Investigating and contesting the ‘word gap’ discourse in the UK

Julia Gillen, Lancaster Literacy Research Centre & Cathy Burnett, Sheffield Hallam University

The “word gap” discourse and why it matters

The current global pandemic has had many effects on young children’s literacy education. After months spent in lockdown, many shared worries about how an interrupted education may disadvantage children for years to come, particularly as they don’t all have the same opportunities to learn at home. Limited access to digital devices, poor internet connections and lack of quiet spaces in overcrowded houses all present real problems for many families. We welcome the endeavours by researchers to investigate how the pandemic is impacting on primary literacy education see for example admirable current work by Gemma Moss in England and Ann Devitt and colleagues in Ireland. Here we want to contribute to tackling another underlying issue, one that has a long history: the idea that many families are intrinsically ill-equipped to support children’s learning, and that much of this has to do with language.  

Deficit-based discourses about young children’s literacy are, regrettably, nothing new. We authors of this post became mutually concerned about the “word gap” discourse as yet another instantiation of casting blame, on poorer families, for supposed failings in literacy learning.  There is a long history of such discourses -and a strong strand of resistance and opposition to highly limited ways of considering family literacies at least since the early 1980s, such as exemplified by the work of Shirley Brice Heath in the USA and Barbara Tizard and Martin Hughes in the UK.

We, the two authors of this blog post, shared a mutual interest into one current, and major, way of conceptualizing young children’s literacy “failures” as we’ve begun to work together research mobilities in primary literacy education.  (Our collaborators in the wider programme include Bronwen Maxwell and Ian Guest, both of Sheffield Hallam University, and Terrie Lynn Thompson of the University of Stirling).  To briefly introduce ourselves: Cathy Burnett is Professor of Literacy Education at Sheffield Hallam University and current President of the UK Literacy Association. Julia Gillen is Professor of Literacy Studies and Director of the Lancaster Literacy Centre.  Cathy, as an academic and former teacher is very concerned by the way some topics in literacy become attached to professional understandings and can ultimately become harmful in the ways they are expressed, to young children, their families, teachers and policy makers.  Julia, a co-editor of the Journal of Early Childhood Literacy is concerned with the part the media – both mass media and social media – can play in forming, questioning and shaping such discourses. We have come together to share some findings and thoughts about the “word gap” discourse, and yes, we’re going to continue to place quotation marks around it!

Hart and Risley used the term the ‘word gap’ to refer to findings from their 1995 study of the words heard by 42 children in the USA. Extrapolating from the numbers of words that researchers heard spoken to the children during 1 hour monthly visits for about 2 ½ years, they famously estimated that – by age 4 – children in the wealthiest homes will have heard over 30 million more words than children from those with lowest income.  In this post we will put forward some of our findings about how the “word gap” discourse has been appropriated in media, taking UK newspaper coverage as a kind of proxy for social discourse.  Of course, that is not sufficient nor appropriate to find the whole story as to what has happened to the “word gap” in the UK.  We would like, and intend in further research, to investigate far more widely how discourses relating to primary school literacy education move in society and intend a mixed methods research study.  But for this initial post we will present some findings about the current word gap discourse in the UK as reflected through mainstream newspaper media, as a starting point, and some of our ideas about why challenge is needed and why further research might help.

The “word gap” then originated from a single research study in the USA 25 years ago.  We knew from our own experiences of working with teachers and reading the media that it still has a great deal of appeal in the UK today.  We therefore decided first to carry out a Corpus Linguistics study to investigate its recent appearances and treatment in UK newspapers.  Using the Nexus database for all UK newspapers we investigated the “word gap” from 1^st January 2010 to the present.  This yielded 63 individual relevant stories, having eliminated other uses of the term and duplicates.

Our first finding concerns the timing of these stories:

Distribution of newspaper stories about the “word gap” by year

Sorting the stories by date was revelatory in that it was for many years occasionally used.  Since 2010 it trickled along by and large for the next seven years. There were a few stories in 2015 which was also a point in time when The Conversation published a piece by Molly McManus challenging the findings of Hart and Risley.  She argued that too much focus on ‘the word gap’ distracts from more pressing issues linked to inequality in education. However, as we shall see, although The Conversation is a way of enabling dissemination of research findings and discussion to the media, the arguments of McManus and indeed other academics who had criticized Hart and Risley’s study was not an approach influencing media coverage.

