The purpose of this presentation is to describe and discuss a study currently being conducted, whose overall aim is to identify experiences and perceptions of literacy among Sfi pupils in both their everyday lives as well as within a school setting. Sfi refers to municipal adult education in Swedish tuition for Immigrants, and the research participants are all Sfi pupils who have had limited opportunities to participate in formal education, prior to their immigration to Sweden. This often entails special challenges, since the pupils have to develop basic literacy while simultaneously learning Swedish as a second language as beginners. Consequently, the overall theme of the conference, “translanguaging in an age of mobility”, is highly reflected in the present study. However, few studies have currently been conducted in the field of basic literacy development amongst adult second language learners. In particular, there is a limited amount of research projects exploring the pupils' perspectives. The projects overarching methodological approach is linguistic ethnography, and the empirical data was constructed through classroom observation, ethnographic shadowing and stimulated recall interviews. Ethnographic shadowing made it possible to construct observational data that also included the pupils´ extramural literacy practices. Drawing on examples of literacy events (observable meetings between pupils and text) in the empirical data, some of the literacy practices that the pupils participated in will be presented. Literacy should here be interpreted in a broad sense, and therefore includes the use of a wide repertoire of semiotic resources, languages and technologies, as described within the field of New Literacy Studies (Barton, 2007). In particular, translanguaging and digital elements in the pupils´ literacy practices will be central.   

Barton, D. 2007: Literacy. An introduction to the ecology of written language. Malden, Oxford: Blackwell.