This licentiate thesis examines schools’ literacy work for multilingual students, taking the sociocultural perspective of teaching and learning as point of departure. The purpose is to investigate and contribute knowledge about schools’ work to develop literacy skills in multilingual students who experience challenges with reading and writing. This knowledge needs to be developed to contribute to equity in education. The research is based on two research questions. The first investigates how, according to the schools in a municipality, report that literacy practices have been designed with a particular focus on multilingual students experiencing specific difficulties with reading and writing. The second question concerns how conditions are created for literacy development in multilingual students who encounter difficulties with reading and writing, in a school that has received good ratings in this field according to a School Inspectorate report. The licentiate thesis is based on two studies, a web-based questionnaire study in one Swedish municipality (Study I) and a case study in a school in a multilingual area in one Swedish municipality (Study II). In the thesis, a theoretical framework model has been developed based on Luke and Freebody’s four resources model (1997, 1999) and Cummins’ theoretical work on multilingual students’ literacy development (2000, 2016). This integrated model has been used for the analysis in Study II and has been further elaborated and explained in the licentiate thesis. The case study (Study II), using methodological triangulation, includes participant observations, interviews and document analyses. The analysis of the questionnaire data (Study I) indicates an emphasis on code-breaking aspects in the mapping and training of literacy skills in most schools. The results show that there is a need to develop schools’ efforts to utilise the linguistic resources of multilingual pupils when identifying literacy difficulties and also to develop cooperation with mother tongue teachers and study coaches. In Study II, literacy teaching included different aspects of literacy and emphasised a multilingual perspective on literacy teaching. The teachers demonstrated a strong commitment to the students’ literacy development and used a wide range of expressions and working methods to maximise the students’ literacy skills. The findings also indicate that the teachers’ efforts to identify emerging difficulties in reading and writing, based on close monitoring, resulted in supporting measures at an early stage, which may have prevented literacy difficulties. The findings further indicate that the school leaders’ organisation of resources and approaches to multilingualism influenced towards, and in different ways created conditions for, relational leadership and differentiated teaching, and provided support within the classroom in the literacy teaching to multilingual pupils.

Schools’ teaching practices for multilingual pupils experiencing difficulties in their literacy development process

The aim of the present study is to investigate how the elementary schools in one municipality describe how they work to prevent difficulties with literacy development, to identify specific reading and writing difficulties among multilingual pupils and how they work to develop their literacy skills. A questionnaire was sent to all schools in the municipality (response rate, 77 %). A literacy model within a sociocultural theoretical framework was used in the analysis of codebreaking and meaning-making practices. The results show the need for schools to improve their capability in two crucial areas: firstly, to better utilize the students’ different linguistic resources and sociocultural experiences, and secondly to improve the collaboration with mother tongue teachers and study guidance tutors. The main conclusion is that the schools can improve their practices by taking advantage of the students’ linguistic resources to a greater extent, which plausibly can support these students’ literacy development.