Content area
Full text
ABSTRACT
In US schools, a particularly marginalised group of emergent learners are the children of migrant farm workers who move regularly to follow the crop seasons. This pedagogical article argues that mobileassisted language learning (MALL) can provide affordances for language teachers to promote culturally sustaining pedagogies for migrant children. In this article, we will first discuss the importance of culturally sustaining pedagogies for the biliteracy development of migrant children. Next, we will introduce MALL and its affordances for culturally sustaining pedagogies in English language classrooms as well as in mainstream education. In the last section, we will discuss the principles for instructional design for culturally sustaining MALL pedagogies especially for novice teachers. While this article focuses on the migrant families located in Monterey, California to illustrate examples from their educational and life experiences, we hope that our suggestions are helpful for all educators working with any marginalised group of emergent bilinguals.
KEYWORDS
Mobile-assisted language learning, migrant learners, culturally sustaining pedagogies, emergent bilinguals.
1. INTRODUCTION
Migrant farm workers are groups of individuals who move to follow crop seasons in order to maintain financial income and improve economic mobility. Migrant families share characteristics similar to those of immigrants and refugees. These include, but are not limited to, fear of deportation, psychological stress from illegal entry, limited access to healthcare, parent's ineligibility for driver's licences and bank accounts, and lack of financial aid (Arzubiaga, Noguerón, & Sullivan, 2009; Free, Križ, & Konecnik, 2014). There are also a separate set of issues that make migrant children's educational experiences a bit more challenging. The instability of their family life, health concerns related to farm work (e.g., pesticide exposure), absence from or tardiness to school, interrupted schooling, and different conceptualisations of social worlds are some of the factors that threaten migrant students' educational and life trajectories (Green, 2003; Nevárez-La Torre, 2012). Teachers' lack of knowledge about and negative attitudes towards migrant students (Free et al., 2014) and lack of communication between migrant families and school administration (Purcell-Gates, 2013) are other factors that impair teachers' capacity to address migrant students' funds of knowledge and diverse cultural backgrounds in ways that enrich their classroom experience (González, Moll, & Amanti, 2005). Overall, the combination of poverty and mobility have "a lethal impact on...