Cross-Cultural Communicative Competence: De-Invisibilizing the Skills of Immigrant Youth

• In Event: Communicative Competence: Looking Within and Across Public Schooling Contexts to Examine Language and Power

Abstract

Communicative competence has historically been defined in monolingual/monocultural terms: What does it take to be viewed and treated as a competent speaker in a given (presumably homogeneous) language community? But in bi- or multi-lingual contexts, a different set of competencies may be demanded and developed, as speakers interact with a wide range of speakers in their daily lives and move across different cultural communities. Additional skills may be demanded when speakers are expected to broker language and culture for others within these spaces. While scholars have called attention to the ways in which globalization is rapidly and unevenly shifting ways of communicating both within and across local communities (Bresnier, 2013; Makihara 2013; Jaffe 2013), and made evident the rich and complex language practices that are fostered in contexts of language hybridity (e.g. Flores, 2016; D. Martinez, 2010; R. Martínez, 2008), a glossic, monucultural, normative model of “what counts” for language competence reigns in U.S. schools.

Using ethnographic, video- and audio-taped data from three research studies centered on the language and cultural competencies deployed by youth operating in multi-lingual and multicultural spaces, including a ten-year ethnographic study of immigrant youth language brokers; a participatory action research study in which immigrant youth documented their own language practices; and a multi-year study of interactions between youth and young adults in an after-school program in central Los Angeles, this paper theorizes and makes visible a set of communicative competencies that serve youth in navigating across cultural and linguistic difference. These competencies include the keen reading of social and linguistic cues; code-switching, style-shifting and other translingual maneuvers; and strategic decision making about what, where, when, why and for whom to translate information.

The main contribution of this paper is to name and illustrate a specific set of competencies that are critical elements of cultural competence in multilingual spaces, yet generally rendered invisible in schools, and to suggest specific ways in which teachers could better recognize, value and support these skills.

Author

• Marjorie Faulstich Orellana, University of California - Los Angeles