This  spike in attention to the “word gap” in 2018 coincided with the  publication of Alex Quigley’s bestselling book ‘Closing the Vocabulary Gap, and with Why Closing the Gap Matters’, which reported findings from a survey of 1000 teachers that found that ‘Over half of those surveyed reported that at least 40% of their pupils lacked the vocabulary to access their learning’ Also significant perhaps were ongoing findings from the Oxford Children’s Corpus about the loss of words from children’s vocabularies – such as the words for animals, birds and plants which prompted the creation of Morris and McFarlane’s much acclaimed The Lost Words in 2017.

After that there several references appeared in 2019 and then just a couple in 2020.  This is not to suggest that the “word gap” idea necessarily correlated with the years where it was most prominent in newspapers; they are just one aspect of communications in society.  It could be that the topic has become too stale in 2020 for news stories; quite another kind of study would be needed to investigate its presence in different kinds of communications in society, especially among educational professionals. We know the notion is not dead!

Despite the limtitations of this approach then we argue it is worth investigating the presence of a concept in literacy education in mass media, such as newspapers, since newspapers have to connect to their audience’s interests in order to prosper.  Therefore we investigated this small dataset, with the aid of Corpus Linguistics software (specifically LancsBox v 5) in order to explore:

• How is the “word gap” represented – what does it apparently mean?
• How are social actors, such as children, parents and teachers represented?
• Are there any differences between different kinds of newspapers, ie tabloid/broadsheet; political position; national/others?

We now report on these in turn.

Representation of the “word gap”

The word gap is overwhelmingly represented as a problem that exists in society, without any dispute.  Just one story referred to “the so-called ‘word gap’” thus with a double hedge, but then continued to discuss it as if unproblematizable.  The overwhelming majority of articles, 78%, refer to “research” as the source; 14% refer to the “original” Hart and Risley study.  Many do not explain the source of research referred to. The “word gap” is generally explained as a phenomenon that characterizes disadvantaged children from their better off peers. 16% of the stories describe the word gap as being of the size of 30 million, and several of these further associate this with children being three years of age. Precise numbers are an indication of facticity as a news value and are therefore prized by news journalists.

The existence of the word gap is described then as something that causes concern, and then frequently as a difficulty that requires action, which is characterized by verbs such as “struggle”, “tackle” “bridge” and “close”.

Representation of social actors

Children

Children are divided by these stories into two groups: those who “suffer” or are “disadvantaged” by the word gap and those who don’t. The unfortunate group are  represented as being from “lower income” “disadvantaged” or “working class” households.  They are characterized as arriving at school “with low literacy skills” “low vocabulary” or even “unable to speak or read”.  They are contrasted, but usually implicitly, with another group of children, “their peers” without these disadvantages, who are sometimes described in other simplistic ways such as “affluent”.  The disadvantaged group are then held to suffer from persistent deficit, through education and into adulthood.  Occasionally dire glimpses of their future are predicted such as unemployment “at age 34” or even imprisonment.

Parents

Parents are most often characterized as passive recipients of directives or advice. Far more often in the word gap discourse parents are passivated, even in context where this is extremely marked ie. unusual, in headlines, e.g. “£5m to tell parents to sing rhymes and read to youngsters” Metro, April 30th 2018. Parents are recipients of multiple instructions and directives about their behaviour.  Many of these concern what parents are going to be urged or encouraged to do as part of some initiative reported in the news story, such as reading to their child, singing nursery rhymes or in directly school-related discourse “teach their children vocabulary”.  Some directives are not directly or obviously linked to literacy but rather link to the continuing news topic of screen time panic such as “parents should put down their mobile phones” or “impose a digital curfew.”

Occasionally parents are cast as agents, albeit often deficient ones who characterized in ways that are active, although often deficient, e.g. “didn’t read” or “censor while they read”. 

They are occasionally depicted as “caring for” or “loving” their children, particularly in politicians’ speeches, before the “word gap” is discussed with supposed remedies advanced.

Teachers

The representation of teachers is more diverse in these stories than either children or parents. They are quite often recruited to support the word gap discourse with some stories referring to teachers’ beliefs, sometimes as elicted through surveys. Many stories link teachers’ capacities to respond to the word gap, or more generally teach effectively, to their training or lack of it in certain respects.  One aspect of teachers’ attitudes and behaviours that particularly attracts journalistic attention is their attitudes to emojis (more on this below).

