‘You don’t speak Spanish in the cafeteria’: an intersectional analysis of language and social constructions in a kindergarten dual language immersion class

ABSTRACT

Dual language immersion (DLI) programs have emerged in the U.S. as effective ways to bring together language minority and language majority speakers in school settings with the goal of bilingualism and bi-literacy for all. However, the proliferation of these programs has raised concerns regarding issues of inequity and dissimilar power dynamics in these spaces (Cervantes-Soon, 2014, “A Critical Look at Dual Language Immersion in the New Latin@ Diaspora.” Bilingual Research Journal 37 (1): 64–82; Flores, 2016, Do Black Lives matter in Bilingual Education [Web log post]. Accessed May 1, 2017. https://educationallinguist.wordpress.com/2016/09/11/do-black-lives-matter-in-bilingual-education/; Valdes, 1997, “Dual language immersion programs: A cautionary note concerning the education of language-minority students.” Harvard Educational Review 67: 391–430, 2018, “Analyzing the curricularization of language in two-way immersion education: Restating two cautionary notes.” Bilingual Research Journal). With this in mind, this study aims to shed light on the intricate social processes at work in DLI contexts. In particular, this paper examines first, how notions of language use, race, and ethnicity are socially constructed and intersect in DLI settings; and second, it explores how these ideas are discerned and re-shaped by young children into their own social and linguistic norms. Employing qualitative research methods, this year-long ethnographic case study uses the intersectional lens of raciolinguistics (Alim, Rickford & Ball, 2016, Raciolinguistics: how language shapes our ideas about race. New York, NY: Oxford University Press; Rosa & Flores, 2017, “Unsettling race and language: Toward a raciolinguistic perspective.” Language in Society 46 (5): 621–647), to examine the intricate cross-cutting dynamics at play in bilingual spaces. The exploration of these ideas helps to illuminate the ways in which language practices and interactions are shaped by social constructions from a very early age. Furthermore, it contributes to understandings of social perceptions and relations in multilingual/multicultural/multiethnic contemporary school settings.

KEYWORDS:

• Bilingual education
• bilingualism
• childhood bilingualism
• dual language immersion
• two-way immersion
• dual language programme

Acknowledgements

The writing of my dissertation, where the data for this paper comes from, was supported by a dissertation Fellowship from the National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation (2018). The opinions expressed in this paper do not necessarily reflect the position, policy, or endorsement of the NAEd. /Spencer Foundation. The author also wishes to thank Patricia Venegas-Weber, Bailey Smolarek, & Liv Davila for their thoughtful comments and feedback on earlier versions of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 I use the term emergent bilinguals to refer to students learning two languages following Ofelia Garcia’s line of argument, which explains that ‘calling these children emergent bilinguals makes reference to a positive characteristic—not one of being limited or being learners, as LEP and ELLs suggest’ (García 2009, 322). By using the term emergent bilinguals, I have chosen to focus on the potential of these students rather than any perceived problems or limitations.

2 Race and ethnicity are highly contested terms in the social sciences in general and they are often loosely blended in American society. The terms take on an added complexity when applied to an ethnic label like Latin@, since the category covers a range of skin pigmentations, cultural backgrounds and other sociocultural matters, and is often conflated with Hispanic. This study uses the term race as Amanda Lewis (2003) conceptualizes it— a shifting category that is socially and educationally constructed rather than biologically fixed. Ethnicity in this study denotes a category referring to ‘cultural practices and outlooks of a community, which identifies them as a distinctive social group. Ethnicity is a social phenomenon, which has no basis in human biology’ (Giddens and Sutton 2013).

3 There are other social constructions such as gender, and social class that also intersected in the studied setting. However, I chose to focus on language, race, and ethnicity because by theorizing these constructs together using a raciolinguistic lens, I was able to pay ‘particular attention to how [these] social processes mediate and mutually constitute each other’ (Alim 2016, 3).

4 All names of places and people used in this study are pseudonyms to protect the confidentiality of the participants.

5 This study uses the term Latin@ to move beyond gender binaries. Even though the most current label used in the literature is Latinx, and some people may think that the term Latin@ promotes a binary because you are either ‘o’ or ‘a’ – whereas the X denotes more options, I have chosen to keep the @ character as a symbol that represents non-conformity. In this study, the @ character doesn’t represent particular letters denoting gender, but it’s a non-specific character that symbolizes a space for individuals’ self-identification. The term denotes students who identify as being of Latin American heritage.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation.

Notes on contributors

Giselle Martinez Negrette

Giselle Martinez Negrette is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Curriculum & Instruction at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She specializes in bilingual/ESL (English as a second language) education and sociolinguistics. Her research interests center on issues of language, equity, and social justice particularly concerning the schooling of culturally and linguistically diverse children in the United States and other regions of the world.