Negotiating Bi/Multilingual Identities in and Across Diverse Sociolinguistic Spaces

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

This symposium explores how children and youth negotiate bi/multilingual identities across diverse geographic and sociopolitical contexts. We consider how students navigate their transnational and translingual worlds, undergirded by notions of legitimacy, competence, belonging, and resistance. While language practices and ideologies are central to our discussion, we are also interested in moving beyond language to consider the extralinguistic factors (e.g., race, gender, class, ethnicity, migration) that impact student sense-making within particular sociolinguistic spaces. We aim for this symposium to foster critical yet hopeful dialogue around the ways in which culturally and linguistically diverse students experience the intersection of social identities and languages, and the concomitant implications for teaching and learning.

Sub Unit

• SIG-Bilingual Education Research

Chair

• Laura Hamman, University of Wisconsin - Madison

Papers

• Becoming Bilingual in Two-Way Immersion: Identities of Promise and Ideologies of Difference - Laura Hamman, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Transbordered Childhoods: Identity, Languaging, and Schooling for U.S.-Mexican Dual Citizen Children - Tatyana Kleyn, City College of New York - CUNY

• When a Monolingual English Speaker Becomes an English Learner - Yasuko Kanno, Boston University

• "You From Cuba, Like Me?" Centrality, Legitimacy, and Raciolinguistics in Preschool Children's Experiments With Their Peers' Home Languages - Katie Bernstein, Arizona State University

• Toward a Critical Understanding of Competence in Multilingual Learning Contexts - Patricia Baquedano-Lopez, University of California - Berkeley; Maryam Moeini Meybodi, University of California - Berkeley

Discussant

• Amanda Kibler, University of Virginia