International Journal of Bilingual
Education and Bilingualism
Editor: Colin Baker, University of Wales, Bangor
Review Editor: Aneta Pavlenko, Temple University, Philadelpia
|
Volume: 6 Number: 3 Page: 267–282
|
|
|
|
|
Bilingual Resources and 'Funds of Knowledge' for Teaching and Learning in Multi-ethnic Classrooms in Britain
|
|
Marilyn Martin-Jones and Mukul Saxena
|
|
This paper is based on an ethnographic project carried out in primary classrooms in the North West of England. The focus of the project was on ways in which the 'roles' of new bilingual classroom assistants
were being defined through the organisational practices and communicative routines of daily life in these classrooms (practices and routines primarily orchestrated by monolingual class teachers). We looked
at these classroom processes by incorporating insights from classroom observation, from participants' own accounts and from our own analyses of audio and video-recordings of different types of teaching/learning
events. We present an account of bilingual teaching/learning events in which the bilingual assistants were able to use the children's home or community language and draw on 'funds of knowledge' (Moll et
al., 1992) associated with worlds beyond the school. In our analysis of these events, we focus in particular on: ways in which they drew on the bilingual resources within their communicative repertoire
in negotiating their relationship with the children; ways in which they linked home and school contexts for learning; and verbal and non-verbal ways in which knowledge of the world beyond the school was
contextualised in classroom discourse.
© Multilingual Matters 2003
Full text PDF
|
