Languaging With Siblings: Dynamic Apprenticeships Into and Beyond School-Valued Practices in Mexican and Honduran Immigrant Homes

• In Event: Developing Multi/Translingual Competencies and Expertise Through Peer Interactions: Affordances, Constraints, and Complexities

Abstract

Objectives
Older siblings in immigrant homes may be especially well equipped to provide younger siblings with access to dominant, school-valued cultural competencies. Nevertheless, sibling interactions underscore tensions when school-based monolingual practices and hegemonic ideologies are imported into home contexts in ways that work against the richness of multilingual resources in immigrant homes. To better understand language and literacy practices that young Mexican and Honduran children bring into classrooms, we explore children’s “languaging” (Swain, 2006) when they engage with siblings in one particular literacy practice at home, joint book reading, in Spanish-dominant or Spanish/English bilingual immigrant homes.

Theoretical framework
Several theories guided our analysis. First, sociocultural theories frame how older siblings’ biliteracy allows them to serve as important sources of learning for younger siblings in socially and historically situated home contexts (Gutiérrez et al., 1999). Second, siblings’ homes are conceptualized as “communities of practice” (Lave & Wenger, 1991), in which family members collectively engage in learning through participation in unique bilingual practices. Third, literacy is understood as both critical and syncretic: attention is paid to “both contradiction and generative potential” (Volk, 2013, p. 239) in siblings’ literacy practices.

Data Sources
This study focuses on three Mexican and Honduran immigrant families with young children beginning their schooling careers (ages 4-6) and older siblings (ages 7-10). Families were selected from a larger ethnographic study because of the regularity of sibling reading activities in the home. Data collection for the current study occurred during six two-hour audio/video-recorded in-home observational visits for each family.

Methods
We used both inductive and deductive coding (Marshall & Rossman, 2010) and analytic memoing (Saldaña, 2013) to identify all fieldnote instances of siblings reading together during observations. We then transcribed and analyzed audio/video recordings using a micro-ethnographic (Bloome et al., 2004) and interactional sociolinguistic (Gumperz & Cook-Gumperz, 2006) approaches to discourse analysis, identifying how siblings used language to engage in joint book reading.

Results
Findings indicate siblings engaged in complex and nuanced negotiations of “fluent reader” identities in both languages, signaling “ownership” of particular registers of language often associated with schooling and thus indexing particular schemes of cultural values (Agha, 2003). Further, older siblings’ enactment of these identities encompassed not only included traditionally-defined reading skills (National Institute for Literacy & National Center for Family Literacy, 2008) and a range of translingual skills and dispositions (Orellana & D’warte, 2010) but also a range of handover/takeover practices across languages that modeled cooperative helping behaviors for younger siblings. However, these “fluent” identities also carried with them ideologies that often emphasized accurate decoding over comprehension and even mediated against younger children’s translingual sense-making during literacy events.

Significance
Sibling reading practices in multilingual homes provide unique opportunities for young children to observe and participate in literacy practices and develop transcultural skills and dispositions, as well as cooperative handover/takeover skills that are likely unique to these contexts. We argue that these issues are vital for both teachers and scholars to understand in order to fully develop multilingual children’s language and literacy repertoires.

Authors

• Amanda Kibler, University of Virginia

• Natalia Palacios, University of Virginia

• Judy Paulick, University of Virginia

• Tatiana Yasmeen Hill, University of Virginia