Hilde Thyness, Department of Humanities, Faculty of Education, Innland Norway University of Applied Sciences (INN University)

In Norway, parent-school interactions are increasingly taking place through digital media, including social media. This paper contributes to our knowledge of how language use in digitally mediated parent-school interactions can be a means for inclusion of an immigrant population group or have the opposite effect of furthering exclusion. It builds on a case study of the second largest immigrant group in Norway, Lithuanians, who mostly come to Norway for work purposes.
The analysis is guided by The Douglas Fir Group’s transdisciplinary framework for second language acquisition (SLA) (2016), and Norton’s theory on identity and model of investment (e.g. Darvin & Norton 2015). While there is research on teacher-parent collaboration, also concerning minority groups, this study is innovative in its focus on the use of digital channels for this purpose.
The paper presents the research design and results of a study of how language use and language ideologies in multilingual families affect their language practices in the digitally mediated parent-school interactions. The paper shows the complex connections between language proficiency, choice of media channel, and the social context that separately and in combination influence the language practices.
To document and study these practices, three ethnographic interviews with the parents of six Lithuanian pupils and six teachers in Norwegian schools are conducted by using the visual support of mediagrams (Lexander & Androutsopoulos, 2019). Both interactional data and interview data is presented to discuss language and media use in view of how this leads to equality and inclusion and/or inequality and exclusion in school-home relations.