Becoming bilingual in two-way immersion: patterns of investment in a second-grade classroom

ABSTRACT

This article explores how second-grade students in a Spanish/English two-way immersion (TWI) program make sense of becoming bilingual. Drawing upon the expanded model of investment theory, I examine how and why students in this classroom “invest” in their emerging bilingualism, attending to the similarities and differences in the sense-making of Latinx students and their non-Latinx peers. Findings reveal that students across linguistic backgrounds held similar understandings of the perceived benefits of bilingualism, including bilingualism for global citizenship, to help others, and to increase their employment opportunities. Students sense-making differed, however, when it came to the uniqueness of the bilingual experience. That is, among White English home language students, there was a shared discourse of bilingual exceptionalism—their bilingualism making them ‘feel special,’ as if they had ‘a secret language’—while Latinx students framed bilingualism as a ‘normal’ phenomenon. I consider these findings in relation to systemic patterns of control and spaces of resistance and discuss implications for fostering and sustaining equitable models of bilingual education.

KEYWORDS:

• Bilingual education
• bilingual students
• ELL
• identity construction
• language ideologies
• two-way immersion

Acknowledgements

I am incredibly grateful to my special issue co-editor, Deb Palmer, and to the anonymous reviewers for your thoughtful and critical feedback on this manuscript. A special thank you to Maggie Hawkins for your guidance and support on the dissertation project upon which this paper is based. I’d also like to thank my partner Mike for his countless reviews of this manuscript. Finally, I’d like to thank the funders who supported this study: Language Learning Journal, Phi Kappa Phi, The International Research Foundation (TIRF) for English Language Education, and the National Federation of Modern Language Teachers’ Association.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 In this article, I am intentionally using the common term for this model (“two-way immersion”), although I align with critical scholars who are argue that the removal of the “b-word” (Crawford 2004) is an untethering of bilingual education from its politicized history as an issue of social justice for language minoritized communities.

2 All names of people and places are pseudonyms.

3 El Bosque offered both English and Spanish evening classes for parents.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Laura Hamman-Ortiz

Laura Hamman-Ortiz is a post-doctoral research associate at the University of Colorado-Boulder. Her research operates at the intersection of applied linguistics and bilingual education, with a focus on translanguaging practices, biliteracy pedagogies, and identity negotiation. She is also currently a Coyle Fellow with the Center for Literacy Education at the University of Notre Dame.