Becoming Bilingual in Two-Way Immersion: Identities of Promise and Ideologies of Difference

• In Event: Negotiating Bi/Multilingual Identities in and Across Diverse Sociolinguistic Spaces

Abstract

This paper critically engages with how young emergent bilinguals experience becoming bilingual in two-way immersion (TWI). In recent years, TWI has emerged as an educational “panacea” for meeting the needs of growing immigrant populations, while also providing native English-speaking students the opportunity to learn a second language. At the same time, critics argue that TWI contributes to gentrification and is unsuccessful in fostering linguistic and social equity (Cervantes-Soon, 2014; Valdés, 1997; Valdez, Freire, & Delavan, 2016). Within this growing empirical literature, scholars have not adequately addressed students’ experiences: how they make sense of learning in two languages, and how they negotiate bilingual identities.

Drawing upon positioning and investment theory, this paper interrogates how language ideologies are enacted and contested in TWI. Positioning theories (e.g., Davies & Harré, 1990) acknowledge student agency in negotiating particular identities, while also recognizing that not all identities are available to all students (Hawkins, 2004). Investment theory (Norton, 2000) considers why students might “invest” (or not) in becoming bilingual and considers how microstructures of power operate across space and time (Darvin & Norton, 2015). Brought together, these theories illuminate how students make sense of their emerging bilingualism and how these experiences are embedded within and shaped by larger ideological discourses.

Data is drawn from a yearlong ethnographic study of a second-grade TWI classroom in Wisconsin and includes semi-structured student interviews and sixty hours of recorded classroom discourse. All data was analyzed from a critical discourse perspective, looking across speech events (Wortham & Reyes, 2015) to move beyond a two-level explanation of context (“macro” and “micro”) toward an exploration of situated and interconnected processes of social identification across several timescales (Lemke, 2000; Wortham, 2006). Through this lens, I explore how students discursively positioned themselves—and were positioned—over time.

Across the study, students revealed asset-based understandings of their emerging bilingualism. The veteran teacher, herself a Mexican immigrant, created instructional and discursive spaces that affirmed Spanish(es) and Latino identities. Spanish was the primary language of student-to-teacher and student-to-student interactions, noteworthy as previous studies have shown the permeation of English into TWI settings. At the same time, native English speakers dominated classroom discussions—even in Spanish—which had implications for who was afforded linguistic and academic expertise. Many students expressed their desire for increased time in English, often problematically framed around providing “the Spanish kids” with more English. Thus, while the classroom engendered unity around bilingualism (“We are all bilingual.”) and affirmed Spanish speakers, it often fell short of resisting dominant ideologies of language and power/knowledge (Foucault, 1980).

Two-way programs are expanding across the nation and yet we know little of how young learners are making sense of them. This is problematic, as we know student investment in language learning matters (Darvin & Norton, 2015) and that equity requires dialogic engagement with ideologies of difference. This study provides deeper understanding of the multiple, intersecting factors that shape students’ understandings of bilingualism and suggests some directions forward in building more equitable bilingual programs.

Author

• Laura Hamman, University of Wisconsin - Madison