Leveraging Language Brokering: A Researcher-Teacher Partnership for Designing Language Brokering-Based Classroom Learning

• In Event: Language Brokering in Diverse Contexts: Implications for Schools

Abstract

Objective
Though there is significant documentation of the rich multilingual repertoires young people use to interpret for their families (García-Sánchez, 2018; Orellana, 2009), there has been little uptake of this research in schools. Based in a research-community partnership between teachers and researchers, this study aims to examine how teachers engage with language brokering (LB) in the classroom: what they know, what they need to know, and what best facilitates their application of this knowledge in curriculum design and implementation.

Framework
A large body of work has analyzed how learning occurs in everyday social practices, such as in games (García-Sánchez, 2010) and in storytelling and story-listening (Marin et al., 2020). Here, we see learning take place in the ways that multilingual children navigate the socio-discursive contours of brokered interactions between speakers of different languages. For example, research has demonstrated that LB helps children to attain skills in attuning to different audiences (Carbone & Orellana, 2010) and in metalinguistic analysis and cognitive function (Dorner, Orellana, & Li-Grining, 2007). Further, this study engages a key idea of culturally sustaining pedagogy: that school curriculum should reflect and center the knowledge and social practices of nondominant communities (Paris & Alim, 2017).

Methods and Data Sources
Methodologically, we draw from the work of Carol Lee on cultural modeling (1995). Using recorded LB episodes, written reflections on LB, and metapragmatic commentary on LB on social media, we created cultural datasets (Lee, 1995; Martínez & Mejía, 2020) that served as artifacts for conversation elicitation (Abildgaard, 2018) between the teachers during several work circles on Zoom. The team of researchers and teachers engaged in work circles throughout the summer, which will continue into the fall and winter. During our meetings, we discussed (1) teachers’ understandings of the LB experiences of their students, as well as ways they may already be building on these competencies, and (2) ways of infusing LB experiences into classroom work. We transcribed the recordings of the work circles and used discourse analytic methods to analyze how teachers discussed LB, what they found successful in the classroom and why, and what they foregrounded and backgrounded.

Results
Our results so far suggest that teachers are well aware of their students’ LB. They see older students brokering for more recently arrived students and engage in brokered parent-teacher conferences and phone calls. They are limited by curriculum standards rooted in English-only ideologies that prevent them from engaging in translinguistic practices in the classroom. They were less aware of how they might use LB to improve literacy and other cognitive skills in the classroom. But early application of LB-based activities and strategies suggested successful gains in student writing abilities, for example.

Significance
Not only is there little uptake of LB practices in classroom curriculum, but there is little understanding of how teachers understand the LB practices of their students. This study expands the LB literature by exploring the explicit connections between LB and schooling practices, as well as how teachers and researchers might work together to promote this bridge between research and practice.

Authors

• Jackson Gzehoviak, University of California - Los Angeles

• Sarah Perez, University of California - Los Angeles