Bilingual student perspectives about language expertise in a gentrifying two-way immersion program

ABSTRACT

The two-way immersion dual language education program design includes the use of language labels to identify students as either the English speaker or the speaker of a language other than English. This paper examines four focal student and two teacher interviews to consider the ways in which the idea of a ‘language expert’ transpired during individual student retrospective interviews. Data include video and audio recordings of student and teacher interviews, classroom observations of student interactions during their kindergarten, first and second grade years. This study draws from a raciolinguistic perspective to explore how power operates in sites where the categorization of language and race are negotiated. A distinctive goal of this paper includes understanding the ways in which students were perceived by their peers and classroom teachers as language learners in order to understand how power relations operated as the school demographics were changing. Findings indicate that race was entwined with social class and language in the ways students perceived one another. Implications for teacher education programs include raising an awareness of how teachers can both mitigate and shift power relations in culturally, ethnically and linguistically diverse contexts.

KEYWORDS:

• Bilingual education
• bilingual students
• classroom discourse
• dual language immersion
• heritage languages
• identity construction

Disclosure statement

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

Notes to contributor

Suzanne García-Mateus is an assistant professor in the Department of Education and Leadership and the Director of the Monterey Institute for English Learners (M.I.E.L) at California State University - Monterey Bay. She completed her Ph.D. (2016) at The University of Texas at Austin in the Bilingual/Bicultural Program. After completing her M.A. in Elementary Education at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, she taught as a bilingual educator for six years in various bilingual education models. Her dissertation titled “She was born speaking English and Spanish! Co-constructing Identities and Exploring Children's Bilingual Practices in a Two-way Immersion Program in Central Texas won second place in the AERA Bilingual Education Research SIG outstanding dissertation awards (2018). Her education interests include examining the intersections between race, language, and class in bilingual education contexts.

Notes

1 These are terms used in TWBE contexts, but not the way I see students. I view TWBE students’ multilingualism as dynamic, varied, and dependent on context.

2 I use a lowercase ‘w’ for the label white to problematize and challenge representations of white supremacy in society and in school settings.

3 I use the term ‘heritage speaker’ because as a US born Latina I understand the struggle to revitalize and maintain the use of Spanish. Spanish is a part of Latinx students heritage despite the varying levels of proficiency they may speak.

4 The Pre-LAS tests is designed to measure expressive and receptive abilities of young children ages four to six in three linguistic components of oral language: phonology, syntax, and semantics (Duncan and DeAvila, 1985). A score of 5 indicates an advanced level of proficiency and a score of 1 indicates a beginner level of proficiency in a language.

5 I use the gender-neutral label, Latinx, to promote the concept that identity construction is not static. This article capitalizes Latinx to give credence to the struggles of a racialized group that shares cultural, political, and historical experiences.

6 Sabine and Nico were maternal cousins and had fathers that were white and spoke English.

7 In this paper, emergent bilingual is used as a general descriptor for bilingual students who are developing multiple languages.