Martín and the Pink Crayon: The Organization of Children's Talk in a Two-Way Immersion Classroom

• In Event: Identity and Two-Way Bilingual Education: Considering Student Perspectives

Abstract

This paper addresses the interactional dynamics of one bilingual, Spanish-English, two-way immersion kindergarten classroom. This setting was unique in that the larger processes of gentrification, school reform, and immigration had brought a very diverse group of children together into this public school context (Author, 2019). Given this diversity, the purpose of this analysis was to understand, simply, how do children from diverse cultural, socioeconomic, and linguistic backgrounds interact with each other in a bilingual immersion classroom, and what do they learn through interacting with each other?

In addition to understanding language as part of students’ communicative repertoire, and learning as a process of socialization, I analyze everyday interactions using participation frameworks (Goffman, 1981) as the unit of analysis. The research presented in this paper was part of a broader ethnographic discourse-analytic study that included 18 months of participant observation, audio and video recording, informal and semi-structured interviews, as well as document and artifact collection. In order to understand how children interacted in this classroom, I recorded groups of children at their table, jotting down notes and interpretations in daily field notes and logging of audio. I selected key interactions to analyze, and diagrammed them visually as well as temporally, developing a form of transcription that represents spatial positioning and participatory roles in conversations.

Findings illustrate how children’s talk and communicative behaviors act as peer socializing processes as children move in and out of various participatory roles in conversation. I illustrate moments of language socialization that occur in everyday interactions among children in unmediated classroom talk, and show how even children that are silent observers or overhearers in conversations are participating in conversations and coordinated activity that become part of language learning. Hence, I argue that by their intentional spatial positioning, students are constantly overhearers in each other’s conversations in multiple languages and varieties, and become both socialized as participants in conversations in their lesser known languages and socialization agents into their classmates’ lesser known languages. This occurs even when children are less aware, resist, and/or reject their emerging bilingual proficiency.

This study builds on previous classroom analytic research in TWI settings, and contributes to this literature in various ways. First, I understand language to be part of students' communicative repertoires (Rymes, 2010), which takes into account all the semiotic resources students employ to make meaning. This includes not only English and Spanish, but also gestures, body language, and interactional stances. Second, I focus on interaction through the analysis of participant frameworks and children’s interactional stances in the course of everyday activities (Goffman, 1981). Finally, through a creative transcription that includes a visual representation of spatial positioning and temporal interaction, I propose a new way to analyze multiparty classroom conversations that allows for insights into the study of classroom dynamics, specifically within bilingual and second language settings. I argue that this framework is a productive lens through which to analyze bilingual multiparty conversations in a way that does not privilege linguistic codes as a basis for analysis.

Author

• Sofia Chaparro, University of Colorado - Denver