Constructing Communicative (In)Competence, (Il)Legitimacy, and (Non)Belonging in Diverse Classrooms in Migration Contexts

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

Abstract

This paper examines communicative competence (henceforth CC) as an emergent product of everyday classroom practice in politically fraught educational contexts. Using examples from immigrant children in Spain, we analyze how non-dominant students’ communicative (in)competence is (mis)constructed interactionally by peers, and sometimes also by teachers, often regardless of these students’ actual knowledge or their own claims to (in)competence. We also show how racialized and deficit assumptions are implicated in the (mis)evaluations of these students’ CC.

We bring into dialogue linguistic anthropological critiques (Besnier 2013; Garrett and Baquedano-Lopez 2002) of the notion of CC (Hymes 1972) with contemporary formulations of raciolinguistic ideologies in educational contexts (Flores and Rosa, 2015; Alim 2016). These critiques have challenged the tendency to treat CC as stable knowledge that resides within individual students and that is performed in value-free contexts, as well as the assumption that possessing the sanctioned CC grants you legitimate membership in a community of practice. Building on raciolinguistic ideologies research, we examine how, for non-dominant students, their actual knowledge/competence does not always afford full participation in learning communities.

This paper builds on a larger ethnography documenting the social lives of Moroccan immigrant children, aged 8-9, in Southwestern Spain who were observed for a twelve-month period. In school, Moroccan immigrant students were videotaped in a 4th grade class for several periods a week. Using videoanalysis and ethnographic methods in discourse analysis, we examine how Moroccan immigrant children are rendered communicatively (in-)competent in everyday classroom interaction.

We analyze a practice that we are calling “the patronizing benefactor”: This practice usually involves a Spanish classmate who assumes incompetence on the part of a Moroccan peer and, without solicitation, intervenes on his/her behalf in order to “help” him/her. The patronizing stance in these unsolicited offers to help stems from entrenched raciolinguistic ideologies that construct the linguistic competence of immigrants as deficient. A surprising finding, however, is that Moroccan immigrant students are simultaneously often ascribed competence that they themselves claim not to have. This happens when Moroccan immigrant students admit to not having completed academic tasks because they did not know how to do them. In these instances, Spanish peers cast doubt on these claims of incompetence in a way that reflects negatively on Moroccan students’ character. The suspicions also play on racialized stereotypes about the supposed laziness of immigrant students. The combination of publicly questioning both immigrant students’ competence AND claims to incompetence is a powerful way to illegitimate non-dominant students’ belonging in the classroom.

Our analysis has important implications for theorizing the processual dimensions of CC as a contested social practice within educational fields of inequality characterized by sociocultural and linguistic heterogeneity and hierarchies. The study of CC requires a dialogic approach to analyze the dynamic, socially shared but uneven, power-laden contexts within which students’ CC is performed and evaluated.

Our work demonstrates the means through which low expectations as well as a sense of difference and non-belonging are communicated to non-dominant students in schools.

Authors

• Inmaculada Maria Garcia Sanchez, Temple University

• Kristina Nasimova, Temple University