Ongoing emergence: borderland high school DLBE students’ self-identifications as lingual people

ABSTRACT

Conceptualizations of language as translanguaging (Otheguy, García, and Reid 2015) help us to render wholeness out of languages and groups of speakers socially constructed as distinct. Yet in practice teachers are still compelled to identify students by dichotomous institutional labels for discrete proficiencies in named languages: identity labels that are inevitably hierarchical and connected to inequity. This paper examines how youth in a two-way DLBE program on the US-Mexico border conceptualized themselves and their peers quite differently – as non-dichotomous – and their bilingualism as more continuously emergent. Based on interviews in a multiyear ethnography, we argue that youths’ conceptualizations of themselves as lingual (Flores 2013) people, rather than bilingual or monolingual, English learner or English proficient, are particularly important for serving our goals of equity in DLBE at the high school level.

KEYWORDS:

• Secondary level
• dual language bilingual education
• identity
• emergent bilinguals
• English learners
• equity

Acknowledgements

We are deeply grateful to the teachers and students at MHS who generously shared their time, experiences, and expertise with us. We are also very grateful to the editors of this special issue, Laura Hamman-Ortiz and Deborah Palmer, for all of their work and guidance in bringing this paper and issue to fruition. All remaining shortcomings belong to us.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Names of people and school are pseudonyms.

2 In this paper we use the term bilingual to refer inclusively to students who use multiple languages in their lives, not specifically two languages nor with any particular proficiencies.

3 Languaging as a concept has been developed in several fields: psycholinguistics (Becker, 1991), biology/neurolinguistics (Maturana and& Varela, 1980), applied linguistics (Swain, et al., 2009), and language policy research (Shohamy, 2006).

4 Umansky (2016) did find that bilingual programs provided some protection against this negative effect of labeling.

5 We did not explicitly ask students to self-identify in terms of race/ethnicity. These identifications are based on information given in the interviews, and could differ from what students would have said if we had explicitly asked.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Katherine S. Mortimer

Katherine S. Mortimer is Associate Professor of Bilingual/Biliteracy Education at the University of Texas at El Paso. Her research focuses on equity for bilingual students, with a focus on secondary-level dual language education, language policies, and processes of social identification at school.

Gabriela Dolsa

Gabriela Dolsa is a PhD candidate at the University of Texas at El Paso. She is a former teacher and a current instructional coach in literacy/biliteracy. Her research focuses on dual language programs and translanguaging pedagogy as a decolonizing tool.