Cultivating Linguistic Flexibility in Contexts of Superdiversity

• In Event: 53.037 - Is Superdiversity the Way Forward for Educational Linguistics?

Abstract

This paper builds on the insights offered by the previous paper to develop a role for super-diversity in educational linguistics that incorporates its methodological insights while avoiding its potential pitfalls. In order to achieve this objective the paper describes an ethnographic study of an after-school program that brings together children and undergraduates in new configurations every ten weeks. Their work in this after-school program reveals how language became a site of negotiation as new participants entered the space.

On the one hand, the analysis reveals that despite the multilingual potential of this context, given the diverse linguistic repertoires of participants, two languages quickly asserted dominance at B-Club: first English and secondarily Spanish. Moreover, the forms of English and Spanish that were spoken represented a more constricted range than might be expected if members had deployed their full collective repertoires. This present a challenge to some of the assumptions that may be made in theorizing about linguistic super-diversity: that where people move, so too moves language. Larger hierarchies of power may unwittingly constrict us all, pushing us toward the forms of language that are dominant both in the larger society as well as in the local context. This is an important cautionary note to sound about easy celebrations of linguistic super-diversity.

On the other hand, the paper also presents evidence that within the narrow range of language forms that were utilized at this site, actors still actively deployed a heightened awareness of language. It reveals the flexibility and versatility in which many of the young adult children of immigrants who participated in B-Club read social identities to determine who was likely to be speaking, reading, or writing what language, and adapted their own language practices appropriately. It also shows how children were attuned to many subtle aspects of language.

The paper concludes that it is by countering an adult ideological viewpoint and adopting an ethnographic approach to seeing how children and young people both use and understand language that we came to see the linguistic flexibility and versatility that existed even within a seemingly English and Spanish-dominant context. It is also by further questioning a modernist view of language as fixed and bounded, and eschewing both monolingual and bi-lingual norms that we can be led to consider new ways of cultivating competencies that may emerge in contexts of linguistic super-diversity. By identifying these, we may in turn create more effective ways to help them to flourish.

Author

• Marjorie Faulstich Orellana, University of California - Los Angeles