Language and faith encounters: bridging language–ethnicity and language–religion studies

Abstract

There has been growing interest by British policy-makers in the importance of acknowledging the role of migrant children's background in their educational progress.Therefore, this article draws on studies of language-ethnicity and of language-religion to understand the linguistic and the religious heritage of four groups of Brazilian migrants in London. The discussions describe data collected for two studies. The first study was conducted in a Brazilian complementary school and the second, in three Brazilian faith settings. A new three-dimensional framework, the REL Triangle, is explained and applied to the two sets of data. It is argued that the REL triangle framework, which examines religion, ethnicity and language as intersecting aspects of identity , can help in the understanding of children's linguistic and cultural experiences in out-of-school contexts, and thus, allow new links to be developed between mainstream schools and migrant communities.

Discourse and Religion in Educational Practice

“…At the same time, they have alerted us to an apparent contradiction between the researchers' theoretical orientations towards identities as negotiated and discursively constructed and how members of religious communities themselves may often reify, essentialise or romanticise religious identities (Baquedano-López and Ochs 2002;Souza 2016;Lytra, Volk and Gregory 2016b). Han (2009) examined the central role Evangelical churches (also referred to as minority, immigrant or ethnic churches) played in supporting the linguistic, socio-economic and spiritual needs of many skilled adult immigrants from Mainland China faced with language, employment and other systemic barriers and in facilitating their settlement and integration in Canadian society.…”

6. Faith and Language Maintenance in Transnational Places of Worship: Brazilian Christian Settings in London

“…Moreover, the interviews examined here indicate that integrating language, ethnicity and religion in one single framework would enhance the understanding of how they interact in the formation of one's identity. Therefore, the application of a threedimensional framework -the Religion-Ethnicity-Language (REL) Triangle -is suggested in this chapter (see also Souza, 2015;Souza et al, 2012). In this framework, each of the three aspects of identity is placed at one of the angles of a triangle with a continuum moving inwards (see Figure 2 below).…”

3. Facebook: A Medium for the Language Planning of Migrant Churches

“…In other words, the study found that the religious, ethnic and linguistic dimensions of identity were reinforced in the Brazilian Catholic lessons. As a consequence, a new framework was suggested for the studies of LPP and which could be applied to both educational and religious contexts, the Religion-Ethnicity-Language (REL) Triangle (Souza, 2015). In this framework, each of the three aspects of identity (i.e.…”