Exploring Identity Development of Kindergarten TWI Students Through the Use of Language Portrait Silhouettes

• In Event: Defining and Operationalizing Sociocultural Competence in Dual-Language Education

Abstract

Objectives
The objectives of this paper are: 1) to expand our understanding of language identity development among young multilinguals; and 2) to explore approaches for promoting and assessing language identity development in the context of two-way immersion (TWI) programs.

Conceptual Framework
Identity development has been conceptualized as a foundational element of sociocultural competence, as it is essential to have a clear sense of self in order to develop strong, equitable inter-relationships with others (Authors, 2014). Among multilingual individuals, language plays a strong role in identity formation. From a post-structuralist perspective (Norton, 2016; Pavlenko & Norton, 2007; Weedon, 1987), language learning is viewed as being situated within specific discourses, in which some voices are privileged and other voices are silenced (Bakhtin, 1981; Norton, 2016; Pavlenko & Norton, 2007). Through this lens, identity can be viewed as language in practice, and provides a rich lens through which to investigate identity construction within TWI programs.

Methods and Data Sources
This study took place in a TWI kindergarten classroom in Central America, in which the lead author was the Spanish teacher. The third author spent six weeks in the classroom co-investigating various aspects of sociocultural competence development with the teachers, through a collaborative action research paradigm (Gordon, 2008). For this paper, the Spanish teacher conducted a read-aloud of El juego de la lotería (Laínez, 2006), a picture book that uses translanguaging to tell the story of an English-dominant boy in the U.S. who spends the summer in Mexico with his Spanish-dominant grandmother. Following this read aloud, students talked in pairs about their own language use in different contexts. The teacher then introduced the Language Portrait Silhouette protocol (Dressler, 2014) by showing the blank body portrait used for the activity and asking students to color in their various languages wherever they thought they belonged in their bodies, using a different color for each language. When students had completed their portraits, they described them in Spanish to the Spanish teacher or in English to the third author, per student preference. These interactions were video recorded and transcribed. Later, the authors engaged in a multimodal thematic analysis (Browne, 2019; Miles et al., 2014; Riessman, 2008) of the student portraits and corresponding commentaries.

Findings
The following five findings emerged: 1) all but one student represented themselves with bilingual or multilingual identities, with the multilingual identities frequently being more aspirational; 2) most students represented their various languages separately, in different parts of the body, and only one student explicitly referenced a hybrid variety (‘espanglish’); 3) some students used red for Spanish and blue for English, mirroring the classroom environmental print; 4) some students, primarily those who were dominant in English, used proportionality to indicate relative proficiency in each language; and 5) there were table trends, indicating collaboration.

Scholarly Significance
This paper adds to the emergent research base on sociocultural competence, and in particular, the sub-construct of identity development. Specifically, it introduces an approach for promoting and assessing language identity among young children, an understudied focal population in identity research.

Authors

• Elizabeth R. Howard, University of Connecticut

• Sandra S Silva-Enos, University of Connecticut - Storrs

• Erika Feinauer, Brigham Young University