A Critical Classroom Study of Language Oppression: Manuel and Malena’s Testimonios, “Sentía como que yo no valía nada . . . se reían de mí”

ABSTRACT

This critical classroom study of language oppression draws from the notion of existing inequalities based on power relations in education research, as addressed in a critical ethnography. This critical classroom study explores the cases of two recent immigrant students, “Manuel” and “Malena,” on the – U.S.–Mexican border near El Paso, Texas, who were attending a fifth-grade dual language class at “Border PK-5 Elementary School” (pseudonyms). This school followed a 50/50 dual immersion model from K-fourth grade. By the fifth grade in this school, 70% of the academic time was taught in English and 30% in Spanish. Documented data from observations in the classroom and students’ multimodal testimonios reveal acts of linguistic bullying against the two recent immigrants based on their underdeveloped second language, English, when self-regulated learning was at work in a cooperative learning environment.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical classroom study of language oppression
• self-regulated learning
• separation of languages
• recent immigrants
• multimodal testimonios
• hazing and linguistic bullying in education
• dual language education

In dual language education, the separation of languages is the policy that requires teachers to target one language for academic instruction without mixing in the second language (Boyle et al., 2015; Collier & Thomas, 2004; Cummins, 2005; Howard et al., 2018; Lee et al., 2008). This policy aims to foster bilingual outcomes when students learn two languages in two separate time frames (Howard et al., 2018; Lee et al., 2008). Under the dual language program, language is supposed to be used as a resource to motivate learning among students when working in cooperative groups (Kagan, 1995; Ruiz, 1984). However, this study reveals that language was also used as an oppressive tool (Bakhtin, 1981; Giltrow, 2003; Phillipson, 1992) against two recent Mexican immigrant students, “Manuel” and “Malena” (pseudonyms). These students did not receive assistance when attempting to work cooperatively with English proficient students (all of Mexican descent) in the “self-regulated dual language learning” environment (Winstead, 2013). The English proficient students made fun of the recent immigrants while they were struggling to understand academic instruction in their second language, English, and their requests for assistance in their cooperative groups (i.e., linguistic bullying).

Introduction

Focusing on the recent immigrant students’ testimonios, as informed by Latina/o Critical Race Theory (LatCrit) (Delgado, 1989; Ladson-Billings & Tate, 2006), this study uncovers counternarratives to self-regulated learning in dual language academic environments where cooperative group work should facilitate safe academic environments for all students, including recent immigrants. Delgado (1989) addresses counterstories and writes that “one can acquire the ability to see the world through other eyes” (p. 2439). Delgado points out that counterstories are new windows that reveal the realities of “out-groups,” which can challenge those in power. The counterstories in this study challenge the dominant discourse on language policy and self-regulated learning in dual language education, which could help when advocating for educational reform (Delgado, 1989; Solórzano & Yosso, 2002) to better dual language education programs for recent immigrants.

Context: the border

Borders can be historically perceived as ever-changing lines redrawn as a result of “conquest, purchase, wars, and treaties” (Staudt et al., 2010, p. xi) or as once imagined communities, as Anderson (1983) explains. Borders are not just nice literary metaphors or a “zone of differences” (Staudt, 1998; Staudt & Coronado, 2002). Borders, as Staudt (1998) posits, are “the new spaces of transformation and reflection” (p. 2). This critical classroom study of language oppression was drawn from these perspectives of the borders as the zones of differences to describe not only the differences among recent immigrants and fluent English speaking students in an American school along the U.S.–Mexican border, but also to reveal the voices of the recent immigrants. Their testimonios in this study are the counternarratives to the dominant discourse of dual language education to promote language policy modifications to assist this population of students better.

Specifically, the context of this study is the Southwestern United States, along the U.S.–Mexican border near El Paso, Texas. Staudt and Coronado (2002) define the border as “the territorial line that divides two nation-states: Mexico and the United States” and “the zone of residents who live within a radius, often drawn at 25 miles north or south of the borderline” (pp. 5, 11). The border connects the two countries geographically, and it also connects the people living on both sides of the border as well as their cultures and languages (Anzaldúa, 1987). This unique border region generates a hybrid environment where people, transfronterizos, constantly cross from Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, to El Paso to work, to visit relatives, to attend school, or simply to shop (De la Piedra & Guerra, 2012; Jimenez et al., 2009). This constant crossing brings the unique sense of a multilingual and multicultural environment (Mendez & Staudt, 2013) that helps create an English–Spanish community where both languages are part of the hybridity of culture in El Paso, Texas.

Literature review

Bullying and hazing in this critical classroom study were two different behaviors observed, based on power relations (Bakhtin, 1981; Carspecken, 1996; Phillipson, 1992). The hazing took place when the recent immigrants intended to belong to a group of students working cooperatively in the dual language classroom. In the cooperative group, the students who were more proficient in English hazed the new students by ridiculing, embarrassing, and humiliating them (Cimino, 2011; Essex, 2014; Tingley et al., 2018) when attempting to work with the group. Consequently, the recent immigrant students felt marginalized and isolated, according to the analyzed data shown later. In this context, hazing was the act that initiated linguistic bullying when the perpetrators intentionally, and repetitively, used English language abilities to continue harming the new students. Linguistic bullying is the main focus of this study. From the analyzed data, this behavior was prevalent in the first two years the recent immigrant students attended the new school in the U.S. Linguistic bullying against one of the two recent immigrants was observed during the investigation; by the third year this student attended the new school in the U.S.

Bullying is an act of oppression and has become a focus for psychological investigation (Atlas & Pepler, 1998; Craig & Pepler, 1995, 1998; Olweus, 1991). Bullying in schools has become an issue that also has attracted education researchers and school administrators’ attention in the last decades (Bauman, 2008; Beran & Shapiro, 2005). Additionally, bullying in school has become a concern in countries outside the U.S., such as Scandinavian nations (Olweus, 1997), Canada (Atlas & Pepler, 1998; Craig et al., 2000), Australia (Bauman, 2008; Jadambaa et al., 2019), the United Kingdom (Rivers et al., 2009), Israel (Gumpel et al., 2014), and Japan (Craig et al., 2000).

Solberg and Olweus (2003) observed three aspects of bullying in education: “the intention to harm the victim, the repetitive nature of bullying, and the imbalance in power between the victim and the perpetrator(s)” (p. 245). However, much of the reviewed psychological literature on bullying in education deemphasized language issues, which are the focus of this investigation. Language issues are crucial to address, especially for recent immigrants attending dual language classes where their first language is minimized and cannot be used to scaffold second language acquisition. This experience can create an added stressor for recent immigrants and can affect their adaptation to a new learning environment (Portes & Rumbaut, 2007; Suarez-Orozco et al., 2009). Zou and Trueba (1998) and Suarez-Orozco et al. (2009) explained the experiences immigrants face when entering a new country, the challenge of confronting a new culture, and learning a new language.

