Salomon Lider, Shira; (2025) Reading between languages: How multilingual families practise, shape, and negotiate home literacies. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

This thesis explores how multilingual families in London practise, shape, and negotiate home literacies, focusing on the ways in which multilingual literacies are used to navigate socio-cultural contexts and identities. Adopting a literacy-as-social-practice perspective and drawing on sociolinguistic and ethnographic approaches, the study investigated three families from Polish, Bangladeshi, and Hasidic Jewish backgrounds. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews with mothers and children, alongside documentation of home literacy environments and reflective fieldnotes. The study found that maternal strategies, external literacy spaces such as religious and community organisation, and children’s own agency all interacted to shape multilingual literacy practices and socio-cultural identities. Migration histories emerged as a powerful lens for understanding how families prioritised languages and literacies, framed long-term goals, organised their literacy environments, and positioned themselves in relation to wider society. Together, the findings challenge prevailing portrayals of home multilingual literacies as always fluid, hybrid, or informal by showing that multilingual literacy practices are often deliberately structured, hierarchically organised, and shaped by distinct cultural, religious, and educational values. By focusing on family-based multilingual literacy practices, this thesis offers insight into how multilingual literacies are sustained, differentiated, and transmitted across time, space, and generations. By offering new theoretical insights and a comparative cross-case analysis, this thesis contributes to studies of literacy, sociolinguistics, and multilingualism by offering a more context-sensitive and layered understanding of how multilingual literacies are practised, negotiated, experienced, valued, and maintained by different family members in contemporary multilingual family contexts. The findings have implications for researchers, educators, and policymakers seeking to support multilingual children and students by recognising their literacy experiences across languages, acknowledging the cultural and social frameworks that shape them, and fostering a sense of belonging across home, educational and societal contexts.

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