Social-Interactive Aspects of Latino Children's Language Development

• In Event: Roundtable Session 37
  In Roundtable Session: Conceptualizing Latino Academic Language: Interdisciplinary Views on Equity, Constructs, and Assessment

Abstract

In this study, we set out to better understand the communicative and linguistic competencies of a group of 12 second-grade Latino students using ethnographic and mixed methods. Our focus was to observe social and linguistic practices of these children in naturalistic settings, and to consider how well these are represented by the frequently employed construct of “academic language”.
We conducted ethnographic research with 12 Latino second graders across school and home settings for approximately two months. We observed these students both in school settings and out-of-school settings (primarily in the home). In addition to traditional ethnographic methods, we video recorded in both settings. We also interviewed the students’ teachers and parents to get a better sense of children’s social and behavioral competencies.
Finally, each student participated in bilingual story retell tasks in order to record narrative language samples in Spanish and English. These samples were then analyzed using the Systematic Analysis of Language Transcripts (SALT) software (Miller & Iglesias 2015) - a commonly used measure to assess verbal fluency, syntactic complexity, and lexical diversity (Heilman, Miller & Nockerts, 2010).
We approached our data using the construct of academic language in order to evaluate how well it captured the complexity of Latino children’s language practices in naturalistic settings. Triangulating home and school observational field notes with video analysis, interviews, and direct assessment data on children’s language functioning provided a useful analytic window for interpreting Latino children’s language use and development in the context of their daily routines, relationships, and social interactions.
Overall, we found that some fundamental assumptions underpinning the social-interactive aspects of academic talk (van Kleeck, 2014) as well as the SALT measure are culturally biased against Latino children in three areas (cf. Flores and Rosa 2015). First, we found that the academic language construct casts culturally appropriate practices of taciturnity in terms of language delay. Second, we found that the academic language construct often confuses Latino students’ lack of independence with a lack of autonomy. Finally, we found that the academic language construct neglects the ways in which contextualized language (i.e., non-“academic talk:”) can be highly sophisticated and cognitively complex.
In concluding, we discuss research and practice implications of our findings. We offer a reconstruction of the social-interactive aspects of academic language that distinguishes between generic and culturally specific dimensions. The challenge for educators is to design language development opportunities that resonate with and build upon Latino children’s sociolinguistic practices outside of school.
We also discuss alternative means of capturing the competencies of Latino students that do not lead to deficit characterizations. For example, we propose that developing naturalistic observation protocols and deemphasizing “productivity” on diagnostic measures could address the problem of taciturnity. In addition, we propose that measures of independence be replaced by measures of autonomy that do not exclude interdependence. Finally, we suggest that academic language assessments include more sophisticated ways to capture cognitively rich and complex contextualized uses of language rather than merely privileging decontextualized uses.

Authors

• Greg Thompson, Brigham Young University

• Bryant Jensen, Brigham Young University