Toward a Critical Understanding of Competence in Multilingual Learning Contexts

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

Abstract

In the field of language education, the notions of linguistic and communicative competence have become the center of much pedagogic inquiry. Loosely defined, communicative competence refers to the ability to speak or act successfully depending on social context. This definition may suggest that this communicative ability lies within the bilingual/multilingual individual who manages to display linguistic competency on his/her own. But competence has much more to do with those who hold expectations of others to act according to norms. It matters, then, how competence is assessed and evaluated, and it matters whose competence is being assessed (García-Sánchez, 2014; Garrett & Author, 2002; Ochs & Schieffelin, 2008). In a society that struggles to identify as pluralistic, and with a history of marginalization of natives to this land and of a variety of immigrant groups considered and perceived as non-dominant, linguistic competence in the U.S. is necessarily tied to politics of race and immigration. 

While standard curricula encourage bilingual/multilingual students to develop grammatical and pragmatic competence, much instruction has tended to support English dominant practices (Wiley, 2004; Wiley & Wright, 2004). The linguistic plurality of classrooms requires more than just skill—it requires negotiation and adaptation, a responsiveness to social and individual changes over time (Haste, 2008). In this paper, our goal is to invite our audience to reimagine and rethink the notion of competence by critically examining the sociopolitical and raciolinguistic contexts where language learning and identity development take place (Flores & Rosa, 2015). 

Our critical lens explores the construction of competence across two studies: (1) a northern California K-5 school with a growing population of Indigenous Maya students from Yucatan, Mexico and (2) a Saturday heritage language school where Muslim Iranian-Americans attempt to preserve their cultural identities in sensitive geopolitical times. In the first case, we examine how the migration/displacement processes of an indigenous group complicates the notion of “Latino” and the linguistic and cultural performance of competent use of Spanish. Drawing from a 4-year ethnographic language socialization study of multilingual first- and second-generation indigenous Maya students, we discuss video-recorded classroom interactional data that introduced these students to the practice and politics of language and race in diaspora.

In the second case, we draw from a microethnographic study that examined how nuanced notions of language, religion, and culture obscure the conceptualization of a competent Persian speaker. Video and audio recordings were collected from field visits to a Persian Saturday school in an Islamic cultural center in Northern California during a year-long ethnographic study of Persian language classes. Preliminary analyses of these data show that these language learning contexts are sites where multiple, conflicting identities/belongings come into contact in complex ways in times of debates and policies of exclusion. 

Together, these cases illustrate the ways in which language learning settings necessitate a critical understanding of what is meant by a competent language speaker and of how linguistic and cultural competence are never static, one-size-fits-all approaches; rather, they are dynamic, ever-changing experiences and processes immersed in history and in racial and linguistic politics.

Authors

• Patricia Baquedano-Lopez, University of California - Berkeley

• Maryam Moeini Meybodi, University of California - Berkeley