Promotora-Child Metalinguistic Conversations in a Preschool Mixteco Heritage learning Program

• In Event: Translanguaging, Multimodality and Affect in School and Community Learning Ecologies

Abstract

Objectives
This paper analyzes promotora-child conversations from a project that provided professional development to Indigenous bilingual Mixtec community women (“promotoras”) in California in early childhood and placed them in local preschools to teach Mixteco language to children there. It draws on translanguaging theory, multimodal conversation analysis, as well as an Indigenous Language Reclamation framework to understand how Indigenous heritage languages can be supported in classrooms.

Theoretical Frameworks
The promotoras’ conversations with children took the form of metalinguistic conversations. These focus less on the learning of Mixteco vocabulary and grammar than on discussion of the place of Mixteco in children’s lives. These conversations were much like discussions that occur in language programs within “Metalinguistic Communities”, groups that “experience a deep affective connection with a language even if many lack proficiency in it; these communities are frequently defined more by talk about a language than talk in it” (Avineri & Kroskrity 2014: 5). They were also like discussions described in Indigenous language programs that focus on Indigenous members re-establishing Community spaces through community cultural practices and establishing relational accountability,
– “fostering healthy relationships that heal the ruptures – between Miami people and our lands, our culture, our ancestors, and even each other – begat by colonization” (Leonard 2021: 254)
Therefore, Indigenous Language Reclamation (Leonard 2021) was drawn on for the inquiry. As these conversations were bilingual in Spanish and Mixteco and metalinguistic, translanguaging theory was also drawn upon (Velasco & Fialais 2016).

Data sources
Promotoras’ were placed in 3 Head Start preschool classrooms. Their conversations with children over various activities at their preschool sites were video-recorded. These took the form metalinguistic conversations, where children’s knowing and speaking Mixteco was topicalized and talked about. Two were selected for the present analysis.

Methods
Promotoras’ metalinguistic conversations were analyzed using the theoretical frameworks described above as well as multimodal conversation analysis (C. Goodwin 2018), to capture how the promotoras and children collaboratively built up an orientation to Mixteco language use in their classrooms.

Results
Promotoras’ metalinguistic conversations were bilingual in Spanish and Mixteco, and topicalized children’s knowing and speaking Mixteco. In these conversations, promotoras made a hearable effort to set up a classroom environment in which Mixteco language knowledge was presented as a key focus. Nonetheless, the conversations were mostly framed in Spanish, the children’s stronger language, to elicit children’s orientation to the Mixteco-learning project. They also connected knowing Mixteco to children’s parents, peers, and land. For example, a promotora, in setting up a Mixteco story, said to children “it was told to me in Mixteco. My mother talked to me in Spanish and Mixteco.”

The two examples selected for this paper illustrate the influence these conversations had on children’s excitement and collaborative embrace of Mixteco in the classroom interaction, seen in their requests for stories to be told in Mixteco, requests for translations of Mixteco words and phrases, and format ties (Goodwin 1990) to one another’s requests.

Scholarly significance
Results point to ways in which children’s embrace of Indigenous heritage languages can be supported in classrooms.

Author

• Amelia (Amy) Kyratzis, University of California - Santa Barbara