Twentieth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

Children today engage simultaneously with hybrid traditions of several communities, for example children learn to speak, read, and write different languages and scripts such as Urdu and English simultaneously (Rogoff and Correa-Chavez in Gregory et al, 2004: i). In home and community settings children may demonstrate complex language and literacy patterns and behaviors as they weave their way through multifaceted literacy activities, however, they may not show schooled literacy in the dominant language of the school per se, (usually English). These multiple literacies are often not recognized by schools that assume that parents who are literate in the dominant language are children’s primary support in language and literacy, and that the levels of congruence between the home and school in such instances are narrow. The focus of this paper is to present a more nuanced perspective on Indian immigrant home literacy practices and their cultural models of literacy. I also examine the possibilities for literacy development. Drawing on interview and observation data from immigrant families of Indian background, this paper concludes that home literacy intersects with schooled literacy, that the families draw on cultural models of reading, and that religious literacy is important to both families.