Future Bilingual Teachers' Self-Reflections on Competence and Language Use

• In Event: Communicative Competence: Looking Within and Across Public Schooling Contexts to Examine Language and Power

Abstract

The bilingual teacher shortage is a nationwide problem that heavily impacts students and families in California (Harris & Sandoval-Gonzalez, 2017) with the recent passing of a state proposition that allows for the growth and expansion of bilingual programs offered to students (Carver-Thomas & Darling-Hammond, 2017). Research on bilingual teacher education is still limited, (Lavadenz & Baca, 2017), yet critical for K-12 students’ academic success. While, the assessment of the Spanish language abilities of bilingual teacher candidates is of concern to teacher educators (Guerrero & Valadez, 2011), the research tends to focus on evaluation tools and assessments. Less is known about how bilingual pre-service teachers make sense of their own language competencies in two languages. This paper reports on a study of bilingual teacher candidates’ self-reflection and evaluation of their Spanish and English language knowledge and use.

Cognitive and psycholinguistic understandings of language use and proficiency dominate the teacher education literature. This paper draws on sociocultural and sociolinguistic understandings of communicative competence and language use to explore how bilingual teacher candidates grapple with their perceived communicative competence (Hymes, 1972; Makihara, 2013) in two languages. Within a Language Socialization framework (Garrett & Baquedano-López, 2002; Hymes, 1974; Schieffelin & Ochs, 1986), language competence is understood as much more than the knowledge of linguistic forms, but the ways in which an individual is able to function and be regarded as a competent member of social groups.

The author collected and conducted a discourse analysis (Fairclough, 2003) of twenty-four linguistic autobiographies written by bilingual Latino students as part of course assignment for a multilingual education course at a California university. The course serves as a prerequisite for prospective bilingual teacher candidates that builds on the premise that an understanding of multilingualism and multilingual education in the U.S. must include learning opportunities to engage the historical and theoretical foundations of the field (Baker, 2010), as well as activities that foster self-reflection and critical awareness of one’s own subject position as a bilingual individual in the U.S. The end-of-the-course assignment provided students with an opportunity to trace their language learning across their lifetime and contexts, with attention to key experiences, events, and people, attending to the ways in which they were socialized through and to language across language communities. These essays were read initially for topics and themes and then coded by repetitive themes (Saldaña, 2009).

Bilingual teacher candidates identified critical language events and actors shaping their language use. Preliminary analyses show consistent themes across language, identity, place, and belongingness, though candidates’ perceptions of their competence varied across languages, settings, and domains, with many reporting feelings of pride and/or shame in their bilingual trajectory. A linguistic autobiography assignment can provide bilingual teacher educators with insights into the complex ways that personal experiences and ideology inform knowledge and dispositions towards everyday practices of bilingualism for teacher candidates. This paper can help shape the imagination of future bilingual teacher educators and researchers focused on the ways in which language underlies our beliefs and dispositions towards educational possibilities and transformation.

Author

• Sera Jean Hernandez, San Diego State University