Most of the studies that have addressed bullying in schools are based on quantitative approaches where researchers used questionnaires and surveys for gathering data (Olweus, 1991, 1993; Solberg & Olweus, 2003). Researchers who adopted quantitative methods used frequencies and percentages to analyze and reveal the relation of bullying to other variables, such as gender differences (Fox et al., 2014), ethnic background (Springgs et al., 2007), cultural sensitivity and language accent (Martinsen et al., 2014), and emotional perceptions, using questionnaires that were translated into numbers and patterns (Solberg & Olweus, 2003). However, there are relatively few works that have adopted qualitative approaches to bullying in school. Some of the few studies that addressed bullying in education with qualitative approaches were Atlas and Pepler (1998), Craig et al. (2000), and Gumpel et al. (2014).

Atlas and Pepler (1998) measured the prevalence and origin of bullying in a public school in Toronto, Canada. The authors adopted a qualitative approach to gather data by observing students’ interactions in the classroom. The authors classified the obtained information by patterns and frequencies, converting qualitative data into quantitative. The teachers categorized the participating students as aggressive or non-aggressive. On the other hand, Gumpel et al. (2014) conducted an ethnographic study with 10th-grade remedial classes in Israel to investigate more about bullying in education. Gumpel et al. presented the findings by making connections between their observations to the interviews with students’ responses about their perception as bullies or as victims. In this ethnographic study, the victims were the “weak” students who were perceived as different.

This paper seeks to fill in the gap in the body of literature that has addressed language as an oppressive tool (Bakhtin, 1981; Giltrow, 2003; Phillipson, 1992), such as cases in which language had been used to harass minority students with offensive verbal acts of discrimination among high school students (Rosenbloom & Way, 2004), to generate shame among ESL nursing students (Colosimo & Xu, 2006), and to maintain social inequities using speech and literacy (Bartlett, 2007). This study fills the gap in education research, examining language as an oppressive tool. No work has thoroughly addressed recent immigrants’ emotions when attending classes where their second language can be used as a tool for linguistic oppression and bullying. This gap is crucial to address, especially in those academic environments where most of the students share similar ethnic backgrounds, and educators assume that “self-regulated learning” (Zimmerman & Schunk, 1989) and cooperative learning can work effortlessly under this educational environment.

There is a need in academia to document the voices of the victims of bullying in education. This study addresses this need in research by revealing the recent immigrants’ counternarratives regarding their experiences of acquiring a second language in a dual language classroom where self-regulated learning is essential. Their testimonios, as used by LatCrit, revealed how the separation of languages policy and self-regulated learning can create a hostile environment for recent immigrant students in elementary education where “language stratification” exists (Bakhtin, 1981). Bakhtin explains that the dominant language is at the top of a stratified system where the languages at the bottom are considered less valued. Testimonios in this study were used to facilitate the sharing of recent immigrants’ experiences when immersed in a new language where the separation of languages policy, self-regulated learning, and cooperative learning were strategies applied in a dual language classroom. The English proficient students used the English language to devalue the recent immigrants’ unsuccessful efforts to pursue assistance in their second language, English, as addressed later.

As defined by Saavedra (2011), testimonio is a “Latin American literacy genre that has been used by individuals to tell a collective story and history of oppression through the narrative of an individual” (p. 261). Saavedra used testimonios to allow her students to share their experiences throughout the curriculum. Beverly (2005) agreed with Saavedra and claimed that a testimonio is an “affirmation of authority of personal experience” (p. 548). Calderón et al. (2012) proposed using testimonios as one of the methodologies for decolonization that could address inequities and break up silences and injustices when looking for social changes to disrupt dominance. According to Elenes (2011), the process of decolonization as a research method “is not to recover the silenced voices by using hegemonic categories of analysis, but to change the methodological tools and categories to reclaim those neglected voices” (p. 60). The testimonios in this study were multimodal (multimodal testimonios), a theoretical construct I introduced to research when the recent immigrants expressed orally, wrote in their journals, and represented in drawing their testimonios during the focus group sessions.

In this study, I drew from the use of testimonios, as used by LatCrit, to give voice to the oppressed. LatCrit is an extension of Critical Race Theory (CRT). CRT adopts testimonios as a method that enables the researcher to show the voices of oppressed people of color. Pérez Huber (2009) explained that testimonios can lead to the best understanding of people of color and their schooling experiences as testimonios contextualize the individual within the collective. Delgado Bernal et al. (2012) explained that LatCrit’s use of testimonios is a methodological approach that includes “political, social, historical, and cultural histories that accompany one’s life experiences” (p. 364). A similarity between CRT and LatCrit is that the two theories challenge dominant ideologies that oppress minorities (Pérez Huber, 2009; Solórzano & Delgado Bernal, 2001). However, the difference between CRT and LatCrit is that LatCrit addresses issues that are being neglected by CRT, such as language, immigration, ethnicity, culture, identity, phenotype, and sexuality (Pérez Huber, 2009; Solórzano & Delgado Bernal, 2001). Immigration and language are issues addressed in this study.

Methodology

A critical classroom study was conducted, drawn from the notion of a critical ethnography, as used by Carspecken (1996), to investigate the power relations inequalities observed in dual language classrooms. This study aimed to explore recent immigrants’ schooling experiences when acquiring a second language in hostile academic environments where the immigrants’ second language was used as a tool of power and domination. These power relations inequalities are referred to as linguicisms by Phillipson (1992). The author explains that “Linguicism involves the representation of the dominant language, to which desirable characteristics are attributed, for purposes of inclusion, and the opposite to dominant languages, for purposes of exclusion” (p. 55).

Participant observation, ethnographic field notes, interviews, and multimodal testimonios during the focus groups were the tools used for gathering data. Multimodal testimonios and focus groups were added to this critical classroom study to facilitate the recent immigrants’ externalization of their experiences when immersed in a new language while attending dual language classes. Students’ testimonios enhanced this critical ethnography research-based study. The recent immigrants were able to discuss, agree, and corroborate the inequalities of power relations observed in the dual language classroom when sharing similar experiences through their testimonios. According to Carspecken (1996), for data generation under critical qualitative research, “conversing intensively with the subjects of one’s study through special techniques of interviewing and the use of discussion groups” is critical under this theoretical frame” (p. 42).

Ethnography, according to Emerson et al. (1995), involves entering a particular social site with the primary intention of getting to know the people that are involved in this community. Emerson et al. claimed that “the ethnographer participates in the daily routines of this setting, develops ongoing relations with the people in it and observes” (p. 1). Under this paradigm, the researcher provides a thick description of the social events in writing (Carspecken, 1996; Emerson et al., 1995). The notion of critical ethnography and the use of qualitative research tools applied under this critical classroom study took place when inequalities were observed in dual language classrooms based on power relations (Carspecken, 1996). The power relations inequalities were observed between English proficient and recent immigrant students when the recent immigrant students did not benefit from self-regulated learning in the cooperative groups.

