Legitimating and Appropriating Dual-Language Education: Policies, Ideologies, and Practices in Two Disparate Chinese-English Schools

• In Event: Contextualizing Translanguaging in Different Chinese-English Bilingual Educational Settings

Abstract

Objectives
Recent studies in the field of dual language (DL) education have demonstrated teachers’ role as policymakers in creating their own ideological spaces and classroom-level language practices to promote learning (Henderson, 2017; Martínez et al., 2015; Zuniga et al., 2018). Yet, it remains under-researched how multiple stakeholders negotiate and appropriate the “official” dual language policy to achieve certain goals. To fill this gap, this study explores the implementation of the 50/50 immersion model in two contrasting Chinese-English DL schools and the ideologies of local actors in shaping these language policies and practices.

Theoretical Framework
This paper is framed as the ethnography of language policy with an ecological lens which highlights this social-cultural process where “modes of human interaction, negotiation, and production (are) mediated by relations of power” (McCarty, 2004, p. 72). This perspective centers on people’s engagement with the policy planning process (Levinson et al., 2009) and the local actors’ (re)interpretation and re(negotiation) of the official policy to defend their interests (Hornberger & Johnson, 2007).

Methods & Data
This year-long multisite, comparative ethnographic research involves ethnographic fieldwork in two 4th-grade classes in two disparate Chinese-English DL schools. One site is a one-way foreign immersion school in the suburban Midwest consisting of higher-middle-class English-monolingual students; the other site is a two-way DL school in the urban Northeast consisting of most economically disadvantaged and ethnically minoritized students. Data include field notes, classroom videos, formal interviews with principals, teachers, and students, and school/class artifacts. Fieldnotes and transcripts were first coded inductively using a combination of process, In Vivo, descriptive, and values codes (Saldaña, 2015) and then pattern coded to establish major categories. Pictures and videos were code into five major themes and triangulated with other ethnographic data for emergent themes. Microethnogrpahic analysis (Bloome et al., 2005) was then conducted to analyze selected class videos for the themes.

Findings
This presentation will show video transcripts, interview/fieldnotes excerpts and pictures to demonstrate 1) the DL policy and practices from the school-wide administrative level and the classroom pedagogical level, and to 2) pinpoint major social actors’ ideologies around the mission of DL education that largely shapes the strategic appropriation. In both schools, language separation is favored and enforced by administrators, but translanguaging happens in both classrooms, though, with different pedagogical purposes and philosophies. While translanguaging is explicitly taught as a norm in one classroom for creative learning and engagement, it is an implicit strategy for targeted linguistic, content, and assessment outcomes in the other classroom. While both school missions emphasize the value of bilingualism, a different ideological emphasis guides the local discourse of DL practices: the ideology of individual accountability and cultural affiliation versus the ideology of neoliberal bi/multilingualism(culturalism). The differences are rooted in the particular social-cultural school communities and are negotiated locally to defend certain student groups’ interests.

Significance
This paper articulates the complexities of dual language planning beyond the dichotomy of language separation and translanguaging. An ecological examination of language ideologies also accounts for the sociocultural contexts and the interaction of multiple stakeholders’ perspectives to inform more effective and collaborative DL planning.

Author

• Bingjie Zheng, University of Central Arkansas