Bilingual Ways with Words: Children’s Identity Enactment and Negotiation in a Dual Language Immersion Class

ABSTRACT

This qualitative study examines strategies used by children in a kindergarten dual language immersion (DLI) class, when enacting and negotiating intersecting social constructions such as ethnicity, social class, and bilingualism. Drawing on data collected during the 2017–2018 academic year, this paper uses an intersectional lens to describe the ways in which children are actively engaged in sociocultural processes of language use and socialization. In addition, it employs the notions of identity and social class position to analyze how children's bilingual understanding and strategic language use is manifested in different ways. The paper ends by encouraging educators and researchers to reconsider the way they evaluate power at work in educational settings and children’s ways of displaying it. A more nuanced understanding of children’s interactions in bilingual settings is necessary in order to stretch our considerations of power and social relations in present-day school contexts.

KEYWORDS:

• Bilingualism
• children's socialization
• dual language immersion
• ethnicity
• social class

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank Danny Martinez and the anonymous reviewers 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. All names are pseudonyms.

2. This study uses the term Latin@ to move beyond gender binaries.

3. The explanations provided by some of these studies regarding why language practices differ by social class have been discussed lengthily in recent years and found to be controversial (see for example, Kuchirko, 2019). The present study seeks to add a description that points to socioeconomic, as well as cultural and educational factors that “collectively create the conditions from which class difference in words—and academic success—emerge” (Kuchirko, 2019, p. 553).

Additional information

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. Her research interests are centered on issues of language, equity, and social justice, particularly in relation to the schooling of linguistically and culturally diverse children around the world.