Unmasking (mis)representations: Literacy and language development of SLIFE students in U.S. high school

Shiyu Jiang

U.S. public high schools often (mis)represent the literacy practices of students with limited or interrupted formal education (SLIFE), who are commonly defined as lacking literacy skills in their first language and performing at least two years below grade level in Math and English (DeCapua & Marshall, 2010). In institutional discourses, labels such as illiterate or semi-literate can invalidate these youths' non-dominant language experience and multimodal literacy engagement. Drawing on New Literacy Studies (Street, 1995) and using the multiple case studies approach, this dissertation research provides a longitudinal examination of SLIFE's literacy and language development and the ways school literacy practices represent or misrepresents their developmental trajectories. This work contributes to education and linguistics research in two ways. First, through interviews with 4 English as a Second Language teachers and analysis of policy documents, I examine how the term SLIFE circulates in a U.S. urban high school and challenge common assumptions that link schooling with cognitive and literacy development. Second, through a year-long ethnographic study design with six SLIFE participants, I trace their literacy developmental trajectory, analyze how various social and functional purposes shape their choice of literacy practices, and examine the extent to which their trajectory aligns with school literacy practices. Jointly, this dissertation research advances scholarly knowledge of SLIFE's language development and offers insights for more inclusive pedagogy.

About Shiyu Jiang

Shiyu Jiang is a Ph.D. Candidate in Educational Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education. Her research is rooted in her teaching experience as a high school English as a Second Language teacher in Rochester, where she worked closely with refugee background students and families. Her scholarship focuses on literacy and schooling, with particular attention to longitudinal language and literacy development of refugee students and students with limited or interrupted formal education. She also examines AI-assisted language learning among diverse groups of learners. Her work draws on classroom-based research to understand how students' literacy practices develop across various social and learning contexts, and how schools can provide more robust supports. Her scholarship has been published in System, Language Teaching Research Quarterly, and Working Paper in Educational Linguistics. Shiyu is also actively engaged in community service. She served as volunteer teacher at Franklin Learning Center in academic year 2023 to 2024 and Northeast High school in academic year 2024-2025. She received her B.A. in Economics from University College London, and her M.Ed. in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages from the University of Rochester.