Heritage Language Learners Enacting and Recognizing Expertise With Linguistically Diverse Peers

• In Event: Turning Languages Into Curriculum: Studies of Curricularization Across Contexts

Abstract

Objectives

Culturally and linguistically diverse learners, such as heritage language learners (HLLs), use language in diverse ways that are not often represented in schools that artificially bound language as an “academic subject” (Valdés, 2017, p. 76). Curricularizing language (Valdés, 2017) is potentially harmful for HLLs who use and have acquired their HL through participation in social practices that go beyond school contexts. One context where the non-curricularized nature of heritage-language learning can emerge is peer interaction, but the extant literature on this topic (e.g., Bowles, 2011) has chiefly focused on how HLLs collaborate with foreign-language learners. Given their multilingual competencies in both majority and nonmajority languages, the interactions between HLLs and peers with diverse linguistic expertise can help transform how we think about language learning and curricularization. Our study begins to address this gap in the literature through the following research questions:

1. How do HLLs represent their language expertise and engage in languaging with linguistically diverse peers in an extracurricular dual language program in high school?
2. What patterns of interaction develop when HLLs collaborate with different peers who demonstrate various levels of multilingual expertise?
3. How do interaction patterns shift with different interlocutors participating in collaborative dialogue?

Theoretical Framework

Grounded in sociocultural theory (Vygotsky, 1978), this paper focuses on languaging and collaborative dialogue as moments when peers engage in discussions about and through language which afford opportunities for language and literacy development (Author, 2010; Swain, 2000, 2006). In addition, we use Storch’s (2002) typology of interaction patterns to analyze peer interactions in terms of equality and mutuality.

Methods and Data Sources

We examined video-recorded data of student interactions from ten sessions in an extracurricular program that brought together high-school students learning English and Spanish. In the transcripts, we identified language related episodes (LREs), in which HLLs engaged in collaborative dialogue with peers. Using sociocultural discourse analysis (Mercer, 2004), we identified relevant LREs and coded them for: (a) who initiated it, (b) outcome, and (c) pattern of interaction (Storch, 2002).

Findings and Implications

Our findings revealed that languaging and interaction patterns among HLLs and their peers were neither constant nor predictable based on how curricularization has conceptualized language expertise. Moreover, we found that students enacted multilingual expertise in varying forms across peer interactions, and that the recognition and validation of said expertise was tied to factors beyond linguistic ability (e.g. race, class, gender).

Although this study occurred in an “extracurricular” space that allowed participants greater freedom in their use of language, our analysis of student and teacher discourse revealed that they still invoked curricularized notions of language in their feedback to peers, as they revoiced language ideologies that they experienced during their regular language classes. Our findings have implications for research and practice and suggest that HLLs need more flexible and critical spaces that support the development of their linguistic expertise beyond traditional world-languages curricula.

Authors

• Melinda E. Martin-Beltran, University of Maryland - College Park

• Andrés Alberto García, University of Maryland - College Park

• Angélica Montoya-Ávila, University of Maryland - College Park