Bilingual investments of dual-language immersion program alumni

ABSTRACT

The article explores bilingual investments of dual-language immersion program alumni through an intersectional narrative analysis. Focusing on the experiences of bilingualism of six alumni, we investigate how they continue to be invested in bilingualism, the factors that shape their self-positionings as bilinguals, and the extent to which race is implicated in their experiences as bilingual speakers of Spanish and English. The analysis revealed that investment is not always agentive and is obligatory, and habitual – less conscious linguistic behavior. While individual efforts sustain bilingual investment, biculturalism requires a collective practice. Bilingual experiences are racialized, and raciolinguistic ideologies at home school, and society at large shape alumni’s bilingual investments. Across all findings, we discuss individual and collective similarities and differences among Hispanic/Latinx and White alumni. The article ends with implications for future research and practical recommendations for designing equitable bilingual programs.

KEYWORDS:

• Investment
• bilingual education
• linguistic disposition
• raciolinguistic ideologies
• belonging
• intersectionality

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank our study participants and the school district administrators who supported this study. We also express our gratitude to Daniella Molle and Lydia Catedral for their valuable feedback.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 We use positioning and identity interchangeably.

2 We refer to our participants as Hispanic/Latinx and White DLI alumni throughout the paper to show explicitly the racialization processes in their narrated bilingual experiences. We follow more recent conceptualization of racialization process in which race and ethnicity ‘cannot be cleanly disentangled because of the subjective, problematic, and inherently reproductive nature of their construction’ (Von Esch, Motha, and Kubota 2020, 394).

3 We put ‘native’ in quotation marks because it is a raciolinguistic term that does not reflect the sociolinguistic reality of our participants.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Madina Djuraeva

Madina Djuraeva is a Senior Post Doctoral Research Fellow at the Jeannine Rainbolt College of Education at the University of Oklahoma. Her research examines language ideologies, education, and identity in multilingual communities. She has published on issues of language policy, linguistic ownership, (non)nativeness, and morality in multilingual transnational contexts.

Diep Nguyen

Diep Nguyen is the Director of Professional Learning at WIDA housed in the Wisconsin Center for Education Research at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. Using a critical sociolinguistic lens, she focuses on language education, teachers’ ideologies, and school leadership. Her most recent work explores the role of professional learning in promoting linguistically responsive pedagogies among content teachers.

Mariana Castro

Mariana Castro is a Research Scientist and a Deputy Director of the Wisconsin Center for Education Research at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. Her research focuses on the language practices of (bi)multilingual learners, bilingual teacher pedagogy and practice, and social justice in bilingual education. She has contributed to the development of K-12 Language Proficiency Standards and Assessments in Spanish and English and is currently developing Spanish Language Arts Framework.