Confronting Intercultural Contact: Toward Coexisting Futures in (Multilingual) Language Education

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

In a world characterized by movement and connection, teaching and learning in multilingual and multicultural environments have become increasingly wrought with challenges and strife. Balancing the local and contextualized needs of multilingual learners against the more widespread and dominant pressures to participate in our post-pandemic, ever-interconnected global society has been a constant and growing task for language educators worldwide.

Inter-nested levels of language policies and the undercurrents of language ideologies shape, help, and hinder our educational goals (Kroskrity, 2000; Woolard & Schieffelin, 1994). By examining the intersections of de jure, top-down language (in) education policies as well as the mostly de facto ideas toward language (and) education from the bottom up (e.g., Schiffman, 2006), this panel explores how language educators who work in multilingual settings, who relentlessly confront and negotiate the intricacies of specific educational contexts and linguistic cultures (Schiffman, 1996), can develop situated practices that address the specific and complex needs of their students and communities (New London Group, 1996).

The first paper presents a case study of a Chinese educator working in early childhood education within a Chinese-English bilingual immersion program in the United States. By examining the challenges involved in teaching for bilingual literacy development, this study analyzes how teachers contend with distinct models of literacy instruction in a multilingual setting (and the ideas that mold them), how teachers’ transnational experiences are crucial for understanding and adapting to differences in pedagogical ideologies and practices, and how educators of Chinese as a second/foreign language might approach their students’ (pre)literacy developments. By extension, the study comments on how educators might navigate the early stages of biliteracy development and provides implications for (pre)literacy curriculum and teaching material design in early childhood language immersion programs.


The second paper applies theories from both biopolitics and linguistic anthropology to examine the multilingual ecologies within (im)migrant populations. Specifically, it combines genealogical research of policy documents and related public discourse with ethnographic fieldwork to examine the language socialization processes that both resist and reify dominant and harmful ideologies that permeate the educational spaces of multilingual newcomer programs in the United States. Furthermore, the paper untangles overlapping discourses of bilingualism and biliteracy, arguing for a reexamination of how newcomer programs are developed and governed. Students in newcomer programs are captivated by and enveloped in the promise of integration and multilingualism but, in actuality, are forced into assimilation and subtractive bilingualism due to English as lingua franca expectations and realities. It concludes with suggestions for future application of biliteracy frameworks toward understanding the student experiences of newcomer/refugee programs.

The third paper marshals both late-nineteenth-century language textbooks as well as current sociolinguistic research to interrogate how the honorifics system in Korean, one of the language’s most pervasive and vital grammatical categories, is not adequately represented in KFL education. Dependent upon the culture-specific model of social relations and hierarchies, honorifics are difficult to master for speakers of languages that do not explicitly mark these categories. Moreover, not attending to honorifics can create tensions and mishaps in interpersonal communication. The study approaches this shortcoming in bilingual development as a mismatch in communicative registers, one that might be remedied in praxis by moving from the descriptive functions of the Continua of Biliteracy (Hornberger, 1994) to its more prescriptive potentials. Further, the paper considers how the dominance of English in the global multilingual ecology can lead to educational and developmental processes that hinder cross-cultural understanding, and what design solutions might be possible to address them.


The fourth paper approaches multilingual language ideologies from a historical perspective by using textbook research methods. Tracing text selection choices and instructional recommendations in language textbooks in Taiwan, the study analyzes how textbook revisions and reissues were adjusted to model changing trends in literacy/literature education practices. It highlights how the contents of biliteracy (Hornberger & Skilton-Sylvester, 2010), in addition to other aspects, must be examined for addressing the implementational and ideological spaces (Hornberger, 2005) that textbooks create. By triangulating findings from content analyses of these textbooks designed for structured pedagogy with preliminary data collected from historical/ethnographic interviews and close readings of literary texts, this paper seeks a more nuanced understanding of textbook use in language education.

Collectively, the panel aims to address pressing issues in bilingual and multilingual education at different levels and to several different populations. Among other connections, the four papers all adopt an ecological view of language, language education praxis, and language in use, utilizing intersecting theories of language development and language pedagogy to understand current conundrums and trends, and by so doing, the panel works towards charting possible directions for language (in) education research that further advocate for both effectiveness and equity.

Sub Unit

• Language Issues SIG

Chair

• Andrew P. Wu, GSE, University of Pennsylvania

Individual Presentations

• A fusion of China and America: Chinese teachers’ experiences of teaching children Chinese literacy in the United States - Peizhu Liu, GSE, University of Pennsylvania

• Under biopolitics: Newcomer programs for refugees and their underlying language ideologies - Shiyu Jiang, Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania

• Honoring honorifics: Reimagining a true intercultural pedagogy for teaching honorific registers to learners of Korean as a foreign language - Eunsun Lee, Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania

• Developmental trends in biliteracy education policy in Taiwan: A view from textbook research - Andrew P. Wu, GSE, University of Pennsylvania

Discussant

• Daniel A Wagner, University of Pennsylvania