Transnational Literacy Practices in Immigrant Contexts
Summary
Transnational literacy practices encompass the myriad ways in which individuals and families who migrate across national boundaries use reading, writing and multimodal communication to navigate social, cultural and political spaces. Such practices are shaped by continual connections to home communities—through digital platforms, remittances, storytelling and communal rituals—while adapting to new linguistic and educational demands in host societies. Research highlights how transnational youth and adults draw upon bilingual and biliterate repertoires to assert identity, resist marginalisation and negotiate power relations. These practices extend beyond formal schooling to include everyday acts of translation, digital storytelling, heritage language maintenance and critical engagement with media. Globally significant, transnational literacies inform policies on integration, curriculum design and teacher training by foregrounding learner agency, sociocultural capital and the translocal networks that sustain migrant communities.
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Transnational Literacy Practices in Immigrant Contexts publication trend
The graph below shows the total number of articles in transnational literacy practices in immigrant contexts across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).
Technical terms
Transnational literacy practices: The use of linguistic and multimodal resources by migrants to communicate, learn and maintain cultural ties across national borders.
Border-crossing biliteracies: A conceptual lens for understanding how bilingual individuals read and write the world by moving fluidly between two language–culture systems.
Translanguaging: The dynamic process by which multilingual speakers draw on their full linguistic repertoire to make meaning and assert agency.
Critical consciousness: The capacity to recognise, analyse and act upon social inequities, often developed through reflective engagement with personal and collective experiences.
References
- Toward Border‐Crossing Biliteracies: Pláticas of Midwest Transnational Latinx Families Reading and (Re)writing the World. Reading Research Quarterly (2023).
- Decolonizing US Latinx Students’ Language: El Sur in the Schools of El Norte. Applied Linguistics (2023).
- Documentation Status and Youth’s Critical Consciousness across Borders. Social Sciences (2023).
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