Expanding What Counts as Language for Latina/o Youth in an Urban Middle School Classroom

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

Abstract

In this paper we document the ways in which youth in a predominantly Latina/o community charter school were encouraged to think about language in ways that leveraged their everyday communicative repertoires in the service of academic language and literacy development. By doing so, we call attention to the diverse messages these youth present in addition to applications to the English Language Arts classroom where explicit talk about language is absent or narrow in its purpose.

Sociocultural language and literacy scholars have long exhorted educators to recognize and build upon the languages youth display across their everyday lives (Hull & Shultz, 2001). Classroom teachers have expressed concern over how to effectively build on the language resources of non-dominant groups (Gándara, P. C., Maxwell-Jolly, J., & Driscoll, A., 2005) specifically given the pressure to perform well on assessments that privilege academic varieties of English (Menken, 2009). In addition, the everyday language and literacy practices of youth, though recognized as complex and sophisticated by researchers are often treated by teachers, and youth themselves, as inferior to school language practices (Alim, 2004).

The project we conducted is framed within a sociocultural perspective on the relationship between home and school practices, a view that treats language as the premier tool mediating learning (Cole, 1996). We also build on linguistic anthropological research that documents youths’ linguistic dexterity (Alim, 2004; Paris, 2009; Zentella, 1997) and that identifies continuities as well as discontinuities between home and school practices (Authors, 2012; Lee, 2007). This project also builds on prior research on Latina/o youth language brokering (Authors, 2009) focused on a specific set of linguistic practices that many bilingual youth engaged in their daily lives.

This research was conducted with Latina/o middle school youth and their teacher, Ms. Reyes, at Pueblo Unido Charter Academy, a school located in Los Angeles’ urban center. Using a research design method (Brown, 1992) the team worked with Ms. Reyes to design lessons that viewed the full linguistic resources of youth as a resource for learning and development (Cole, 1998). Data for this research were collected over a 2-year period via ethnographic field notes, video-recorded data of in-class lessons, student writing, transcripts of student interviews and focus groups, as well as student-created videos.

While the project focused on having students consider how their language brokering skills could be leveraged in their classroom interactions based on previous research (Martinez, Orellana, Pacheco & Carbone, 2009), in this iteration of the project, we were interested in how students made sense of language through everyday classroom tasks that had them consider their language use across contexts. Through an analysis of their reflections, we found that youth developed expansive understandings about what can count for language in a classroom setting, and how their linguistic resources were valuable for their academic tasks. These findings suggest that Latina/o middle school youth can provide teachers and researchers with knowledge about language that can benefit future pedagogical practices in urban classrooms.

Authors

• Elizabeth Montaño, University of California - Davis

• Danny C. Martinez, University of California - Davis