This critical classroom study was drawn from a critical ethnography approach when examining the recent immigrants’ new experiences in classrooms where the students and teachers became a new community. This community is a new culture (Canagarajah, 1993) where equity among the recent immigrants and English language proficient students is questioned. This critical qualitative research study became embedded in language oppression when linguistic bullying was observed from multimodal sources of data: from observations in the classroom and from student participants’ testimonios in writing, drawing, and oral expression during the focus groups. Carspecken (1996) points out that critical ethnography is suitable for the researcher interested in critical issues that involve power relations. This study involves power relations between linguistically advanced students in English and recent immigrant students. Language proficiency was a tool used for bullying two recent immigrant students, Manuel and Malena, based on their underdeveloped English language acquisition.

Drawing from the use of multimodal testimonios as a genre for free expression, this study adopted this qualitative tool as one of the methods to collect data. In this critical qualitative classroom study of language oppression, multimodal testimonios were used to help the recent immigrants voice their new schooling experiences when learning a second language. Multimodal testimonios were communicated by the participants through writing, drawing, and orally sharing during focus groups. Kamberelis and Dimitriadis (2005) suggest the use of focus groups as a research methodology that is based on inquiry and broadly define the focus groups as “collective conversations or group interviews” (p. 887). The authors describe that focus groups allow participants to share their own experiences in a natural environment that forms part of their social life through “conversations, group discussions, negotiations, and the like” (p. 887).

Participants

This critical classroom study of language oppression took place in the participating elementary school for five months, from February to June 2014. Four focus groups were conducted with six recent immigrants from Mexico (who had resided for about two years in a community near El Paso, Texas, and attended dual language classes) throughout the study. The participants were: two first-grade students, a third-grade student, one fourth-grade student, and two fifth-grade students. Five of the participant students were from Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico (including the two participants of this study, Manuel and Malena), and one of them was from Chihuahua, Chihuahua, México. For this study, the cases of the two fifth-grade students, Manuel and Malena, are presented. These recent immigrant students experienced linguistic bullying in their new school, as documented in this study. The two students were 11 years old at the time of the investigation.

Focus groups

The interviews with students in the focus groups took place in the participating school during school hours and were audio-recorded. The multimodal testimonios from oral sharing (audio recorded), writings, and drawings generated during the focus groups were documented. The focus group sessions with the participant students took place in the mornings at the school library at 7:45 am., 15 minutes before classes started, and ended at 8:40 am. The questions for the discussions, posed in Spanish, were regarding the recent immigrants’ schooling experiences when learning English. These students discussed and answered the questions in their first language, Spanish.

Observations and interviews

Participant observation in this classroom took place, given that the researcher is the primary instrument for doing ethnographic research (Carspecken, 1996; Emerson et al., 1995; LeCompte & Schensul, 2010). I conducted 240 hours of participant observation in the participating school’s classroom throughout the five months of the fieldwork (three hours per day, four days per week). Additionally, the participant students’ fathers and three of their teachers were interviewed individually regarding the recent immigrants’ new schooling experiences (30–45 minutes per interview). All of the participant students’ teachers were of Mexican descent (two female and one male), including their fifth-grade teacher, “Mrs. Vidal” (pseudonym).

Positionality: an insider

Positionality is very significant when doing fieldwork. It helps researchers admit their privileges and biases that might make them disapprove of “the power structures that surround our subject” (Madison, 2012, p. 8). Carspecken (1996) writes that an insider is familiar with diverse cultures and highlights the fact that being an insider “is the best way to assess universalizing claims and thus to stop the wordings of cultural power” (p. 145). Wolcott (2008) urges ethnographers to present participants’ own words to make the study a more accurate way to show someone else’s story, especially when one adopts the insider position. Being an insider, an immigrant who experienced struggles when confronting a new culture in a new country, facilitated the researcher understand the recent immigrants’ experiences, such as crossing borders and learning a new language. Being an insider researcher presenting students’ own words, and using their testimonios from a multimodal approach, also made it easier to present more accurately the recent immigrants’ new schooling experiences where oppression took place.

The classroom

The classroom was located by the cafeteria and near the school’s library. Along the center of the door was a narrow window. There was a colored curtain with flowers and leaves adorning the small window. Upon entering the classroom by the door, was a desk with a projector, science objects, such as jars with sand, and graded papers to the side. Standing at the door, to the right and left of the classroom were two blackboards against the walls with notes and the agenda of the day with the academic standards to be covered. There were also signs written mainly in English and few of the signs were in Spanish. Looking straight from the door of the classroom was the teacher’s main desk, which had some family pictures and more graded papers on it. Two cabinets with shelves were near the sides of the main desk against the walls. On top of one of the cabinets was a transparent bowl made of plastic that held differently colored marbles that the fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Vidal, used as an incentive for giving rewards to students with good behavior. When the students worked well in their groups, the teacher would fill the bowl with marbles until they reached the top. At the end of the six weeks, when teachers turned in grades, the students would earn an ice cream party for the class if the bowl were full. If the bowl began to empty at some point in the six weeks between turning in grades, it was because students were loud, or because some of them had forgotten to do the homework.

The desks for students were setup into five groups of four. On the walls were science projects and classroom rules in English. On the boards were the academic subjects’ notes from the day written in English. In the back of the classroom were shelves with Spanish, English, and bilingual dictionaries. There were also textbooks for all the subjects. At the center of a wall by Mrs. Vidal’s desk was a round table with assignments, vocabulary words, and more books for students to read during Language Arts.

Cooperative work occurred frequently in Mrs. Vidal’s classroom. I observed that after the teacher delivered the lessons at the beginning of each academic subject, students were assigned to work and help one another in their groups. Students used translanguaging strategies (García & Sylvan, 2011) when working cooperatively and when using any resources available to facilitate and demonstrate their learning while helping one another, using both languages. I observed and documented that the teacher used translanguaging strategies to explain academic concepts in Spanish whereas the rest of the lesson was delivered in English. For example, during a science lesson, Mrs. Vidal asked students, “¿Cómo se debe de ver su half-moon in the cycle? Remember the balls, and their positions para recibir la luz del sol” [How is the half-moon supposed to look like in the cycle? Remember the balls, and their positions to receive the light from the sun].

In this fifth-grade classroom, according to Mrs. Vidal, 70% of the academic instruction was given in English, and Spanish was minimized to 30% of the instructional time, even though from Kinder – Fourth grade, the school followed a 50/50 dual language model where students received 50% of the academic instruction in English, and 50% in Spanish. Mrs. Vidal revealed that by the fifth grade, the participating school focused more on English instruction than Spanish. The teacher explained that by the fifth-grade level, the students “are getting ready to move on to middle school where the focus is more in English. That is one of the main objectives, by the end of fifth grade, to help students acquire more English. By the time they have to leave, they have learned enough English to not struggle in middle school” (personal communication, March 7, 2014).