Differences in treatment

In national newspapers the word gap story is particularly prevalent in broadsheet newspapers, presumably because the strong message about deficiencies in parenting is easier to communicate to middle-class parents who will see themselves as the right side of the social class/word gap divide.  Sometimes the less right wing newspapers will take an apparently “scientific” approach such as The Guardian’s story headlined, “How babies learn – and why robots can’t compete; (April 3, 2018).  The topic is far less likely to appear in traditional tabloid stories, but, interestingly, can be recruited to create some balance. In “2 ORNOT2; Teachers use emojis to teach kids Shakespeare” in the Sun on May 19, 2018, concern over the word gap is given as the reason at the end of the article for disputing the approach apparently taken by “desperate” teachers.

The word gap topic appears occasionally in regional newspapers, where it is linked to local events.  For example in the Nottingham Post on January 14^th 2020 a closure of a mental-health scheme for pregnant mothers by a Conservative-led council is linked by an opposing Labour councilor to risk of widening the word gap. Perhaps the most fascinating evidence of the permeation of the topic into society on “Villages” (for which read “parishes”) in the Loughborough Echo on January 14^th 2020 which reports on one local school’s ambition “to close the word gap.”

Where do we go from here?

The “word gap” is a deficit concept- an idea that focuses on what children can’t or don’t do with language.  Through adopting a more positive perspective, other research has arrived at rather different conclusions. Shirley Brice Heath’s study of three communities in the US in the 1980s, for example, illustrated how children learned to use language in different ways as they socialised with those around them.  The ones that were most successful at school were those whose language fitted easily to the way language was used in school. The point here is not that children have no or limited language but that their language use differs from what’s expected and valued in schools. When this happens, children can’t draw on what they know, their progress doesn’t register on assessments designed to measure other kinds of language use, and their ability to communicate can be underestimated by teachers.

If this is the case then why has the idea of ‘The word gap’ gained such traction, and why have references to the word gap recently surged, 25 years after the original study was published? In a way this is obvious – ‘The word gap’ is a snappy phrase, and  linked to a mind boggling (if overly extrapolated) statistic – ‘Did you know that children in low socio-economic groups hear 3 million (yes, 3 million!!) fewer words than the children of professional parents?’  And as so often happens when research is disseminated, the nuances of the underpinning research are lost, along with researchers’ caveats about their methodologies.

But there is other research-  with another slightly less snappy phrase, but far more positive and insightful in our view – that has had far less influence on policy and practice, in England at least. Moll et al. coined ‘funds of knowledge’  to refer to the knowledge children gain through their experiences within families and communities. Research carried out by them and by many others since have found a tremendous wealth of resources and networks in the community that have the potential at least to be drawn upon by schools.  Many succeed in doing this as has been shown by some inspirational practice in the UK and internationally  studies.  Many have argued that building on such resources  provides a productive- and equitable- starting point for language and literacy learning at school – Barbara Comber’s work in Australia for example[1], and Mariana Souto-Mannings in the US[2] ‘Funds of knowledge’ therefore is a powerful response to the ‘word gap’ which has travelled far and wide in the academic literature, has formed the basis of many subsequent studies, and is frequently referenced in postgraduate studies of literacy education. Yet somehow the idea that low income households in the UK hold ‘funds of knowledge’- and are providing valuable opportunities for learning and language use – has failed to take hold with the wider public in England. And to the best of our knowledge it did not feature prominently in recent discussions about opportunities for home learning during COVID-19.

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Funds of Knowledge

So why does some research gain greater influence than others in education? How does research enter into conversations beyond academia? What happens as a phrase such as ‘word gap’ circulates among educators and the wider public? What kinds of assumptions are associated with as it is communicated by various different means significant in dialogues among primary literacy educators, online and in other means.  What happens to the “word gap” for example as it is tweeted and retweeted by teachers, academics, consultants and other educators? What kinds of meanings does it gather as it gains momentum? And what does this mean for how we understand the problems that children face and the solutions we devise to address these problems? We hope that continuing research by ourselves, our colleagues and others will address these questions.

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[1] Turn-around pedagogies: improving the education of at-risk students

Kamler, Barbara ; Comber, Barbara

Improving schools, 2005-07, Vol.8 (2), p.121-131

[2] Challenging Ethnocentric Literacy Practices: [Re]Positioning Home Literacies in a Head Start Classroom

Mariana Souto-Manning

Research in the teaching of English, 2010, Vol.45 (2), p.150-178

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Did the inspiration for a glittering military career lie in this 1902 postcard?

