Emergent Bilinguals Theorizing Language in Dual Language Bilingual Education

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Friday 9:50 am Four Seasons Ballroom 1
  In Roundtable Session: Language, Ideology, and Identity in Bi-/Multilingual Education (Table 4)

Abstract

This qualitative study investigates children’s perceptions of bilingual language development and language processing in a culturally and linguistically diverse Spanish-English dual-language immersion program. Using a connectionist and dynamic bilingualism perspective to analyze students’ metalinguistic interviews, the findings illustrate how seven bilingual children make sense of their ability to use two languages to support literacy development in the dual-language classroom. As children developed their bilingual linguistic repertoire, they also developed theories about the nature of language and what it means to be bilingual, shaped by their linguistic agency, families, classrooms and broader society.

Authors

• Eurydice B. Bauer, University of South Carolina

• Sibylla Leon Guerrero, University of California - Irvine