Abstract
Based on a three-year ethnographic study, in such nested contexts involving six Korean-immigrant families, one regular French classroom, one private English institute, and one Korean church in Montreal, Canada, this study explores how the literacy practices and strategies of culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) learners were influenced and shaped by the literacy objects and practices of their social environments. By implementing a qualitative research methodology, interviews, surveys, observations, and conversations with Korean-Canadian parents and teachers plus the author’s own teaching experiences at a Korean school were used. Using activity theory, this qualitative study identifies two distinct orientations to literacy teaching and learning in the lower primary grades depending literacy objects such as from written language-centered literacy to student-centered literacy. On the basis of this study, the author proposes an activity-centered approach to literacy emphasizing the development of the creativity of teachers and higher mental functions (i.e., concept formation) in young CLD children through the development of interactive and collaborative learning environments, so-called literacy-based and concept-oriented playful activities.
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Notes
The origin of activity and its original meaning developed in the philosophy of Hegel and Marx in which activity is the universal explanatory principle as an alternative to the individualistic model of human conduct advocated by the British empiricists. According to Blunden (1997), Hegel and Marx have in mind culture, individual, and activity as a necessary triangle in which activity is mediating between culture and the individual. Thus, activity is self-conscious or self-defining, and consciousness makes human being to reproduce themselves as human beings defined as the subject.
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Acknowledgments
This research was supported by a grant from Fonds de Recherché sur la Société et la Culture in Montreal, Canada. I thank the teachers, parents and students of the school where this research was conducted.
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Kim, M.S. Toward activity-centered literacy: teaching and learning Korean literacy in a multilingual montreal context. Asia Pacific Educ. Rev. 12, 447–461 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12564-011-9153-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12564-011-9153-1