“¡Mamá! ¡Así no se dice!”: Exploring intergenerational and collective language practices amongst immigrant children and mothers.

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Saturday 11:45 am - Gold 3
  In Roundtable Session: Living Liminality: Navigating Belonging, Resistance, and Care in Immigrant Educational Journeys

Abstract

Studies have addressed how young people engage in fluid linguistic practices throughout their daily lives to help their families negotiate various daily tasks (Orellana, 2001). Immigrant children who act as language brokers for their families do so from young ages, but few studies explore language brokering throughout communities of speakers and families and across age spans. This paper offers a more holistic ethnographic view of the dynamic language practices of young immigrant children in an early childhood classroom and their immigrant mothers learning English at an immigrant center in Los Angeles. Through participant observation and semi-structured interviews, and through recorded analytic conversations between both researchers, we examine how different practices of culture and language emerge in interaction at the center.

Authors

• Jackson Gzehoviak, University of California - Los Angeles

• Micaela Bronstein, University of California - Los Angeles

• Flora Zempleni, University of California - Los Angeles