During the observations, I noted that Mrs. Vidal assisted students primarily in English when they needed academic support. However, I also observed that she did use Spanish for translating to students when needed, and she used translanguaging strategies when teaching in English, as previously shown. This statement is consistent with what Mrs. Vidal explained regarding the distribution of English and Spanish instruction in this classroom, as mentioned before. In this classroom, the teacher focused on academic instruction mostly in English and waited to instruct in Spanish until she was called for assistance. I did not observe the teacher monitoring group work. Active monitoring is an essential characteristic of cooperative learning where students are the center of learning (Kagan, 1995). During the cooperative work, the teacher worked at her desk, grading papers, or organizing the next subjects’ assignments.

Separation of languages and self-regulated learning: the counternarratives

Self-regulated learning and cooperative learning in dual language education are essential practices and can help construct meaningful learning environments when students work and help one another in small heterogeneous groups (Kagan, 1995). Peers in a dual language classroom are crucial resources in self-regulated learning and a vital aspect of cooperative learning (Kagan, 1995; Ruiz, 1984). These pedagogical practices are essential when the policy of the separation of languages restricts the use of minority students’ primary language and emphasizes academic instruction in their second language. As a result, recent immigrant students must communicate with peers, who are the resources of learning, for getting assistance in the recent immigrants’ first language. However, not all dual language teachers are adept at managing such essential practices in dual language education. When teachers are not capable of managing self-regulated and cooperative learning in dual language classrooms, these practices can create tension, isolation, and stress among the recent immigrants. These unfortunate events can occur when these students are not able to receive support from the English proficient students or the teacher in a cooperative learning environment, as shown in the results of this critical classroom study.

The separation of languages policy eliminates using second languages as a resource for teaching (Ruiz, 1984) when focusing only on a target language; that is, the two languages are not to mix. When focusing mainly on English instruction and replacing the teachers’ academic assistance of recent immigrant students in their first language with English proficient students in the cooperative groups, the power over language begins. Self-regulated learning can create a sense of hostility when students are assigned to assist the recent immigrants and refuse to help, making fun of the recent immigrants’ struggles to understand academic instruction in English. This practice in dual language education facilitates relying on English proficient students, trusting that recent immigrants are being assisted by the group members when they are not, as shown in this study. This problem is especially critical to address when English proficient students and recent immigrant students share a similar ethnic background and language. Under this classroom’s demographics, the students who are proficient in English can be unwilling to assist, even though it is expected that the recent immigrants are getting the support they need in their cooperative groups.

When the recent immigrants shared their new schooling experiences during the focus groups, Malena explained that her fourth-grade teacher, “Mr. Godina” (pseudonym), was the only one assisting her when she started attending the new school. Manuel revealed that when he was a new student in the school attending the third grade, his teacher, “Mrs. Segovia” (pseudonym) did not help him sufficiently.

Manuel explained:

Manuel:

A veces en tercero me iba con la maestra y al principio ella me ayudaba. A veces me decía: “Acabalo tú solo” y le decía a mis compañeros que me ayudaran, pero no me querían ayudar.” [Sometimes when I was in 3rd grade I used to go with the teacher, and she would help me. Sometimes she would tell me: Finish it by yourself, and she asked my classmates to help me, but they did not want to help] (personal communication, May 2, 2014).

Malena also explained:

El primer día no entendía nada. No tenía amigos que me lo explicaran. O sea que yo nada más levanté la mano, porque nos dijeron: “Any questions?” Y yo nomas la levanté [riéndose]. Y mi maestro me dijo: “¿Si Chiquita?” Y yo le dije, “¿Qué es eso? … ¿Qué dijo?” Me lo explicó en español, pero también me dijo que era una clase de inglés y que no podía estar hablando mucho en español [The first day of school I did not understand anything. I did not have any friends that could explain to me what the lectures were about. I only raised my hand because the teacher asked: “Any questions?” And I just raised my hand [laughing]. And my teacher asked me: “Yes, little one?” And I asked, “What is that? … What did you say?” He explained it to me in Spanish, but also told me that he would not be able to talk too much in Spanish] (personal communication, May 2, 2014).

This data showed that Malena and Manuel were ignored by their group members when they asked for their support in Spanish during their first year in this school. It also showed that Mr. Godina was the teacher who helped the recent immigrants more than other teachers and made them feel comfortable. However, Mrs. Segovia, Manuel’s third-grade teacher, was not always willing to help him and would send him to ask for help from his group members, who then refused to assist him, as shown in the next excerpts of data.

Language oppression was sustained through the application of the separation of languages policy and self-regulated learning in dual language education. The English proficient students were able to haze the recent immigrant students after having power over these students in the cooperative groups. Hazing initiated the unfortunate instances of linguistic bullying. Hazing occurred when the English proficient students took advantage of the empowerment they had to humiliate and embarrass the recent immigrant students. Linguistic bullying also occurred when the English proficient students used language as an oppressive tool (Bakhtin, 1981) to repeatedly harm the recent immigrant students. These unfortunate incidents arose when the teacher was not able to include Spanish as part of the instruction, when most of the instruction was in English, and when the teacher asked the recent immigrants to look for help within their groups, such as in the case of Manuel. The recent immigrants were not receiving language support in the academic environment where linguistic bullying took place. The recent immigrants expressed their unfortunate experiences when English was used as an oppressive tool against them when the teacher was unaware of the problem in the self-regulated learning academic environment. Olweus (1993) points out that the parents and teachers of victims of bullying are unaware of the incidents because students who have been bullied by their classmates do not talk about these unfortunate experiences with anyone.

Manuel listened to Malena very carefully in the focus group. Without being asked, he extended the conversation by sharing his similar experiences. The goal of conducting focus groups is to foster a natural social environment through conversations or group discussions (Kamberelis & Dimitriadis, 2005). The participants agreed with one another regarding their feelings toward their new schooling experiences in a different country. They shared their experiences of not having any friends or academic support in their first language, Spanish, when working in groups, which both of the participants believed was necessary for understanding the lessons and assignments they had to accomplish, as shown later. The students demonstrated feelings of frustration and isolation to the point of crying when the English proficient students refused to assist them and they did not even have the support of the teacher who instead insisted on sending them to ask the group members, as shown in the following excerpts of data from the focus groups:

R:

Me dijiste que a veces llorabas ¿Por eso llorabas? [You told me that sometimes you used to cry. Is that why you used to cry?]

Manuel:

Sí. Porque no me querían ayudar. [Yes, because nobody wanted to help me.]

R:

¿Y les preguntabas? [And you asked them?]

Manuel:

Sí. Les preguntaba, pero a veces no me querían ayudar. [Yes. I asked them, but sometimes they did not want to help.]

R:

Y cuando no te querían ayudar, ¿qué hacías? [What would you do when nobody wanted to help you?]

Manuel:

Le preguntaba a la maestra y ella sí me ayudaba poquito al principio, pero después ya no. [I used to ask the teacher, and at the beginning she used to help me a little, but then she did not help anymore.]

R:

¿Y tú, Malena? ¿Cuál era la razón por la que llorabas? [And you, Malena? Why did you cry?]

Malena:

Porque ya no lo podía soportar. Porque a mí tampoco me ayudaban. [I cried because I could not handle it anymore. Because they did not want to help me either.]

