In everyday life adult migrants have to cope with various demands of the dominant language environment. In a literate society (Maas 2009: 147) these demands involve not only oral proficiency but also L2 literacy, e.g. in activities such as using public transport, making an appointment, paying bills, and countless more situations.
In the talk we want to address the question how adult migrants cope with communicative situations involving literacy in Germany. We discuss results of a qualitative interview study (Förster, Aboamer & Czinglar in press), on a group of 12 Arabic speaking adults with heterogeneous literal experiences who participated in contrastive literacy courses (Arabic/German) during a period of nine months. Drawing on sociocultural perspectives on literacy as social practice (e.g. Street 1984, Cope & Kalantzis 2000), we rely mainly on personal reports of these 12 adults on experienced literal events in order to reconstruct their literacy practices. The recurring semi-structured interviews are carried out in Arabic by the multilingual research team, and thus reveal the emic perspectives of this underpriviledged and vulnerable group of second language learners. Additionally, we conduct an interview about the participants' literal biography i.e. their early pre-school and school experiences with written language and literal practices in their L1 (Gherwash 2017). Besides the interviews (online and face to face) the participants document their everyday experiences by sharing written and audio messages as well as pictures of literal artefacts, i.e. written fragments below the text-level (Waggershauser 2015: 50), in a chat with the interview team. The multimodal, multilingual and biscriptual qualitative data will be transcribed and translated into German and analysed with qualitative content analysis.
Our interest lies in the ways and strategies adult migrants develop to engage in literacy practices. How do they manage to make meaning from texts they encounter? Which texts are they creating and for what purposes (Waggershauser 2015)? Who or what is of help in this process (Perry 2009)? We aim to understand how literal events and literacy practice relate to one another and how literacy as a social practice is shaped by situational and cultural contexts, ideologies and power (Purcell-Gates, Perry & Briseño 2011).
Literature
Cope, Bill & Kalantzis, Mary (Hrsg.) (2000): Multiliteracies. Literacy learning and the design of social futures. London, New York: Routledge.
Gherwash, Ghada (2017): Diglossia and Literacy: The Case of the Arab Reader. Arab Journal of Applied Linguistics Vol. 3 (3): 56-85.
Maas, Utz (2009): Sprache in Migrationsverhältnissen: „Sprachausbau (Schriftsprache) vs. mehrsprachige Kommunikation". In: Gogolin, Ingrid & Neumann, Ursula (Hrsg.): Streitfall Zweisprachigkeit – The Bilingualism Controversy. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 145-161.
Perry, Kristen H. (2009): Genres, Contexts, and Literacy Practices: Literacy Brokering Among Sudanese Refugee Families. In: Reading Research Quarterly 44(3), 256-276.
Purcell-Gates, Victoria; Perry, Kristen H. & Briseño, Adriana (2011): Analyzing Literacy Practice: Grounded Theory to Model. In: Research in the Teaching of English 45(4), 439-458.
Street, Brian V. (1984): Literacy in theory and practice. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press.
Waggershauser, Elena (2015): Schreiben als soziale Praxis. Eine ethnographische Untersuchung erwachsener russischsprachiger Zweitschriftlernender. Tübingen: Stauffenburg.
