Mexico, Rwanda, and Vietnam. We present data from longitudinal case studies of these students’ school and work experiences as they participated in MMM curricular interventions, including SFL analyses of changes in the ways they produced and interpreted different genres of texts. These data illustrate how the MMM Collaborative constructed contact zones that supported the expansion of refugee students’ semiotic resources and semiotic mobility. Within these contact zones, refugee students drew on gestures, graphics, images, their home and peer languages, and English in learning to read and write disciplinary genres. Further, through their participation in genre pedagogy, refugee students expanded their use of a range of semiotic resources, including the ability to read and write disciplinary texts in English. However, students’ social, academic, and economic mobility appeared to be strongly influenced by their immigration status. These findings offer a nuanced perspective on what it means to be a refugee youth tasked with learning disciplinary literacies in the U.S. public school system today, and signal productive ways to rethink the role of critical applied linguistics in teacher education practices.
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Notes
- 1.
‘Milltown’ is a pseudonym, as are all refugee student names in this chapter.
- 2.
Following Halliday and Hasan (1985), we use ‘text’ to refer to any oral, written, multimodal, or multilingual representation of meaning. This expanded understanding of ‘text’ acknowledges the many literacy practices refugee students routinely engage in whether they have ever produced a written “academic” English text in a U.S. classroom. It also recognizes the influence of technology and the way texts are rapidly taking new forms and traveling in new ways across languages and cultures (e.g., animated whiteboard videos, Instagram stories, Twitter Chats, video conferences).
- 3.
SFL offers a rich metalanguage for talking about register choices at the word-, sentence-, and text-level, as well as in graphics and images (e.g., Halliday & Hasan, 1985; Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006). See Accurso and Gebhard (2020) for a review of uses of SFL metalanguage in U.S. teacher education and K-12 classroom practice, including examples of the metalanguage at work in different grade levels and content areas.
- 4.
SLIFE refugee students with other immigration statuses may experience different affordances and constraints associated with these statuses (e.g., Iraqi Special Immigrant visas, asylum granted after arrival in the United States, DACA). In Table 3 it is important to note that students with special immigrant juvenile (SIJ) status are eligible to apply for increased levels of state health coverage and in-state college tuition; however, these affordances are not automatically triggered. They may apply for work permits and driver’s licenses only after an immigration judge submits their request for permanent residency and a provisional social security number has been issued. These application processes are often confusing, subjective, and require initiative and know-how to navigate, making it difficult to materialize the affordances of SIJ status without the assistance of an advocate.
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Accurso, K., Gebhard, M., Harris, G., Schuetz, J. (2021). Implications of Genre Pedagogy for Refugee Youth with Limited or Interrupted Formal Schooling. In: Warriner, D.S. (eds) Refugee Education across the Lifespan. Educational Linguistics, vol 50. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79470-5_4
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