Immigrant Spanish as Liability or Asset? Generational Diversity in Language Ideologies at School

Abstract

Latino students’ educational success is central to America’s prosperity—in traditional immigrant destinations and in New Latino Diaspora locations, previously unfamiliar with Latinos. Implicated in this success is the reception young immigrants receive, especially the ways in which they are identified in schools. We describe findings from 6 years of ethnographic research in a high school and an elementary school in the New Latino Diaspora and describe divergent ideologies of Mexican-immigrant Spanish circulating in each context. We show how monoglossic language ideologies in the 2 schools frame teenage immigrants as deficient and younger immigrant children as proficient. These ideologies influence both elementary and high school decisions about how to serve immigrant students, and they shape students’ own language practices, which have implications for their learning opportunities and future trajectories. We argue that attention to these divergent language ideologies is necessary for understanding different educational outcomes across decimal generations of immigrant students.

Key words:

• New Latino Diaspora
• language ideologies
• Latinos
• decimal generations
• English-language learners
• contexts of reception

Notes

¹ In the absence of consistent support for immigrant languages in schools (Ovando, 2003), this pattern of acculturation may contribute to the rapid loss of immigrant languages in the U.S. “language graveyard” (Rumbaut, 2009), where even in areas of dense immigrant settlement such as Southern California, immigrant languages are often no longer spoken at home by the third generation (Rumbaut, Massey, & Bean, 2006).

² A note on terminology: When referring to students’ language proficiencies, we choose the term emergent bilingual in order to recognize proficiency in both of their languages and we use English language learner/ELL occasionally for readability. We use ESL as an emic term in reference to programs or classes.