The Edwardian Postcard Project recently launched a searchable database of one thousand postcards, written and sent between 1901 and 1910, together with transcriptions and all the historical data we have found so far about the people who wrote and received the cards.  Investigating the cards, the social networking tool of the early twentieth century, we have uncovered some amazing tales but perhaps few as remarkable as the story behind this card.

This type of picture postcard is the only format the Post Office allowed at the turn of the century.  Although this was before the era of colour photography, publishers could produce attractive images such as this, of Hastings Castle, through techniques such as hand colouring.   Since there were several deliveries a day in towns and cards could travel across country extraordinarily quickly through the rail network, people used postcards just as they use social networking platforms and text messages today.  Wherever they were, they bought, commissioned or created their own artwork on postcards and sent them off in the knowledge they would reach their recipient within hours.

The card’s message reads as follows:

July 22^nd 1902

I am sending you this view of Hastings Castle- as I am sure you learnt who landed here, & won the battle of Hastings- With much love M.M. (??)

At the very beginning of the twentieth century the Post Office regulations were understood to insist that the whole of the other side had to be used for the address. Therefore, although picture postcards had become popular the only space for a message was a tiny area left blank by the publisher.  The only possibility was to write a short messages that often functioned as a caption to the message, much as one might use Snapchat or Instagram today.

The Edwardian Postcard project uses the censuses, especially 1901 and 1911 in order to investigate the postcard addressees.  Occasionally, especially if we are given a clue such “Dear Mum” and a first name we can read we can find out about the sender too. With this card nothing about the sender could be ascertained but, with help from Kathrin Kaufhold, I succeeded in tracing the person who received the card.

The card was written to: J. Drummond Inglis, Esq, 24 Culmingron Road, Ealing.

This led me on a fascinating trail with various twists and turns.  In the 1901 census (accessed through http://www.findmypast.co.uk) it was easy to find John Drummond Inglis living at the address on the card with his mother Katherine S. Inglis.  There, John was listed as being born in 1896 in Devonport, and so was just 5 years’ old when he received the postcard.  The household was relatively privileged with two servants, a nursemaid to look after John and a cook.  The husband was not present on the night the census was taken.

At this point I could find a John Drummond Inglis who progressed from being a Second Lieutenant, to Lieutenant and then Major in the Royal Engineers in the First World War.  The next record for him I found was as an “Exec” recorded as a shareholder in the Great Western Railway in 1932. But could I be sure this was the same John Drummond Inglis who received the card?  And if so, were there any other records about his life?

I looked forwards into the 1911 census where I found a Katherine Sarah Inglis, identifiable as John Drummond’s mother through repetition of her birthdate and place.  At this time she was recorded with her husband in St Marys Church Street, North Colchester.  Thomas Drummond Inglis is described as a Retired Major Royal Artillery Training.  In the household with them were three servants (none the same as 1901) but John Drummond Inglis was not with them and I could not find him elsewhere.

The breakthrough came through a simple search engine find for the military John Drummond Inglis.  This revealed a portrait of “Sir (John) Drummond Inglis” by Janet Jevons, dated 1944 in the National Portrait Gallery online collection.  A vital piece of information that enables me to prove our postcard was sent to this man was provided by the clue of his birth and death dates – here given as 1895.  It is extremely common for censuses to record birth dates wrongly; census enumerators enquired the age of everyone living in the house and then approximated the year of birth.

Armed with the new information that he was born in 1895 rather than 1896, much more information emerged.  His birth is confirmed in 1895 in Devon, in both birth and baptism records.  In the 1911 census, when he was not at home with his parents, he was a student at Wellington College, Crowthorne, Berkshire.  John Drummond Inglis like many of his schoolmates fought in the First World War; 707 lost their lives then.  John must have felt himself fortunate to survive.

Other records, including a particularly informative obituary of his second wife, who died in 1987, flesh out his military career.  Between the wars he was particularly involved in technical developments in the army working in elements such as the “School of Electric Lighting” (19922-26) and acting as the Vice President of the Mechanical Board between 1934 and 1937.  During the Second World War, he became Chief Engineer, 21 Army Group and then held the rank of Temporary Major-General.  On retirement in 1945 he was granted the honorary rank of Major-General.  But he did something else very interesting when he retired: he deposited “correspondence, papers and photographs” with the Royal Engineers Museum.

