Developing Literate Identities with English Language Learners through Digital Storytelling

__________ Digital storytelling provides an opportunity for children and adolescents to design multimodal narratives that represent and reflect upon their lives and interests. In the article we look at how two English language learners, Diego, a male Mexican-American kindergartener, and Allie Feng, a female Chinese-American junior in high school, drew upon their sociocultural identities, foundational literacies practices, and new literacies competencies to design and present digital stories. _____________________ School literacy instruction is often based on a traditional, print-based conception of text (Alvermann, Moore, Hinchmann, Phelps, & Waff, 1998; Hagood, Provost, Skinner, & Egelson, in press). At the same time, children’s and adolescents’ out-of-school literacies and cultural practices related to popular culture texts (Alvermann et al., 1998; Hagood, Stevens, & Reinking, 2002; Moje, 2002) and multi-modal, digital texts (Lewis & Fabos, 2005; Majar, 2001) are highly motivating, and, as such, can serve as a valuable scaffolds for students’ academic learning (Skinner, 2007b; Hobbs & Frost, 2003; Morrell, 2002). Research on children’s and adolescents’ new literacies practices outside of school has shown that they read and utilize texts using sophisticated literacy competencies (Mackey, 2003; Vasudevan, 2006). These literacies involve engagements such as those with popular culture (Alvermann, Moon, & Hagood, 1999; Dyson, 2003); using visual and digital technologies