R:

¿No te querían ayudar al principio? ¿Y qué les decías? [They did not want to help you at the beginning? And what did you tell them?]

Malena:

Ayuda, ¡por favor! [Help, please!]

The previous scenario is an example of language oppression, as defined by Bakhtin (1981). Bakhtin explains that to keep power among other languages, the mainstream language is placed at the top of a stratified system to control other languages, which are considered to be less important. In this case, the students who began attending dual language classes in kindergarten were more advanced in their English knowledge by the time they began the fifth grade. These students used their English proficiency to bully (i.e., linguistic bullying) the recent immigrants who needed assistance to be given in their first language, Spanish. Language oppression occurred when the recent immigrants received academic instruction under both flexible and rigid approaches to separating languages and when the teacher also did not monitor cooperative group work in a self-regulated learning environment.

It is essential to mention that in this study, these unfortunate situations of hazing and bullying against the recent immigrant students happened in the later grades (i.e., third, fourth, and fifth grades). The two participating recent immigrant students attending a first-grade dual language class during the investigation (not included in this study) did not experience hazing or bullying. When asking Manuel and Malena what the reason they thought would be for the first graders not experiencing bullying, Malena answered, “Yo creo que es porque a nuestra edad, ellos piensan que ya debemos de saber en inglés. Por eso se burlan” [They think that at our age we should be able to know how to speak in English. That is why they make fun of us]. Nodding his head, Manuel agreed with Malena. Malena and Manuel were able to use their point of view about “critical issues” (Canagarajah, 1993; Carspecken, 1996) that were happening in their school. The students were able to perceive inequities of power relations in their classroom (Carspecken, 1996), where the dominant language was used as a tool for oppressing minoritized languages (Bakhtin, 1981; Giltrow, 2003). The recent immigrants became conscious of language oppression through the focus group discussions and externalized their feelings toward their unfortunate schooling experiences, as revealed next.

Malena’s counterstories: her feelings, “Sentía como que yo no valía nada … Se reían de mí”

As documented, Malena had a hard time getting used to the new school in the U.S. according to her father, “Mr. Hernandez” (pseudonym), and her previous fourth-grade teacher, Mr. Godina. They explained that Malena would sometimes run away crying from the classroom to the restroom. Mr. Godina pointed out that she was “very smart, but very sensitive, and always crying” and was having a hard time adapting to the new school (personal communication, March 5, 2014). Mr. Hernandez felt responsible for Malena’s hard time. He explained: “It was my fault. I did not prepare Malena for the new challenge. I thought she would be able to cope with the change like my oldest daughter did” (interview, March 4, 2014); his oldest daughter entered middle school two years before Malena moved with her father to a community near El Paso.

Olweus (1993) claims that victims of bullying do not reveal being bullied to their parents or teachers. Malena never told her teacher or father about her experiences being bullied by her classmates during her first and second years attending the new school. The students ignored Malena when she asked for assistance in her first language and made fun of her because she did not know English, as shown below. None of Malena’s teachers were able to detect these types of aggression against the recent immigrant student when the students worked cooperatively. When I asked if she had ever observed or known about bullying against the recent immigrant students, Mrs. Vidal, the fifth-grade teacher, responded without hesitation: “Never. That does not happen in my classroom” (personal communication, March 7, 2014).

Malena expressed her frustrations of not receiving help from students and being made fun of because she did not know English. She first mentioned her feelings about her treatment when the two recent immigrant students were proposed to be part of the investigation. After the first observations in the classrooms, I formally started gathering the student participants for the research study. I began by observing and asking for information about the recent immigrants in the dual language classrooms who fulfilled the requirements for the study: immigrants from Mexico who had resided in communities near El Paso for about two years and were attending the participating school in dual language classes. I asked the administrator and the teachers for information about potential participants. As recent immigrants were identified, I asked their teachers to allow me talking to the prospective participant students regarding the research and my interest in their participation in the study.

Before class on March 5th, 2014, I asked the teacher if it was possible to talk to Malena and Manuel about the study. The fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Vidal, agreed and asked them to go to the hallway outside of the classroom to talk with me. I began the conversation by describing the focus of the investigation regarding recent immigrants’ schooling experiences in a new school when learning a second language. Then, I informed Malena and Manuel that I was interested in them being participants of the study.

After explaining the study to the students and without any prompting on my part, Malena expressed her feelings regarding her academic experiences with students who used to laugh at her because she did not know English. She also explained that it was even worse because students were unwilling to help: “Lo que yo puedo decir es que me sentía muy mal … . Sentía como que yo no valía nada. Se reían de mí [crying]” [What I can say is that I felt awful … . I felt like I was not worth anything. They laughed at me (crying)] (personal communication, March 5, 2014). Malena’s distress regarding her initial experiences when immersed in the new language was so profound that, she broke into tears and externalized her feelings even though no questions had been asked about her recent experiences of attending the new school. Afterward, during a focus group session, Malena reiterated in a drawing that she was bullied by classmates who did not want to assist her and made fun of her (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Malena expressed that nobody wanted to help and made fun of her.

Malena wrote, “Yo me cambié de la escuela, pero me sentía muy avergonzada porque no entendía nada de lo que me decían y no tenía amigos que me lo explicaran” [I moved to a new school, but I felt so embarrassed because I did not understand anything they said, and I did not have any friends who could explain it to me].

In drawing and writing, Malena’s testimonio corroborates what she expressed on the first day I spoke to her. Malena’s drawing conveys that she felt “avergonzada” [ashamed] because she did not understand what the classmates were talking about, and it was even worse because she did not have any friends who would assist her. She drew some students laughing at her (Figure 1). For the second time, Malena expressed her feelings, now in drawing, about being bullied in her new school. The drawing shows how students used to make fun of her because she did not know how to speak English. As shown in the illustration, the students not only refused to assist Malena. They also contributed to her isolation. She explained, “I felt so ashamed because I did not understand anything they said, and I did not have any friends who could explain to me.” Malena drew herself apart from (to the left) the other students standing together and making fun of and laughing at her. In the speech bubbles, she wrote, “Ha, ha,” pointing out how the students made fun of her. The application of multimodal testimonios during focus groups helped students to express their linguistic bullying experiences in their new school and revealed the unheard voices of people of color (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 2006). Discussions generated during the focus group sessions disclosed oppression as the recent immigrant students became “conscious of the oppression” (Bakhtin, 1981; Freire, 2000; Giltrow, 2003) when sharing their similar experiences of being bullied by their group members in the cooperative group.

Figure 2 is an additional excerpt from Malena’s journal used during the second focus group. The question addressed on this day was about who helped the students understand instructions given in English when they were not able to understand English. According to Malena, her fourth-grade teacher, Mr. Godina, was the only one who supported her. She reiterated her answer in the Figure 2 drawing where she expressed that she did not have any friends to assist her. She drew herself smiling when asking Mr. Godina for academic support. Malena also drew him explaining something to her, as seen in the speech bubble stating, “bla, bla.” Malena drew herself responding that it was okay, meaning that she finally understood what to do because the teacher used her native language to explain.

