ABSTRACT
This chapter emerges from an extensive, three-year ethnographic research in a reading support after-school program for children considered ‘at risk’ of school failure. In Barcelona, where this research takes place, after-school activities have become a regular feature in the life of many students, and existing research shows the potential of these activities to become spaces where children can display and develop competences not often acknowledged in formal education, including their everyday language and literacy practices and language brokering skills.
The specific data presented in this chapter consists of two interactions in which a young girl skilfully displays her plurilingual repertoire and mediating skills for overcoming communicative obstacles and for meaning making, while engaging in literacy-related activities with an adult reading mentor. The analysis, guided by ethnographic and socio-interactional principles, aims at documenting the interactional practices that emerge in a specific after-school site, and particularly to acknowledge the potential of promoting plurilingual literacy practices for encouraging children’s use of their entire repertoire and mediating skills, and for re-distributing child–adult language expertise. It also aims at contributing to transform ingrained linguistic ideologies about the (lack of) competence of plurilingual speakers, and about the social and educational value of their repertoires and practices.
