We Value What We Experience: Translanguaging to Increase Learning Opportunities for Emergent Bilinguals With Dis/abilities

• In Event: English Learners With Disabilities and Opportunity to Learn

Abstract

Purpose
By establishing linguistically dichotomous spaces (e.g., dual language, transitional bilingual programs), schools create and reinforce linguistic divisions that remove supports multilingual children need while instilling deficit perspectives of home language practices (HLP) (García, 2011). This division is acute for emergent bilinguals labeled as disabled (EBLADs) placed in monolingual English classrooms; these programs do not facilitate faster adoptions of English, instead, they communicate intrinsically how HLP do not belong in the school nor serve an educational purpose (García & Kleifgen, 2018). Thus, the resulting linguistic divisions reduce students’ opportunities to learn (OTL), while devaluing the role that linguistic ideologies play in relationships. To date, there is a lack of scholarship centering translanguaging practices at home and how they support academic development, as well as how EBLADs internalize school-based linguistic ideologies and the subsequent effect on home-based OTL.

Perspectives/Theoretical Framework
Our theoretical framework brings together Freire’s (2012/1970) conceptualization of traditional education as a mechanism for oppression, Bourdieu’s theory on capital (2011), and Crenshaw’s (1991) theory on intersectionality. Linguistic divisions encountered in schools are forms of oppression that position HLP as devalued capital. As Latinx children, EBLADs lead lives that often erase their intersectional identities, and they are subject to educational experiences that replicate and maintain oppressive systems. These systems are introduced into the home through practice and ideology. In other words, through lived experiences in school, EBLADs learn to devalue certain linguistic practices, to attribute certain behaviors to particular genders, and to foreground one identity at the expense of the other(s).

Methods/Data Sources
Data for this paper stem from a larger ethnographic study on the experiences of Latinx Spanish-speaking mothers of EBLADs in New York City. Data shared arose from interviews with three EBLADs in Grades 2 through 5 (one interview per child). The focus of the interviews was to explore each child’s perceptions of language and their relationships with their mothers.

Interview data were audiorecorded, transcribed, and translated as needed. Analysis was guided by the following questions: (1) How are HLPs framed when EBLADs talk about their mother’s ability to facilitate OTL? (2) How, if at all, do translanguaging practices show through in the way children talk about learning? Data were coded and organized around themes stemming from the theoretical framework, reproduction of oppression and language as capital. These were organized into three foci: language as functional, relational, and hierarchical.

Results and Significance
The findings were twofold: (1) Traditional, school-based linguistic programming for EBLADs results in students internalizing ideologies that view HLP as a factor limiting their OTL and/or be sufficiently supported at home. (2) Ideas about HLP reflected more deficit-centered perspectives the older the child and the longer they had been classified with a disability within U.S. public schools.
Reframing HLP as translanguaging practices centers the need for translanguaging in schools to facilitate home–school partnerships and increase EBLADs’ OTL. Educators should recognize HLP as legitimate and reflective of real language use. Such a shift would reposition the multifaceted ways parents create and facilitate OTL, across spaces and languages.

Authors

• María Cioè-Peña, Penn GSE

• Rebecca E. Linares, University of Colorado - Boulder