Troubling the “two” in two-way bilingual education

ABSTRACT

There is ongoing debate within the field of bilingual education concerning the extent to which instructional languages should be separated. However, neither side has sufficiently addressed how language practices and policies shape the ideological space of the classroom, and the concomitant implications for student learning and sense-making around bilingualism. This article interrogates how programmatic binaries within a second-grade two-way bilingual education (TWBE) classroom emerge in and through classroom discourse in ways that (re)enforce the ideological construction of “two” languages and “two” groups of learners. Drawing upon microethnographic discourse analysis and positioning theory, I conduct a close analysis of one illustrative classroom language event, revealing how students are discursively positioned as either Spanish-speakers/Latinos or English-speakers/Anglos. Through this analysis, I demonstrate the complexity of identity positioning in TWBE, revealing how the reification of binaries affirms Latinx student identities while simultaneously reinforcing monoglossic framings of bilingualism and overly simplistic understandings of students’ linguistic identities. Findings point to the need to critically reimagine how two-ness is constructed and negotiated in TWBE and to better account for the interrelation among classroom practices, language ideologies, and student identities.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Maggie Hawkins, Deb Palmer, Lara Handsfield, and Mike Ortiz for their generous and critical feedback on early drafts of this manuscript and to the reviewers for your careful edits and suggestions (any remaining flaws are mine alone). My deepest gratitude to the students and teacher at El Bosque who welcomed me into their classroom and allowed me to learn with/from them during the 2016-2017 school year. Finally, I am grateful for support for this work from the following sources: Phi Kappa Phi Dissertation Fellowship, Language Learning Dissertation Grant, National Federation of Modern Language Teachers’ Association (NFMLT)/Modern Language Journal (MLJ) Dissertation Award, and The International Research Foundation (TIRF) for English Language Education Doctoral Dissertation Grant.

Notes

1. As “dual language” encompasses a variety of program models, I use the term “two-way” to refer to programs that include students from both majority and minoritized language backgrounds. Following Sánchez et al. (2018), I also intentionally center bilingual to (re)engage with the politicized goals of bilingual education, often made invisible through the removal of “the B word” (Crawford, 2004) in dual language policy and practice.

2. All names of people and places are pseudonyms.

3. I use Latinx here and elsewhere as a gender-neutral alternative for Latino, Latina, and Latin@ in an effort to counter masculine normativity in the Spanish language.

4. I use “English-dominant” to denote students who primarily engaged in English outside of school, recognizing the label is an imperfect representation of students’ linguistic identities and experiences.

5. As Spanish was the designated language of instruction for math, the game was enacted entirely in Spanish.

6. Drawing from linguistic anthropology, I understand indexicality as “the connotational significance of signs” (Blommaert & Rampton, 2011, p. 5) and indexing as pointing to (or indicating) a situated social meaning within a particular context.

7. Note: One Latinx student (Camila) was not present for this lesson.