The Museum have kindly given me some information about this archive which reveals his career to have been exceptionally glittering.  It includes a letter from

Field Marshal Montgomery congratulating him on the award of his KBE.  It also contains the paperwork for various awards he received including the OBE, Order of the Bath, the French Legion of Honour and several others.

John Drummond Inglis died in Eastbourne in 1985, so aged 90.  I can never be sure how the card was preserved for so long that we were able to buy it from a dealer in the twenty-first century. Usually dealers acquire cards once the families let them go,  often through house clearances.  But it seems likely it was held onto for a many decades, perhaps the whole of his life by John himself in order to reach us over a century later.  Was this card, sent to a small boy in 1902 about the Battle of Hastings, perceived by him as a source of inspiration for his long and glittering career?  Of course objectively the influence and position of his father and their social class, plus the good fortune of surviving the First World War were likely to have been decisive factors.  But we can still wonder.

Everybody is welcome to browse the new database, read the cards and transcripts for themselves.  We are now benefiting from an Arts and Humanities Council Cultural Engagement Fund Fellow, Dr Amanda Pullan.  People are beginning to contribute more information about the cards, their senders, receivers, as well as places and events associated with them.  We are also appealing for people to share their cards, or scans of cards with us.  The Edwardian Postcard Project website gives further details about this.

The database was funded through the Lancaster University Public Engagement with Research Leadership Group Fund.  The Edwardian Postcard Project is co-directed by Julia Gillen and Nigel Hall, Emeritus Professor, Manchester Metropolitan University.

50 years of the UK Literacy Association

Back in July many of us went to the University of Sussex to the 50th International Conference of the UK Literacy Association.  In my opinion it’s a superb organisation I’m very proud to be a member of, combining robust good sense, sound research and a powerful commitment to foster children’s imagination.  The latter is particularly apparent in its support for children’s literature; I’ll never forget, for example, hearing Malorie Blackman talk at an earlier UKLA conference.  This passion for books is something shared by some of the best contributors to the National Council for the Teaching of English – a US conference I visited in 2012. There I encountered the indefatiguable Donalyn Miller, who tirelessly discusses children’s literature and the power of reading via Twitter (@donalynbooks) to her 47k followers. Many folk in both organisations are interested in books, whether accessed by print or new media.

My excuse for writing about the UKLA conference now, perhaps a little late, although of course we are still in the UKLA 50th anniversary year, is that I’ve come across this superb blog post by Eve Tandoi about the Sussex conference. It’s brought back some good memories, engaging carefully with the views of the plenary speakers in particular.  I think I would just add that I was at the time very aware of the controversial nature of Ken Goodman‘s claims about literacy.  He raised quite a Twitter storm when suggesting that it would be better to abolish the teaching of literacy as such, rather embed it in purposeful, authentic work with children.  He is very critical of SATs that are so narrow that they demand, especially in less privileged classrooms, teaching to the test and endanger the sense of excitement in learning that children start out with.

Finally, then, I’ll share the short abstracts of the symposia by my colleagues and myself at the Lancaster Literacy Research Centre.  If you’re interested in learning more about any of this work, do contact any of us directly or look at our webpages.

Many voices of literacy: polyphony in Literacy Studies research.

These linked symposia from the Lancaster Literacy Research Centre reflect on the value of researching literacy as a social practice to enable us to hear and engage with the multiple voices and perspectives of different participants in literacy research.  We have a tradition of research which reveals the multiple capacities and creativity of people’s everyday literacy practices.  Ethnographic and interpretive methodologies seek to make visible, and sometimes to empower, the voices of those who are often silenced by the pseudo-objectivity of governments, policy-makers, large-scale survey research and other dominant voices.

The first session, on researching literacies in educational settings, continues an established area of interest.  The second, on researching digital literacies, reflects on an area which challenges and forces us to develop our established ways of doing research. They are followed by a discussion led by our discussant Brian Street.

Session 1: Polyphony in educational settings

Papers in this session focus on educational settings, addressing how literacy research can engage with the voices of teachers and learners positioned within centralised policies, formal, decontextualised assessments of achievement, and measurement against national and international league tables.  We have a tradition of working with teachers and literacy practitioners, understanding their role as active agents who bring their voices, experiences and understandings of learners to negotiate policy frameworks.

Diane Potts: “Teachers as knowledge workers: Positioning professionals in discourses of accountability.” A multimodal discourse analysis of teachers’ digital accounts of classroom literacies practices and educational stakeholders’ responses to these texts illustrates the challenge for educators attempting to take up a position within policy debates.

