Becoming Bilingual in Two-Way Immersion: Patterns of Investment in a Second-Grade Classroom

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

Abstract

This paper explores how second-grade students make sense of doing/being bilingual (Auer, 1984) in a Spanish/English two-way immersion (TWI) classroom. Drawing upon Darvin and Norton’s (2015) expanded model of investment, I examine how and why students in this classroom “invested” in becoming bilingual, with attention to the similarities and differences in the sense-making of Latinx students and their White, English-dominant peers and the local, institutional, and ideological factors that shape students’ investment in becoming bilingual.

My understanding of student sense-making is grounded in Norton’s (1995) concept of investment, a sociological theory of identity that explores the relationship between learner identity and context for language learning. An investment lens provides a shift from conceptualizing the learner’s role in L2 learning from a cognitive lens (i.e., an individual’s motivation to learn) to consider the multiple, context-dependent factors that shape why a learner would “invest” in learning a new language. In my theoretical framing and analysis, I leverage the recently expanded model of investment (Darvin & Norton, 2015), which considers the relationship between structure and agency within an increasingly interconnected world and examines how microstructures of power and systemic patterns of control operate across space and time.

Data for this paper were drawn from a yearlong ethnographic case study of languaging and learning in a second-grade TWI classroom, including 38 participant observations (127 hours) of classroom discourse, student focus groups, and teacher interviews. For this paper, I primarily analyzed focus group data, although I also drew from the larger data corpus to trace how micro- (interactional), local- (institutional), and macro- (ideological) level factors shaped student investment. In my analysis, I utilized an approach to discourse analysis that looks across speech events (Wortham & Reyes, 2015) and considered how my findings corresponded to the three interstices of the expanded model of investment (affordances/perceived benefits, positioning, and systemic patterns of control).

Findings reveal that students across linguistic backgrounds held similar understandings of the perceived benefits of bilingualism, including bilingualism for global citizenship, enhanced social stewardship, and increased employment opportunities. Students sense-making differed, however, when it came to the uniqueness of the bilingual experience. Among White English L1 students, there was a shared discourse of bilingualism making them “feel special,” as if they had “a secret language”—an ideology that I term bilingual exceptionalism. Latinx students, on the other hand, discussed bilingualism as a “normal” phenomenon. In my paper, I consider these findings in relation to classroom practices (e.g., strict language separation), student positioning (e.g., as “Spanish experts”), and systemic patterns of control (e.g., high-stakes assessment policies). This paper contributes empirically by enhancing current understandings of how young learners experience TWI--an underexamined demographic in the existing body of attitudinal research--and theoretically by proposing spaces of resistance as an additional conceptual and analytical lens for investment-oriented research. I close with a discussion of implications for promoting and sustaining more equitable models of bilingual education, grounded in the importance of accessing and leveraging student perspectives.

Author

• Laura Hamman-Ortiz, University of Northern Colorado