"Technically an EL": The Production of Raciolinguistic Categories in a Dual-Language School

• In Event: Humanizing Subaltern Voices, Knowledges, and Language Practices in Dual-Language Bilingual Education

Abstract

Purpose
Bilingual Latinx students in schools have often been considered as lacking proficiency in English and Spanish. This discourse of languagelesness (Rosa, 2016) produces raciolinguistic categories that frames the bilingualism of Latinxs as deficient and in need of remediation. In this article, the researchers examine one such raciolinguistic category: students in dual language programs who are classified as both English learners and first language (L1) users of English. The authors offer three case studies of students who fit this linguistic profile and explore how teachers struggle to make sense of this paradox as they describe their students’ language practices. The case studies show how teachers, when describing the practices of their students, are often constrained by educational structures like standardized tests and language services, and resort to discourses of languagelessness.

Theoretical Framework
This article adopts a social view of bilingualism and biliteracy (Hornberger & Skilton-Sylvester, 2000) and begins from the premise that discourses of languagelessness are inherently inaccurate in order to shift the focus towards understanding how and why these discourses emerge and impact Latinx bilingual students. The authors contend that although bilingual programs intend to valorize the language practices of students, schooling structures have historically positioned fluid languages practices as a barrier to instruction and achievement (Garcıa, 2009) and continue to dichotomize the fluid language practices of students through the strict separation of language. The authors theorize how raciolinguistic ideologies (Flores, 2015) that typically inform the foundation of these programs result in the construction of raciolinguistic categories that pathologize the language practices of bilingual Latinxs.

Methods/Data Sources
This paper utilizes ethnographic data drawn from an on-going nine year study at a bilingual school in Philadelphia around how eight focal students experience bilingual education from kindergarten onwards. The data in this article are from classroom observations as well as interviews and focus groups with the focal students and their teachers for the first five years of the study. The focus of this article is three Latinx focal students in fourth grade who are classified as ELs and English dominant.

Results
The data demonstrates that assessment data used to classify students as simultaneously ELs (based on English language proficiency assessments) and L1 users of English (based on English and Spanish literacy assessments) positioned teachers to reproduce discourses of languagelessness even when they also` recognized the contradiction embedded in the description of an English dominant EL. Discourses of languagelessness were not the product of individual teacher ideologies but instead a result of monoglossic ideologies upheld through standardized assessments, such as literacy tests, to describe whether or not a learner was considered “truly” bilingual.

Scholarly Significance
Rather than blame teachers for having a deficit lens of students, this article asks us to consider how educational structures create these confusing contradictions. Likewise, this article asks researchers and educators to consider what it means to take educational responsibility for the way we talk about the language practices of learners of color and recognize how that may be related to race.

Authors

• Karla M. Venegas, The University of Pennsylvania

• Jennifer Phuong, University of Pennsylvania

• Nelson Flores, University of Pennsylvania