Translanguaging's Transformative Potential for Emergent Bilinguals Labeled as Disabled: Challenging Deficit Perspectives of Dis/ability, Families, and Home Languaging Practices

• In Event: The Transformative Potential of Translanguaging Spaces for Diverse Latinx Students

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 (García, 2011). This division is acute for multiply-marginalized students such as emergent bilinguals labeled as disabled (EBLADs) placed in monolingual-English classrooms since these programs do not facilitate faster adoptions of English but instead communicate intrinsic ideas of how home language practices neither belong in the school nor serve educational purposes (García & Kleifgen, 2018). Resulting linguistic divisions devalue the role linguistic ideologies play in relationships and EBLADs’ opportunities to develop home language(s). There remains 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. As such, we explore, through vignettes, translanguaging’s transformative potential for countering deficit perspectives relegated to the home and/or social spaces based on the reinforcement of monoglossic ideologies.

Theoretical framework
Integrating Freire’s (2012/1970) conceptualization of traditional education as a mechanism for oppression, Bourdieu's capital theory (2011), and Crenshaw’s intersectionality theory (1991), our study is grounded in the idea that linguistic divisions encountered in schools are forms of oppression that position EBLADs’ linguistic practices as devalued capital. As bi- and multilingual racialized children, EBLADs' intersectional identities are often erased due to educational experiences that replicate and maintain oppressive systems. Ultimately, through schooling experiences, EBLADs learn to devalue certain linguistic practices foregrounding one identity over others.

Methods and data sources
Data 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 two through five focused on exploring each child’s perceptions of language in relation to their relationships with their mothers.

Interview data were audio recorded, transcribed and translated. Analysis was guided by the following questions: (1) How do EBLADs discuss their linguistic practices in relation to their mothers’ linguistic practices? (2) how, if at all, do translanguaging practices appear in how children talk about language? 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.

Findings and significance
(1) Traditional, school-based linguistic programming for EBLADs results in students internalizing ideologies that view their HLP as a factor limiting their academic success and/or their mothers’ capacity to serve as an intellectual model at home and at school.
(2) Ideas about translanguaging practices reflected more deficit-centered perspectives the older the child and the longer they had been classified with a disability within US public schools.

Reframing how translanguaging practices are viewed across context and how EBLADs’ families are positioned requires increased understanding and partnership opportunities between home and school. Educators and administrators should recognize translanguaging practices as legitimate and reflective of real language use. Such a shift would reposition the ways students understand their linguistic practices and their families across spaces and contexts.

Authors

• María Cioè-Peña, University of Pennsylvania
  Presenting Author

• Rebecca E. Linares, Rowan University
  Presenting Author