Confirming identity: Supporting students to tell and write their stories

Description

Identity texts can be used to support the development of language and identity and embrace and confirm students' home language and identity. An identity text is a multimodal, oral or written text that draws on an individual’s experiences and linguistic resources (Cummins, 1981;Cummins & Early, 2011). Cummins, Markus & Montero (2015) draw attention to ‘essential aspects of the link between identity affirmation, societal power relations, and literacy engagement’ (p. 556). We argue that identity texts is a way of engaging students and supporting literacy development. This paper reports on the Identity Texts Project which began when some proactive secondary teachers from English faculty and the executive wanted to further improve the literacy and language outcomes of their students. The school had a large population of students who could be defined as having a Language Background Other Than English (LBOTE) or of speaking English as an Additional Language or Dialect (EAL/D) and therefore speaking one or more languages other than English. The project has now been developing over several years, and as colleagues and mentors we have been working with this school and a similar primary school supporting their professional learning around the teaching of English, language and literacy.

Period	10 Jul 2018
Held at	2018 ALEA/AATE National Conferenc
Event type	Conference
Location	Perth, Australia, Western Australia
Degree of Recognition	National