Multiracial Mandarin: When Asian American racialization meets multilingual education

• In Event: Asian American Racialization: Critical Perspectives on Mandarin-English Bilingual Education

Abstract

Purposes
I present findings from an ethnographic study of Mandarin world language programs, and argue that racialization of Asian Americans is tied to pedagogical and curricular decisions concerning Asian American multilingual students.

Theoretical framework
I apply contemporary concepts of raciolinguistics (Flores and Rosa, 2015; Wolfram et al., 2023), heritage language and monolingual orthodoxy (Cook, 2016; He, 2006, 2010; Leung et al., 1997; Martínez, 2013; Song et al., 2024; Valdes, 2019), and racialization of Asian American in school settings (Au, 2022; S. Lee, 2022; Louie, 2004), meaning that the provision of language education is strongly tied to racial classification and stigmatization, and that there is a scarcity of institutional resources for supporting language education for students who use the target language outside instructional settings.

Methods
I conducted two years of ethnographic fieldwork across two public schools in a large Californian metropolitan area. The schools differ in racial composition as well as socioeconomic status. One school, Santa Maria High School, is ethnically diverse (about 45 percent Latinx, 15 percent Black, eight percent White, 25 percent Asian American) and largely working-class; the other, Silicon Valley High School, is majority-Asian American (75 percent, the remainder a mix of White and Latinx), and affluent and characterized by high academic achievement. Across these two field sites, I interviewed over 95 informants, as well as repeatedly interviewed Mandarin language teachers and focal students in their classrooms. Data was coded according themes and categories of language classifications, racial classifications, and construction racial equity.

Results
First, students experience antagonism between language identities: that is, between interlocking ethnic, racial, and linguistic classifications, joined to subject positions and their enactments. At Silicon Valley High School, antagonisms existed between so-called “native speakers” (often described emically as “Chinese speakers,” “home speakers,” or “Chinese freshmen”), who had home-based Mandarin competences, and second language learners, usually Chinese- or Korean-ethnic. These antagonisms resisted racialization, due to the overwhelming majority of East Asian American students in the Mandarin classroom. However, at Santa Maria High School, these antagonisms could readily be racialized due to each classroom's racial makeup.

Second, at Santa Maria High School, Asian American students were constructed as high academic achievers, which does reflect objective racial disparities in the school. At this school, language curriculum, pedagogy, and practitioner policy could favor monolingual orthodoxy in a bid to make a racially equitable Mandarin program, inclusive to racially marginalized (i.e., Black and Latinx) students. This practice is reflected in emic data from Mandarin teachers themselves, who reflect about the contradictions and problems inherent in their work, yet remain committed to the project, especially to avoid what they construct as the negative alternative at Silicon Valley High: a Mandarin program that predominantly serves, in teachers' emic constructions, “native speakers” or “heritage speakers,” or in my analytic terms, Mandarin-multilingual students.

Scholarly significance
This paper contributes to accounting for the relationship between Asian American racialization and education for multilingual Asian Americans, which is underexplored in education research.

Author

• David Shuang Song, University of Oklahoma