The Power of "Social Bilinguals" and "Street Talk": Student Perspectives in a Two-Way Immersion Classroom

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

Abstract

The policy of language separation, common within dual language program design, includes the use of language labels to identify students as either the English speaker or the speaker of a language other than English. Proponents of language separation argue that each language needs a protected space in order to encourage all students to produce the target languages (Potowski, 2007; Lindholm-Leary, 2005), although an emerging body of scholarly literature has demonstrated that the strict separation of languages can have negative implications for Latinx students who come from Spanish-speaking communities (Palmer & Martinez, 2016; Garcia, 2017). Considering these divergent perspectives, the following research questions guided the analysis presented in this paper: How do students and teachers understand the role that language labels play in a TWBE classroom? In which ways do language labels position students in one TWBE classroom?

As part of a larger ethnographic and longitudinal study, I collected data for six to eight consecutive weeks during each of the 2010-2014 academic school years. Data sources from the broader study include video and audio recordings of student and teacher interviews and classroom observations of student interactions during their kindergarten, first, and second grade years. This paper examines data from the 2012-2013 academic school year (during students’ second grade year). As a case study, this paper examines how the idea of a “language expert” emerged for four focal students through the analysis of individual student retrospective interviews (Rampton, 1995) and teacher interviews.

This study draws from a raciolinguistic perspective (Rosa & Flores, 2017) to explore how power operates in sites where the categorizations of language and race are negotiated. A distinctive goal of this paper includes understanding the ways in which students were perceived by their peers and classroom teachers as language learners in order to understand how power relations operated as the school demographics were changing through gentrification.

Findings indicate that race was entwined with social class and language in the ways that students perceived one another. One student, Nico, described an understood hierarchy of language and power already tied to the students’ academic identities in their second grade classroom. Two students, Elizabeth and Cristóbal, both embodied a raciolinguistic perspective by referencing the use of language labels according to the understood hierarchy and resisting the racialization of their identities. Another student, Tessa, revealed how bilingualism benefitted her in ways that masked her white privilege. Lastly, the two teachers’ attempts to support the use of both instructional languages seemed to racialize students identities, yet, at the same time, it appeared that that were also trying to disrupt monoglossic notions bilingualism.

The role of perception in the co-construction of identity in TWBE programs is an area that merits more attention in the existing scholarship. The ways individuals perceive one another is connected to the ways they use language in both spoken and visible forms in a classroom space. Implications for teacher education programs include raising an awareness of how teachers can both mitigate and shift power relations in culturally, ethnically, and linguistically diverse contexts.

Author

• Suzanne García-Mateus, California State University - Monterey Bay