Young Migrants' Pluriliteracies Practices in an After-School Program in South Korea

Due to an increasing number of (im)migrant students in Korean schools, the English education landscape in South Korea has become more linguistically and culturally diverse. However, despite the drastically changing educational contexts, one (official) language, Korean, remains the predominant language of instruction for English teaching and learning in Korean schools. This has led to a growing need to examine the language and literacy practices of emergent multilingual learners in a monolingual educational setting. Following these lines, this case study explores how four Uzbek migrant learners in South Korea engage in language and literacy practices in a specially designed afterschool program as well as how the program supports the students' literacy skills across languages. Drawing upon a pluriliteracies approach, data were collected and analyzed from various sources. The findings show that all four students actively and voluntarily participated in pluriliteracies practices in the program, where more linguistic and non-linguistic resources were available for meaning negotiation. Additionally, their participation in the program promoted their agency, enabling them to recognize, discuss, and acknowledge cultural differences and multilingual values and beliefs. The findings suggest that the process of meaning-making mediates pluriliteracies development which highlights the importance of pluriliteracies pedagogy application in EFL contexts for emerging multilingual students.