The role of home environment in biliteracy development: an autoethnographic study of Saudi bilingual school-age children

Abstract

Home of immigrant families is the distinguished context for learning languages naturally wherever massive literacy practices at home. It is crucial to shed light on how sojourning children practice the literacy of minority languages at home. Based on sociocultural perspectives of literacy learning, this study aims to investigate the role of home in the biliteracy development of sojourning Saudi bilingual school-age children who began to study in English schools formally in the UK and did not study in Arabic schools in Saudi Arabia because they came to the UK at an early age with their parents. They focused on learning English literacy to meet the requirements of schoolwork, and they were rarely exposed to learning Arabic literacy, which made it challenging to understand the different language systems.

This research adopted an autoethnographic qualitative approach to explore practising literacy at a sojourning family home. The home context is selected because it has abundant multiple literacy practices through social interaction at any time within an authentic cultural context. It allows ethnographic researchers to learn from actual experiences, see the phenomenon in an authentic situation to describe and analyse it. This study collected data through various research instruments, including observations, interviews, field notes, documentary materials, artefacts, video and audio recordings, and photographs.

Data analysis employs the thematic approach based on relevant sociocultural concepts. The literacy events are used as a unit of analysis to describe literacy practices that occurred on different occasions at home, which were categorised into parent-driven events and child-driven events. It also includes various episodes raised from literacy practices and shaped by them.

The study confirmed the crucial role of the home environment in biliteracy development. It showed the effect of the parental value of transmitting various knowledge to increase the child’s metalinguistic, meta-literacy and cultural knowledge. Also, parental support, encouragement, and flexibility confirmed parents' vital role in mediating their bilingual children's literacy. Moreover, findings showed the ability of the bilingual child to connect school-home experiences and to blend the previous knowledge with the new to create their own ways of learning literacy practices. They benefit from this experience through two stages: self-support to understand literacy aspects and the meaning of the text of both languages and an expert for the novice younger sibling to transmit the competent knowledge and facilitate literacy learning. The study implements the importance of practising minority literacy at home to raise biliterate children additively. The study contributes methodologically to the autoethnographic parent-researcher and theoretically to children Arabic-English biliteracy study from an ecological and sociocultural perspective.

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ORCID for Alison Porter: orcid.org/0000-0002-8462-1909

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