A Family Affair: Supporting the Communicative Capital and Writerly Identities of Young Children

Abstract

This study investigates the ways in which multilingual parents/caregivers support their young children’s emerging identities as writers and communicators at home, within the context of a virtual early literacy program for families of a historically marginalized community near the U.S. border with Mexico. The study’s focus is on a set of multimodal compositions that four-year-old children authored during one of the virtual, videoconference sessions. The researchers employed a discourse analysis approach in examining the transcripts of the virtual sessions, which was guided by the theoretical concepts of community cultural wealth and the pedagogical concept of accompaniment. Their analysis offers a counter narrative to the deficit governmental descriptors (e.g., low-income; low-achieving) assigned to children and families of historically marginalized communities. The parents in their study were well-equipped to enact pedagogies of accompaniment that cultivate their children’s communicative capital and foster their children’s identities as capable communicators.

Keywords

• family literacy
• emergent writing
• early childhood education
• accompaniment
• communicative capital