Young Bilingual Children's Rhetorical Astuteness

• In Event: Roundtable Session 57
  In Roundtable Session: Pedagogical Possibilities for a Changing Public: Bi/Multilingual Latina/o Students in Urban Schools

Abstract

This paper explores one way of organizing writing curriculum in order to leverage the linguistic abilities of bilingual children. While such children are commonly perceived as disadvantaged by their bilingualism, researchers have argued that they may instead possess metacognitive and metalinguistic advantages (Valdés, 2003). Following this, teachers and researchers might attend less to remediating perceived deficits and more to exploring the connections and points of overlap between students’ existing linguistic skills and the language arts curriculum (Orellana & Reynolds, 2008; Martinez, Orellana, Pacheco & Carbone, 2009). In particular, bilingual children’s skill in codeswitching suggests they possess important insights about audience, and this audience awareness is a critical skill in effective writing (Martínez, 2010).

This paper draws on data from a year-long formative/design study (Brown, 1992) in a first grade ESL classroom. In this study, the researcher and teacher planned a audience-focused writing curriculum in which students wrote for real readers with diverse linguistic preferences. In data collection and analysis, the researcher explored the relationship between children’s metapragmatic awareness---their sensitivity about which languages to speak to whom and when--and the composition skill of rhetorical astuteness--the ability to read and respond to rhetorical sites of action (Bawarshi, 2001).

This work draws on sociocultural (Barton, 1995; Heath, 1983) and translingual (Canagarajah, 2015) theories of literacy. This theoretical perspective requires a shift from decontextualized evaluation of written products towards a focus on situated literacy practices, including writers’ trajectories over time and dexterity in using multiple languages, language varieties and modalities.

Understanding the sociocultural context of literacy also involves looking for patterns across a wide array of data: students’ talk, important artifacts, and context of school and community (Dyson & Genishi, 2005). To that end, this study relied ethnographic methods, including participant-observation, fieldnotes, video- and audio-recording and semi-structured interviews with six focal children selected via purposeful sampling (Merriam, 2009). Analysis considered how rhetorical astuteness was demonstrated tacitly through students’ writing moves as well as how it was explicitly articulated in students’ talk about their writing. All data were analyzed using an inductive approach informed by the constant-comparative method (Glaser & Strauss, 1967). Analysis occurred in three overlapping phases: data reduction and organization, initial coding, and focused/hypothesis coding (Saldaña, 2009).

Analysis of the data revealed writing for bilingual readers developed and displayed students’ rhetorical astuteness. Children chose appropriate language(s) for their intended readers, addressed readers directly in their writing, and used wide array of rhetorical strategies to make effective persuasive arguments. Some aspects of children’s rhetorical astuteness were explicitly articulated and others were tacit or embodied. Children showed a sensitivity towards the linguistic needs of both individual readers and categories of readers, and described how their intended audience affected their choice of topic, language and design aspects like color. Finally, students’ rhetorical astuteness was built over time through interactions with their readers, suggesting the value of authentic audiences in supporting (bi)literacy learning. These findings highlight the potential of a language arts curriculum which builds on bilingual children’s metalinguistic insights and expertise.

Author

• Leah Durán, The University of Arizona