Playing With Language, Languaging Play: Translanguaging Practices in a New Immigrant After-School Program

• In Event: Roundtable Session 6
  In Roundtable Session: Complicating Superdiversity Through Children and Youths’ Communicative Repertoires

Abstract

Recent scholarship challenges traditional notions of language as static and bounded, and a whole host of words have been invented to index language crossings: code mixing, code-meshing, style shifting, translanguaging, polylanguaging, urban metrolingualism (Blommeart, 2010; Canagarajah, 2013; Garcia, 2009). This language attempts to capture the wide range of ways in which people cross linguistic borders, but in the burgeoning literature on hybrid language practices in super-diverse communities, few researchers have considered the perspective of children. Indeed, an adult-centric lens is evident in the fascination for this “new” diversity. In this paper I ask: how do immigrant children’s notions of language, identity, and culture fit with the borders and boxes of the adult-defined world? What’s normal, and strange, to them? How do they navigate language and literacy in its multiple forms, and what do they learn from doing so?
I ground this discussion through ethnographic research in an after-school program serving the children of immigrants from Mexico, Central America, and the Phillipines. These youth are growing up in a multi-lingual city, attending a school that hosts two dual language programs, set in a community where languages intersect and collide in a variety of everyday ways. Our after-school program provides many opportunities to “play” with and reflect on language. Drawing on fieldnotes, audio- and videotaped data, interviews with the youth, and collections of their writing and drawing, I look at how children leverage the various tools in their linguistic toolkits as they interact with their peers and undergraduate student mentors, and how they express themselves through drawing and writing to different audiences. I identify practices that support the fluid and creative deployment of their linguistic repertoires as well as forces that reinforce bounded notions of language. I also explore the meanings that language takes on for some youth, as a marker of identities, as evidenced in their queries to newcomers: “What language are you?”

Author

• Marjorie Faulstich Orellana, University of California - Los Angeles