Figure 2. Malena did not have any friends to help her in the classroom, only Mr. Godina.

Malena wrote: No tenía a nadie que me ayudara. Solo el maestro es el que me podía a ayudar porque no tenía nadie que me ayudara o amigas [I did not have anybody to help me. Only the teacher was the one who would help me because I did not have anybody who could help me or friends].

Figures 1 and 2 reveal how the English proficient students used language as a tool for oppressing the disadvantaged recent immigrant students, who needed their support to understand academic instruction in the new language. During the second focus group, Malena reaffirmed, through her multimodal testimonios, that her classmates refused to assist her and made fun of her instead. The students were empowered by their more advanced English proficiency to oppress Malena and made fun of her because she did not understand academic instruction in her second language, English. Language oppression acts as a hegemonic system where language stratification exists (Bakhtin, 1981). Language oppression was sustained by the practice of self-regulated learning in a cooperative learning environment where the teacher followed the separation of languages policy and did not monitor group work. These approaches to teaching were supported by the dual language program and by the district of the participating school where the teachers, from the recent immigrants’ testimonios, failed to assist or to make sure the immigrants’ peers in the cooperative group were supporting them in their struggles in understanding what to do in English.

Malena’s affective schooling experiences: linguistic bullying or “We English … You Spanish”

The dates for the 2014 math and reading portions of standardized tests were set to take place less than a month from this particular day of observations. On this occasion, I observed that the teacher reviewed the practice test for reading assigned for students to go over as homework a day before. Malena reviewed the practice test in Spanish while the other students did it in English. Mrs. Vidal explained that Malena was not ready for taking the standardized test in English and was allowed to take it in her native language, Spanish. According to Mrs. Vidal, Manuel was ready to take the test in English and was provided with the study guide in his second language, English.

I sat down close to Malena’s group to observe and to take notes. I noted that Malena answered the review questions taken from the practice book in Spanish while the rest of the students were using the English version. Next to Malena’s group was a female student who frequently made “smart remarks” with the other students. This student noticed that Malena was answering the questions in Spanish as well and quietly called Malena’s attention. When Malena turned to see the classmate calling her attention, the classmate laughingly remarked, “We English … . You Spanish.” When I noticed the student talking to Malena, I also saw a look of satisfaction on the bully’s face. The student smiled when she spoke and kept staring at Malena. Her face seemed to challenge Malena, and she kept her head up high. On the other hand, Malena looked uncomfortable with the student’s comment. Her eyes seemed very sad, and she did not say anything back to her classmate. I noticed Malena sighing and trying her best not to cry. Since I sat very close to Malena’s group, I was able to see her eyes start to tear. Afterward, Malena focused her attention on the teacher, but she still looked sad. The bully was aware that someone had witnessed the incident. However, she did not seem to be afraid or ashamed of humiliating Malena. The bully used language as an oppressive power (Bakhtin, 1981; Phillipson, 1992) to discriminate against Malena, who was provided with Spanish material for the test review while everybody else reviewed the material in English.

According to Malena’s oral testimonio, even though it was her second year attending this school, she was still a target of linguistic bullying because she struggled with her second language, English. I also observed “language oppression” (Bakhtin, 1981) when classmates used language to marginalize and make Malena feel less important than those who dominated English because she did not speak English fluently. In this study, language oppression differs from linguistic bullying in that language oppression is the systematic way of applying the separation of languages policy among linguistically disadvantaged students who worked in a self-regulated learning environment where more linguistically advanced students were assigned to support the recent immigrants. However, the linguistically advanced students took advantage of the teacher’s empowerment to assist the students in need (the recent immigrants), making them feel inferior. Language oppression refers to the stratification of language in the classroom, where the dominant language is at the top of a stratified system, and minority languages are at the bottom and are devalued, according to Bakhtin (1981). In this dual language classroom, linguistic bullying occurred when the English proficient students committed aggressive acts using their language proficiency to harm the recent immigrants with “the intention to harm the victim, the repetitive nature of bullying, and the imbalance in power between the victim and the perpetrator(s)” (Solberg & Olweus, 2003, p. 245).

Manuel’s conterstories: his feelings, “Sentía como que no me querían”

“Mr. Mora” explained that his son, Manuel, struggled to get used to the new school. Mr. Mora stated that Manuel used to cry for his mother and family who lived in Ciudad Juárez, and did not want to go to school in a community located near El Paso where his father lived. (Manuel’s parents were divorced.) According to Mr. Mora, “He used to cry because he wanted to be with his mother. Every Sunday, when it was the time to come back to school close to El Paso, he would be crying and asking if he could stay in Juárez” (personal communication, March 4, 2014). Mr. Mora was also unaware of what Manuel was going through in the classroom when he was being bullied. The collected data demonstrated that not only did Manuel cry for his family in Mexico, but he would also cry because he was bullied at school. Once again, in Manuel’s case and similarly to Malena’s, he did not communicate to his father that he was bullied in his new school. Such findings are consistent with research that reveals parents’ unawareness about the problem of bullying against their children at school (Olweus, 1993).

Manuel’s third-grade teacher, Mrs. Segovia (the English teacher), was also unaware of the aggression problem against Manuel in the form of bullying in her classroom. When interviewing the teacher, she explained that Manuel always cried in class. The teacher also explained that it was because he missed his mother. Mrs. Segovia knew that Manuel’s parents were divorced, and that Manuel had moved with his father to an area near El Paso after the school year had already started (when he began the third grade). This statement was also consistent with what Mr. Mora said about Manuel. He explained that his son cried because he wanted to be with his mother. However, Manuel’s reason for crying was not only because he missed his family, but also because he felt sad, embarrassed, isolated, and bullied when students did not want to help him and instead made fun of him, according to the findings from this critical classroom study. During one of the focus groups, Manuel explained:

R:

Entonces al principio tus amiguitos cuando les pedías ayuda, ¿no te querían ayudar? [Then, at the beginning when you asked your friends for help, they did not want to help you?]

Manuel:

No.

R:

Y ¿eso te hacía sentir triste? [And that made you feel sad?]

Manuel:

Sentía como que no me querían. [I felt like they did not like me.]

R:

Y ¿qué es lo que hacían cuando no podías decir algo en inglés? [And what did they say when you were not able to say something in English?]

Manuel:

Cuando yo decía algo mal todos se reían. [When I said something wrong, everybody would laugh at me.]

R:

¿Y cómo te sentías? [And how did you feel?]

Manuel:

Muy mal. [Really bad].

During the focus groups, Manuel explained that when he was attending his first year of school in the U.S., he was sad to the point of crying because nobody wanted to help him.

