Ongoing Emergence: Borderland High School Dual-Language Bilingual Education Students' Self-Identifications as Lingual People

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

Abstract

This paper argues that the goals of equity in dual language bilingual education (DLBE; Valdés, 1997) are best served when bilingualism is conceptualized as always emergent: continuously in development even after standardized measures of English language proficiency are met. This proposition emerges from an analysis of high-school DLBE students’ descriptions and identifications of themselves and their place in the DLBE program. Youths’ descriptions contrasted significantly with adults’ (administrators and teachers) descriptions of students, which were part of policy that limited English learners’ (ELs’) access to dual language classes.

The study draws on translanguaging scholarship (Otheguy, García, & Reid, 2015) to understand language not as discrete “named languages” but as individuals’ dynamic and holistic linguistic repertoires. The study also draws on linguistic anthropological conceptualizations of identities as constituted in discursive practice (Bucholtz & Hall, 2005) and as analyzable, in part, in metapragmatic discourse, or talk about the intersection of language and the social world (Agha, 2007). Youths’ self-identification as they talked about their language use in the social world of their DLBE program was substantially in line with translanguaging theory and with Flores’ (2013) proposal that we see all people as “lingual” rather than as monolingual or bilingual.

Data come from a 2.5-year ethnographic study of policies and practices in high school DLBE contexts and include participant observations, video-recorded classroom interactions, interviews, and artifacts. In this context on the U.S.-Mexico border, nearly all students were Latinx, some English-dominant and some Spanish-dominant. This paper focuses primarily on data from interviews with nine student participants, analyzed through close discourse analysis (Gee, 1999; Wortham & Reyes, 2015)

In this high school two-way DLBE program, inequity of access developed around a policy that prohibited students with EL classification from taking DLBE classes, in part, because adults conceptualized EL and bilingual as mutually exclusive categories. Youth in the program, however, conceptualized themselves and their peers differently—as non-dichotomous—and their bilingualism as more continuously emergent. Students without an EL classification consistently identified themselves through descriptions of their earlier experiences of not understanding English, representing what adults might have dichotomized as EL selves and bilingual selves instead as a single whole. They made very little distinction between newcomers and those who had participated in dual language (DL) programs since childhood. Students with an EL classification identified themselves as belonging in DL classes. These youths’ conceptualizations of their own and peers’ bilingualism were dynamic—representing its emergence as ongoing and natural—and focused on meaning making rather than named-language use.

These youths’ conceptualizations of themselves as lingual people are significant in contrast to adults’ conceptualizations, which were instantiated in policy and resulted in ELs’ exclusion from DLBE. They are also significant as a construction of an emergent bilingual identity that is more natural, permanent, infinite, and whole than many widespread uses of the term, especially when used as a direct substitute for ELL or LEP classification. Our goals of equity will be better served if our understanding of bilingual emergence is that it is never finished.

Author

• Katherine Mortimer, The University of Texas - El Paso