Learning English as an L2 in Head Start: Identity, Centrality, and Language Acquisition

• In Event: Lifelong Identity Work: Examining Identity Formation From Preschool to Adult Teachers in a Range of Local Contexts

Abstract

Educational researchers have explored the relationship between identity and learning in contexts from college writing (Ivanič, 1998) to first grade writing (Bomer and Laman, 2004); from science class (Brown, 2004) to English class (Wortham, 2006). Parallel work in the field of second language acquisition has sought to understand how identity is intertwined with the process of learning an additional language (Block 2007). This paper builds on both bodies of research but focuses on preschool, seeking to understand the relationship between classroom social identity and English-as-a-second-language learning for students enrolled in Head Start.
Drawing on Davies and Harré’s (1990) positioning theory and Weedon’s (1987) poststructuralist understanding of subjectivity, this paper views identity as a social process negotiated in interaction with others, through language.
This ethnographic case study (Duff, 2008) took place in two Head Start preschool classrooms over one school year, focusing on three female Nepali-speaking students in one classroom and three male Spanish-speaking students in the other. Classroom observation and video recording produced a corpus of transcribed interactions from which three distinct data sets (with three methods of analysis) are drawn:
1. Longitudinal linguistic data from each focal student (for corpus analysis in comparison to classmates;
2. Qualitative interactional data (for coding/ discourse analysis of social positioning of focal students
3. Quantitative interactional data (for a social network analysis (Borgatti et al, 2013) of how central/peripheral focal students are in the social web of the classroom).
Analysis points to a strong relationship between linguistic competence, positive social identity, and centrality in the classroom social network. Yet, individual cases reveal that centrality must also involve dense connections with speakers of different L1 and competence in other modalities – gesture, facial expression, body movement – was as important to a positive social identity in PreK as linguistic competence.
This paper aims to apart the kinds of language-building interactions that ‘central’ ESL students engage in so that we may think about how to facilitate these for all students.


References
Block, D. (2007). The Rise of Identity in SLA Research, Post Firth and Wagner (1997). Modern Language Journal, 91(5), 863–876.
Bomer, R., & Laman, T. (2004). Positioning in a Primary Writing Workshop: Joint Action in the Discursive Production of Writing Subjects. Research in the Teaching of English, 38(4), 420–466.
Borgatti, S. P., Everett, M. G., & Johnson. (2013). Analyzing social networks. London: SAGE.
Brown, B. A. (2004). Discursive identity: Assimilation into the culture of science and its implications for minority students. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 41(8), 810–834.
Davies, B., & Harré, R. (1990). Positioning: The Discursive Production of Selves. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 20(1), 43–63. Duff, P. (2008). Case study research in applied linguistics. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Ivanic, R. (1998). Writing and Identity: The discoursal construction of identity in academic writing. John Benjamins Publishing Company.
.http://calper.la.psu.edu/publications.php?page=ssh&vid=5
Wortham, S. E. F. (2006). Learning Identity: The Joint Emergence of Social Identification and Academic Learning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Author

• Katie Bernstein, University of California - Berkeley