"El Güerito...¡Mira Que No Tiene Acento!" The Possibilities and Challenges With Becoming Bilingual in Two-Way Immersion

• In Event: Moscone Center North Roundtable Session 15
  In Roundtable Session: Challenging Normalized Conceptions of Bilingual Identity in Multilingual U.S. K–12 Education

Abstract

This paper explores one student’s experience of becoming bilingual in a two-way immersion (TWI) classroom. By tracing his “trajectory of identification” (Wortham, 2006), I show how Liam, a White, English-dominant student, shifted from being a peripheral and (self-professed) non-Spanish-speaking member of the class community to a valued member of the class who positioned himself as bilingual. In my analysis, I highlight the asset-oriented classroom practices that facilitated this transition, while also addressing the role of bilingual exceptionalism--a racialized framing of bilingualism as something notable for (only) White, English-dominant students.

To understand Liam’s trajectory, I draw upon legitimate peripheral participation, the process through which “newcomers become part of a community of practice” (CoP; Lave & Wenger, 1991, p. 29). A CoP approach views learning as apprenticeship through increased engagement in situated social practices within a given community. This perspective enables me to link Liam’s process of becoming bilingual to classroom practices, policies, and ideologies that shape locally-defined models of bilingualism. To theorize identity, I leverage positioning theory (Davies & Harre, 1990; Harre, 2012) and social identification (Wortham, 2006), two lenses that help me explore the discursive construction of self and the mutually constitutive nature of academic learning and student identities.

Over the 2016-2017 school year, I conducted an ethnographic case study of a second-grade TWI classroom, exploring how language practices and ideologies shaped students’ emerging bilingual identities. The data corpus included 38 in-class participant observations (127 hours) and student and teacher interviews at strategic points throughout the year. Observational and interview data were analyzed using cross-event discourse analysis (Wortham & Reyes, 2015) a method that traces an individual’s “pathway,” a linked series of events sharing relevant context and indexing processes of social identification. I leveraged this analytic tool to identify factors that shaped how Liam gradually took on and enacted a bilingual identity.

Findings reveal that the teacher’s constant affirmations of Liam’s participation and her privileging of Spanish languaging spaces strongly shaped his entrance into the bilingual CoP and his reflexive positioning as a successful bilingual. At the same time, Liam’s trajectory was influenced by the locally-constructed discourse of bilingual exceptionalism, enacted in the ways the teacher responded to his Spanish use (e.g., “Que bonito se oye el español de Liam” and “El güerito…¡mira que no tiene acento!”). Given that she did not publicly acknowledge the English use of Latinx students, this positioning marked the bilingualism of English L1 students as exceptional, while the bilingualism of Latinx students was seen as “normal.” Thus, Liam successfully transitioned from peripheral non-bilingual to central member of this bilingual CoP, the teacher’s efforts reinforced problematic discourses perpetuating broader trends of “elite multilingualism” (Barakos & Charlotte, 2019) that may subvert equity-oriented programmatic goals. This paper makes an important contribution to the field, revealing the powerful ways that TWI classrooms can foster bilingual CoPs while also revealing the need for a critical lens on the differential ways that students’ bilingualism is recognized in the classroom.

Author

• Laura Hamman-Ortiz, University of Northern Colorado