I asked if he told the teacher about it, but he said, “No.” Manuel in detail explained:

“Yo nada más me la pasaba preguntando a otros estudiantes que si me podían ayudar,

pero cada vez que les preguntaba me decían, “¡No!”! Yo decía, me ayudas?—“¡No!” Y a otro, me ayudas?—“¡No!” (Figure 3) Y ellos se reían de mí. Y así me la pasaba” [I just kept asking other students for assistance, but each time I asked for help they said, “No!!” I used to ask, “Can you help me?”—”No!!” And to another student, “Can you help me?”— No!! (Figure 3) And they made fun of me asking for help, and that was the way it was].

Figure 3. Manuel feels isolated and nervous: All students refused to help.

Manuel wrote, “Me sentía nervioso porque yo no sabía hablar inglés y no tenía muchos amigos como tenía en Juárez. Todos los niños se reían porque yo no hablaba inglés y también era muy grande la escuela. Siempre me perdía en los pasillos, pero me sentía muy mal porque los niños nunca me hablaban” [I felt very nervous because I did not know English, and I did not have friends like I used to have in Juárez. Students used to laugh at me because I did not speak in English. The school was too big, and I always got lost in the hallways, but mainly I felt bad because the kids never talked to me].

Manuel said that Mrs. Segovia helped him for about two or three weeks at the beginning of the school year, but after that she would tell him, “Ask somebody to help you.” For her part, Mrs. Segovia explained that when Manuel raised his hand to ask a question, she would continue explaining in English following the “strategies for teaching in a dual language class” (personal communication, May 14, 2014). However, she would take pauses within her teaching to ask a student to be “a translator” and explain in Spanish to Manuel. However, during the first focus group session, Manuel explained that not even the translator wanted to help him when working in groups. That was why he cried when going to Mrs. Segovia’s English class.

Figure 3 shows a student refusing to assist Manuel and screaming at him when answering that he did NOT want to help him. Manuel wrote the negation to his request for assistance with an exclamation sign, meaning that the answer was loud. Manuel explained that students made up a sort of a game when he sought assistance, and everyone would exclaim the same answer – “NO!” – while laughing at the student. This scenario reveals hazing initiating acts of bullying. The hazing took place when Manuel tried to work cooperatively with peers in the group and was not welcome. Linguistic bullying occurred when students used language as an oppressive tool (Bakhtin, 1981; Giltrow, 2003) to continually and intentionally harm the recent immigrant whose second language proficiency was in progress and needed support from the group members. This incident took place in a dual language environment where students took the role of oppressors and carried out violent acts (Freire, 2000), as the teacher implemented the policy of the separation of languages adopted in dual language education (Collier & Thomas, 2004; Cummins, 2005). The teacher kept teaching in the target language, English, and the recent immigrant students did not have any other option but to keep asking students for assistance, who then denied support. Manuel and Malena’s counternarratives to the dual language education experience are windows that allow other people “to see the world through other eyes” (Delgado, 1989, p. 2439).

Manuel added that he used to get lost in the hallways of the new school (Figure 3). In addition, during a focus group discussion, Manuel reiterated that he also got lost in the school when going to the restroom; this was one more reason for feeling isolated and unassisted. The student did not have guidance when he needed to go to the restroom. This experience made him feel nervous, according to his response. Furthermore, during the discussion, he explained that what made him feel bad was that his classmates did not talk to him (Figure 3). These unfortunate incidences made it more difficult for him to adapt to the new schooling environment, mainly because he was a recent immigrant already carrying the burden of not being with his family (Suarez-Orozco et al., 2009).

Figure 4 is a drawing of Manuel when his third-grade teacher, Mrs. Segovia, helped him on occasion, but who would later send him to other students to get assistance. Manuel explained that Mrs. Segovia assigned a student as “the translator” in the classroom to help him, but not even the translator wanted to assist him. By the fourth grade, students did not want to help him either. However, the new teacher, Mr. Godina (Malena’s fourth-grade teacher), would help him “a little more” than Mrs. Segovia, as depicted in his drawing. However, Manuel explained that when he started attending the fifth grade with Mrs. Vidal, he started making friends with students who would assist him more.

Figure 4. Manuel’s teacher sending him to get help from his classmates.

Manuel wrote, “Los maestros me ayudaban en que me explicaban en español, o me mandaban con otro compañero para que el me explicara mejor” [The teachers helped me in the sense that sometimes they explained what they said in Spanish, or they would just send me with one of my classmates to help me better].

According to the recent immigrants’ testimonios, when students in their group made fun of their pronunciation and when not able to communicate and understand the lessons in English fully, their classmates also refused to assist them. These were some of the reasons recent immigrant students felt stressed out in the dual language classroom. From the analyzed data, linguistic bullying was more frequent during the first year the recent immigrants attended the new school in the new country. However, I also found that for some students, as in the cases of Malena and Manuel, these acts of linguistic bullying were still prevalent during the second year that they attended a dual language class in the U.S.

The importance of integrating languages: “No quisiera que pasaran por lo que nosotros pasamos”

In this section, the recent immigrants’ testimonios allowed these students to voice their suggested changes to the strict separation of languages policy in dual language classrooms. Their proposals aimed to improve the schooling experiences for recent immigrants in a new country. Critically, the participants also questioned the treatment and attention given to this population of students in their new classrooms.

Toward the end of the focus groups, the participating students were asked to give advice to the teachers of recent immigrants regarding academic instructions for these students. This question was added to the formulated questions for the students during the focus groups. The question was: “From your experiences in your new school, what advice would you give to teachers to better assist recent immigrants and make them feel welcomed when learning a second language?” Manuel and Malena explained that the teacher needs to help recent immigrants by assisting them in their native language when they cannot understand English lectures, as shown in Figure 5.

Figure 5. Malena’s advice to the teacher about recent immigrants.

Malena wrote, “Yo le diría a la maestra que tiene un niño que no habla inglés, que le ayudara explicándole lo que no entiende”[I would tell the teacher of a recent immigrant who does not speak in English that she needs to help him by explaining in Spanish what he does not understand in English]. The speech bubbles read, “Ok” and “Esto dice” [This is what it means].

Figure 5 shows how Malena supported the idea of assisting recent immigrants in Spanish when they did not understand academic instruction in English. In Malena’s illustration, the teacher explains to the student in Spanish, “Esto dice” [This is what it means]. During the last focus group, when the participants discussed how to help recent immigrants attending a new school, Malena said, “Yo si le ayudaba. Se siente bien gacho cuando no entiendes nada” [I would help him/her. It feels terrible when you do not understand anything].

Manuel drew, wrote, and explained that he would help the recent immigrants in his classroom by translating from English to Spanish when explaining what to do (Figure 6). He revealed that the first time he had to go to the restroom in the new school, he got lost and did not know how to get back to class. Manuel explained: “Me perdia en los pasillos” [I got lost in the hallways], which is why he answered that he would help recent immigrants also by guiding them when they may need to go to the restroom (see Figure 6).

Figure 6. Manuel: How he would help a recent immigrant in the school.

Manuel wrote, “Le ayudaría en el inglés. Les traduciría las cosas que tenía que hacer. Cuando tenía que ir al baño yo le ayudaría” [I would help the recent immigrant with English. I would translate whatever he needed to do. Whenever he needed to go to the restroom, I would help him].

