An Ethnographic and Sociolinguistic Study of Multilingual Immigrant Children

• In Event: Unapologetically Dramatic About Injustices: Anthro-Performances of Minoritized Children/Childhoods

Abstract

This paper illustrates reflexive and intersubjective stories that aim to understand differences among multilingual immigrant preschool students with translanguaging teaching practices. Little attention has been given to the ways that everyday translingual classroom management techniques and understandings impact immigrant students. Garcia’s study (2021) provides statistical evidence that early childhood education is increasingly standardized. Today, there is a bigger risk that the treatment of these young children would not acknowledge their complex bilingual practices (Garcia 2021).

To that end, this performance examines the potential to create educational spaces that appreciate and value native Arabic speakers’ identities in predominantly Turkish-speaking preschool classrooms through multi-textual and multimodal readings of data collected from ethnographic and sociolinguistic fieldwork conducted in a preschool in eastern Turkey. In short, these stories are about attending to the understanding of differences and identities through language. What teachers think about multilingual children in classroom practices tells us how language and differences are intersubjectively produced and producing in mundane moments. Additionally, this performance spotlights how schoolteachers come to experience and make sense of what kind of approach and practices are better to appreciate a child’s identity and be inclusive.

When using an intersubjective framing of language and differences, we come to understand that language and difference does not reside in the individual child, but in the group—the group makes and is making the child into someone who has a language difference. Differences are not abnormal, they are typical. On another level, this performance also considers the relationship between language differences and the intersubjectivity of intercultural understanding. Garcia and Wei (2014) emphasize that there is potential to establish a setting for more equitable education for children through intentional and explicit translingual practices and pedagogies (p. 115).
As a rookie, linguistic ethnographer I begin to recognize how language and difference in multilingual early childhood classrooms parallels what occurs in educational, linguistic, and anthropological research fields writ large.

My ethnographic and sociolinguistic performance aims to demonstrate how I and my colleagues feel confusion when language differences arise, but also “to decenter my own subjectivity to imagine I am a part of something bigger than me—a group subject—that is and is not personal, and is and is not structural, historic, regional, cultural and institutional” (Valente, 2015; Boldt and Valente, 2016).

Author

• Özge Ergin, Pennsylvania State University