Community literacy club and family language policymaking initiatives for biliteracy development

Abstract

Background: Our article analyses two case studies that show an urban South African family and members of a community literacy club engaging in grassroots initiatives as family and community language policymakers and planners for bilingual and biliteracy development.
Objectives: The main aim is to describe and analyse the initiatives taken by both community members of the literacy club and family members in challenging separate bilingualism, monoglossic, and anglonormative ideologies.
Method: The researchers used linguistic ethnographic methods to collect data and primarily draw on image data, a written text at the literacy club, as well as transcribed data from observational data.
Results: The research findings point to the critical role that communities and families play in developing and maintaining children’s home language, as well as desire and uses of more than one language to develop children’s biliteracy.
Conclusion: We view children’s biliteracy development in the community and the family as rooted in the sociocultural through a process of drawing from a rich linguistic knowledge and vocabulary that is learned in context.
Contribution: Our contribution to the field is in highlighting policymaking from below and how policymaking from above needs to meet language policymaking and planning from below. We also contribute to understandings of simultaneous biliteracy as opposed to separate and sequential biliteracy.