Language Policy Considerations From Bilingual Adolescent Latinx Youth

• In Event: Collaboration for Transformation: Critical, Community-Led Action Research in Language Education Policy

Abstract

This research paper emerged from a case study that used PAR methodologies to engage eleven bilingual Latinx adolescent youth in an 8-week after-school program aimed at building youths’ critical awareness of the relationships between language, race, and power, and better understanding youth perspectives and experiences of languaging. Activities included keeping language journals, collaborative analysis of social media, improvisational theater, and interviews. I analyzed data using a combination of thematic analysis, narrative analysis, and Critical Discourse Analysis. The primary question guiding this paper is, How do bilingual Latinx adolescent youth express their understandings of their language practices in different contexts?
García (2009) writes, “For us, translanguagings are multiple discursive practices in which bilinguals engage in order to make sense of their bilingual worlds” (p. 45). Mignolo further states that, “The celebration of bi or pluri languaging is… a critique of the idea that civilization is linked to the ‘purity’ of colonial and national monolanguaging” ([2000] 2012, p. 250). Mignolo then calls on Anzaldúa’s concept of the Borderlands (1987) as a marginalized yet fruitful and generative space, and attributes Anzaldúa with the idea of “bilanguaging as a fundamental condition of border thinking” ([2000] 2012, p. 253). Thus, bilanguaging, or translanguaging, is essential not only to sense-making, but to naming, embracing, and resisting aspects of life and self in the borderlands, and to speaking back to hegemony.
Data revealed youths’ complex, context-based, and power-imbued understandings of bilingual languaging. First, youth describe the frequent use of translanguaging in virtually all contexts, but describe how one language typically dominates depending on the context and the participants. Thus, translanguaging is rarely a balanced act, and English hegemony informs this balance.
The second major finding is based on youth feedback on the language policy of the after-school program itself. Although the language policy was open, youth opted to use English almost exclusively. In exit interviews, youth theorized on why this may have been, and voiced a preference for a language policy that created more space for Spanish-dominant discussion. Language use in this study suggests that in similar contexts, an open, flexible language policy may become a de facto English-dominant policy, and youth suggestions point towards thoughtful language policy that consciously creates Spanish-dominant spaces.
Both of these findings suggest the importance of language policy that creates designated space for the non-dominant language, while at the same time keeping that space, and all spaces within schools, language-flexible, rather than strictly monolingual. Thus, spaces that are “language-dominant,” as in “Spanish-dominant” without being “language-only,” as in “Spanish-only,” best align with the actual language practices of youth.
The findings of this study carry language policy implications for any program, school or classroom that serves multilingual youth. In addition, the PAR methods utilized may be useful in other contexts seeking to explore hegemonic power relations with middle school-aged adolescent youth.

Author

• Sarah Hesson, Rhode Island College