Multilingual Literacies, Identities and Ideologies

This book explores the language and literacy practices which sustain transnational migration across generations and across traditional boundaries such as school and home. The author has conducted extensive fieldwork in Pakistan and the UK to study migration between the two countries. Individuals’ access to the dominant literacies of migration are contrasted with the vernacular practices which migrants take up at home as part of their digital literacies. The study explores the blurring of boundaries between home and school as well as the blurring of boundaries between language varieties. Tracing access to literacy in this way also shines a light on the literacy mediators migrants turn to for help with English language learning and when trying to access the bureaucratic literacies of migration. The study ends by exploring how migrants use all of their language resources, not just English, to fit into their new homes once they have arrived in the UK.

Tony Capstick is Lecturer in TESOL and Applied Linguistics at the University of Reading, UK where he teaches on the MA and BA programmes including the module Literacy: Social, Educational and Cognitive Perspectives. Prior to this he was the BA Linguistics and Language Programme Director at Birkbeck, University of London. As a teacher educator, Tony has worked in Pakistan, Indonesia and Cambodia. He has also carried out work exploring the language in education needs of Syrian refugees in the Middle East.

“The volume is a timely contribution on a major topic of growing significance. With a particular focus on the complex issues of multilingual reality in the context of migration and power inequality, it provides rich and fascinating insights into how migrants mobilise their available multilingual resources to stay connected with their support networks, to deal with institutional gate-keeping requirements and to get on with their lives. These practices represent migrants’ grassroot responses to linguistic hierarchies imbued by power differentials in the society at large and can only be understood from a close examination of migrants’ trajectories, histories and aspirations.” (Zhu Hua, Professor, Birkbeck, University of London, UK)

“Tony Capstick's Multilingual literacies, identities and ideologies is an innovative fusion of literacy studies and migration research. It highlights the role of literacy in the migration process in an ethnographic study that is rich in insights into both literacy practices, both in Pakistan and the U.K.,  particularly literacy mediation and cultural brokering as well as into migration processes. It is written in a lucid and readable style.” (Mike Baynham, Professor, Leeds University, UK)