"He Needs Help": Marking and Marginalizing English Learners Through Peer Interactions

• In Event: Stress and Coping of English Learners in the 21st Century

Abstract

Purpose

Despite decades of scholarship and activism emphasizing the importance of democratic, culturally relevant pedagogies (Freire, 1970; Ladson-Billings, 1994; Paris, 2012), the education of ELs and other minoritized students continues to be inequitable (Valencia, 2015).Yet relatively few studies have examined the very practices whereby inequity is built from the ground up in ELs’ school-time interactions, with most research on ELs focusing instead on what are viewed as the purely academic aspects of their schooling, particularly their academic language and literacy skills, which are often presumed to be deficient (Flores & Rosa, 2015).

Theoretical Framework

Building on a small body of previous research on ELs’ and other minoritized students’ racializing and marginalizing experiences in classrooms (García-Sánchez, 2012; Talmy, 2010; Wortham, 2006), in this presentation, we highlight micro-level replications of hegemonic macro-level structures and discourses through a discourse analysis of second-grade students’ peer interactions. Our analysis is framed specifically by two main theoretical concepts: markedness, which refers to a process whereby some groups and identities become highly recognizable (Bucholtz & Hall, 2004); and nonperson treatment (Goffman, 1963), which entails objectifying interactional practices that render the Other hypervisible or invisible.

Methods and Data Sources

This discourse analysis is based on approximately 30 hours of video and audio recordings of peer interactions and student interviews that were collected as part of a larger one-year ethnographic study of Room Z, a linguistically diverse second-grade classroom in California. Transcripts of recordings were coded deductively for the exclusionary practices highlighted by our literature review as well as inductively to reflect emic practices and language. Our analysis was guided by a sociocultural linguistic emphasis on the importance of examining talk within its sociopolitical, ethnographic, and interactional contexts (Bucholtz & Hall, 2004), as well as an emphasis on the importance of attending to various semiotic modes, including embodied action (e.g., Goodwin & Kyratzis, 2007).

Results

Our analysis highlights several interactional practices whereby at least half of the students in Room Z routinely positioned two ELs, Nestor and Tomás, as intellectually, interactionally, and linguistically deficient. Through frequent and sometimes subtle verbal and embodied practices which we refer to as silencing, over-helping, critiquing, and insulting, the two boys were constructed as nonpersons whose actions, abilities, discourse, and bodies were either invisibly marginal or hypervisibly marked. We argue that these peer interactional practices limited the boys’ opportunities to be agentive participants in the classroom and that they were enabled largely by broader discourses of neoliberal multiculturalism (Kubota, 2014) and of intelligence as innate and quantifiable (Oakes et al., 1997).

Significance

We discuss the theoretical and educational implications of this analysis, emphasizing that in order to counter these ideologies and to enact actively anti-racist, democratic pedagogies, it is crucial—particularly in an era of legitimized violence against minoritized groups—for educators and researchers to attend to the social and affective dimensions of ELs’ educational experiences.

Authors

• Meghan Corella, The University of British Columbia

• Jane Y. Choi, Mathematica Policy Research, Inc