Malena agreed with Manuel, and they both added that they would help the recent immigrants by translating and explaining what they had to do. “No quisiera que pasaran por lo que nosotros pasamos [I do not want recent immigrants to go through what I went through],” Manuel explained during a focus group discussion. Malena agreed with Manuel’s statement by nodding her head in approval.

Conclusion

The findings of this study reveal how when cooperative learning is not well implemented in a dual language classroom, it can create unsafe environments for recent immigrants, contrary to what is theoretically suggested by the research experts in the field. Under the application of self-regulated learning and the separation of languages policy, recent immigrants depend on the assistance of English proficient students in their group when they do not understand English instructions. When cooperative learning is not well-practiced, English proficient students may refuse to assist them. In turn, they can haze and linguistically bully the new students when the teacher is unaware of the problem. The participating school’s counselor was not involved in the investigation because not even the teachers knew what was happening in the classrooms concerning bullying against the recent immigrants during the two years (approximately) that the recent immigrants had been attending the new school. The participant teachers in this study denied the occurrence of these unfortunate experiences in their classrooms, as previously shown. The focus of the investigation was merely on the recent immigrants’ experiences when learning a new language in dual language classrooms and their teachers and parents’ perceptions of those experiences. However, counselors and bullying in education is a topic left for further investigation.

The analyzed multimodal testimonios indicate that the dominant language, English, is favored in the Dual Language program. The minority language is oppressed when giving English proficient students the empowerment to assist the recent immigrants in a self-regulated-learning environment. In this study, the recent immigrant students externalized their experiences of being hazed and bullied when they attempted to be part of cooperative groups to receive academic assistance in their first language, and the teacher was blind to the problem. From the recent immigrants’ testimonios, English instructions were hard for them to understand since they began attending the new school. They struggled because their teachers delivered academic instructions in English for a week when attending the third and fourth grades (following the 50/50 dual language model). The students assigned to assist the recent immigrants during the week of English instruction instead made fun of and embarrassed them when sought support (i.e., hazing). As a result of such unfortunate events, the recent immigrants were excluded from the cooperative work and bullied by the group members who denied help and used their English language proficiency to repetitively humiliate the recent immigrants (i.e., linguistic bullying). These acts of bullying and hazing led to the marginalization of the recent immigrants when not able to understand academic instructions in their second language, English, and lacked support from their group members. The recent immigrants’ testimonios were part of the “out groups” realities, as posited by Delgado (1989), when they created counternarratives to the dominant discourse of the separation of languages and self-regulated learning implemented under the dual language programs. Through “other eyes” (Delgado, 1989), i.e., the recent immigrants’ eyes, other people can see the world from the perspective of the oppressed (Freire, 2000), a perspective expressed in the recent immigrant students’ testimonios through drawing, writing, and oral sharing during the focus groups.

The recent immigrant students demonstrated that they gained an ideological consciousness of the imbalance of power existing within the educational system (Apple, 2004; Bakhtin, 1981; Carspecken, 1996; Phillipson, 1992). This ideological consciousness occurred when the separation of languages policy and self-regulated learning were applied in dual language classrooms where the students assigned to assist the recent immigrants failed to help them in the immigrants’ first language, Spanish and instead bullied them (i.e., linguistic bullying). Malena and Manuel’s testimonios challenge the power structures in dual language education regarding cooperative work, the separation of languages policy, and self-regulated learning, all of which were expected to work effortlessly in classes with students who share similar cultural backgrounds and language.

Malena and Manuel were able to critically come up with a solution for teachers in dual language programs to assist recent immigrants better while also making them feel welcome in the new academic environment and to prevent English proficient students from hazing and linguistically bullying them. The recent immigrants externalized their voices through their “social and political” histories in the classroom, which has the potential to foster a “change in society” (Delgado Bernal et al., 2012, p. 364). Ladson-Billings and Tate (2006) affirm that the voices of people of color are crucial for thoroughly analyzing the educational system (p. 58). The externalization of their voices was evident when Malena and Manuel advised teachers to assist the recent immigrant students in Spanish when attending dual language classes in the U.S. It was a plea for teachers to be flexible with the application of the separation of languages policy when using their native language, Spanish, within lectures to assist them. From the results of this study, a flexible separation of languages policy and the availability of monitoring self-regulated learning in the cooperative groups could help prevent the hazing and linguistic bullying that took place in the classroom when the teacher ignored the problem. Being aware of the problem of linguistic bullying that repeatedly occurs within cooperative groups in dual language education is crucial, especially in a border context with so many Spanish speakers and Spanish oases where both languages are part of the hybridity of culture in El Paso, Texas (Jimenez et al., 2009; De la Piedra & Guerra, 2012).

Implications

This critical classroom study has two implications for dual language education teachers and education graduate programs. First, from the findings of this critical classroom study that revealed how the recent immigrant students struggled when looking to work cooperatively in their groups, the teachers in a dual language program must be trained to be well adept in successfully implementing the cooperative learning approach. This teaching development is particularly important to implement in classrooms where recent immigrants need linguistic support from English proficient students. The teachers under this program must give the same importance to both languages to empower the English proficient and recent immigrant students equally during cooperative group work. Focusing only on the dominant language and relying on English proficient students to assist recent immigrants without supervision can create a sense of empowerment among the proficient students over the recent immigrants, who can be marginalized and treated inferior based on their language proficiency in English; thus, they may not receive the support they need in their first language. From the analyzed data, the imbalance of power can create a hostile environment for the recent immigrants when they are intentionally left out of cooperative group work as a result of hazing by English proficient students. English proficient students can prevent recent immigrants from being part of cooperative learning. Hazing can lead to bullying when not recognized by the teacher, escalating to linguistic bullying when English proficient students use language proficiency to intentionally, and repeatedly, harm the recent immigrants in the process of second language acquisition.

Second, this critical classroom study also uncovers how teachers under the education graduate programs can use their classroom status and power to influence, directly or indirectly, the power relations that may exist in their classrooms among English proficient students and recent immigrant students. By acknowledging this, teachers may be able to develop the most appropriate practices to assist recent immigrants, beginning with the inclusion of their primary language when students work cooperatively, as the recent immigrant students in this study suggested. When discussing the implementation of a cooperative learning approach under a dual language program, dual language teachers also may be able to look for better pedagogical approaches to teaching in a cooperative learning environment. Perhaps they could implement translanguaging practices to embrace multilingualism in the classroom (García & Sylvan, 2011; Ibarra-Johnson et al., 2019) and elevate the recent immigrant students’ primary language when it has been placed below the dominant language and treated as inferior, such as in the cases of Malena and Manuel. The practical implementation and monitoring of cooperative learning where both languages are equal and a flexible separation of languages policy in the self-regulated learning academic environment are crucial to better the academic and linguistic instructions for all students in dual language education. These implications may prevent the hazing and linguistic bullying of recent immigrants in this academic environment.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.