Mary Hamilton: “Representations in policy: positioning key voices, occluding others.” Examples of the powerful imaginaries of literacy and literacy learners that circulate widely in the media, government and popular discourse.

Uta Papen: “Studying phonics policy and practice: how the voice of policy is heard by literacy teachers.” A detailed analysis of how synthetic phonics and the new Phonics Screening Check are presented in policy documents and how the policy is put into practice by teachers and children in primary school classrooms, based on critical discourse analysis with classroom ethnography.

Session 2: Polyphony in digital literacies

In researching online practices, moves towards harvesting ‘big data’and applying techniques such as corpus analysis and visualisation can indicate broad trends and developments.   However, without an ethnographic perspective we risk divorcing digital content from its originators, occluding the perspectives and voices of the people engaging in these practices. The presenters will each address an approach to researching individuals’ perspectives on and practices in online literacy.

David Barton: “Technobiographies –  bringing the self into research.” A methodology for researching the range, variety and changes in people’s contemporary language practices. This also acts as structured way for students to reflect on their own life histories with technologies, as an introduction to studying new media.

Julia Gillen: “Adopting a new kind of professional voice: a literacy studies approach to a Twitter case study.”  A case study of an individual’s developing use of Twitter, drawing on ethnographic methods, examined in their sociohistorical context and through interactions involving others.

Karin Tusting: “Language use on an internet forum: voices of collaborative learning on Mumsnet.”  Detailed analysis of vernacular literacies for learning in online settings, developing an example of collaborative learning about parenting practices from the Mumsnet talk forum.

 

Racism in US Children’s Books

I recently came across this blog post by Sharon Chang about the tiny number of children’s books published in the US that feature characters of any other ethnicity than “white”. Chang points to a number of societal problems and impacts on literacy practices that may arise from this situation – not just for the minorities that are invisible in most children’s books, but for “white” families as well. But is the situation just as bleak in other countries, including the UK? There are certainly media reports suggesting this, and some UK professionals who point to positive examples of diversity in publishing from the US, while lamenting the UK situation. Comments and examples welcome!

Johnny Unger

Wendy Crocker’s PhD

Wendy Crocker’s PhD is now publicly available here.  Those of us who have been fortunate enough to be present at the Literacy Research Discussion Group when Wendy has presented her research, have been completely entranced.  Here’s the title and abstract of her thesis.

Crocker, Wendy A., “Telling tales out of school: Principals’ narratives of the relationship between school literacy and the home literacy practices of a minoritized culture” (2013). University of Western Ontario – Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository. Paper 1458.
http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd/1458

Much of the literature in the area of school leadership pertains to the role of the principal in school improvement – specifically in raising reading and writing scores in large-scale assessments. However, what is less represented is how administrators who are confronted daily with the socially constructed and multiple representations ofliteracies demonstrated by the English Language Learners in their schools view the focus on reading and writing referred to in the literature as school literacy. This Narrative Inquiry explores administrators’ perspectives of the relationship between school-literacy and home-literacy practices of a minoritized culture taking as its case the Low German-speaking Mennonites (LGM) who reside in particular rural areas of southwestern Ontario and often migrate between Ontario and northern Mexico.

A Principal Learning Team (PLT) was employed in this study which brought together ten participants from six schools within one school board to share their narratives of reading and writing in school, working with LGM students and their families, and school leadership. The four main findings for discussion included: (i) recognition of a mismatch between the multiliteracies demonstrated by students and the print-literacy model perpetuated by Education Quality and Accountability Office (EQAO) ; (ii) the use of the Low German language as a vehicle to build trust with the LGM community; (iii) recognition by the principals that cultural proficiency within school communities is critical when working with students from a minoritized group; and (iv) the ways in which existing leadership frameworks and checklists constrain principals’ literacy leadership vis-à-vis minoritized cultures.

The study recommends that school leaders as literacy leaders adopt a widened view of literacies to encompass both the print literacy of large scale assessments such as EQAO and the daily demonstrations of multiliteracies by the students of minoritized cultures. Further, administrators should be granted greater autonomy by local boards to support school-based resource decisions. Finally, to better reflect the literacies of the students in their schools and to more appropriately assess students from minoritized cultures on large scale assessments, principals require greater latitude to employ accommodation and exemption mechanisms within the EQAO assessment.