Bilingual Student Perspectives About Language Expertise in a Gentrifying Two-Way Immersion Program Suzanne Garcia-Mateus, California State University, Monterey Bay
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California State University, Monterey Bay From the SelectedWorks of Suzanne Garcia-Mateus Summer July 29, 2020 Bilingual student perspectives about language expertise in a gentrifying two-way immersion program Suzanne Garcia-Mateus, California State University, Monterey Bay Available at: https://works.bepress.com/suzanne-garcia-mateus/10/ International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rbeb20 Bilingual student perspectives about language expertise in a gentrifying two-way immersion program Suzanne García-Mateus To cite this article: Suzanne García-Mateus (2020): Bilingual student perspectives about language expertise in a gentrifying two-way immersion program, International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, DOI: 10.1080/13670050.2020.1797627 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13670050.2020.1797627 Published online: 29 Jul 2020. Submit your article to this journal View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rbeb20 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF BILINGUAL EDUCATION AND BILINGUALISM https://doi.org/10.1080/13670050.2020.1797627 Bilingual student perspectives about language expertise in a gentrifying two-way immersion program Suzanne García-Mateus Monterey Institute for English Learners, Education and Leadership Department, California State University – Monterey Bay, Seaside, CA, USA ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY The two-way immersion dual language education program design Received 27 June 2019 includes the use of language labels to identify students as either the Accepted 11 June 2020 English speaker or the speaker of a language other than English. This KEYWORDS paper examines four focal student and two teacher interviews to ‘ ’ Bilingual education; bilingual consider the ways in which the idea of a language expert transpired students; classroom during individual student retrospective interviews. Data include video discourse; dual language and audio recordings of student and teacher interviews, classroom immersion; heritage observations of student interactions during their kindergarten, first and languages; identity second grade years. This study draws from a raciolinguistic perspective construction to explore how power operates in sites where the categorization of language and race are negotiated. A distinctive goal of this paper includes understanding the ways in which students were perceived by their peers and classroom teachers as language learners in order to understand how power relations operated as the school demographics were changing. Findings indicate that race was entwined with social class and language in the ways students perceived one another. Implications for teacher education programs include raising an awareness of how teachers can both mitigate and shift power relations in culturally, ethnically and linguistically diverse contexts. Introduction They’re not exactly pros because me and Sabine are the best, like the smartest in Spanish. They’re mostly like Spanish speakers. Nico In this excerpt, Nico, a Latino and middle-class student in a two-way immersion classroom, was referring to his Latinx classmates who were from Mexico and/or from a lower socio-economic back- ground. Nico’s description of them as ‘mostly Spanish speakers’ but ‘not exactly pros’ represents how the use of Spanish is highly stigmatized in the US context for speakers from marginalized commu- nities. The way the use of Spanish is perceived can have positive or negative academic implications for students (Bartlett and García 2011; Palmer 2009). Two-way immersion bilingual education (TWBE) models bring ‘Spanish speakers and English speakers’ 1 together to become bilingual, biliterate and bicultural (Lindholm-Leary 2005). When bringing together a culturally and linguistically diverse group of students to learn, it is urgent that we consider how students are perceiving one another in their bilingual school community. TWBE models have been on the rise in metropolitan areas across the USA due to interest conver- gence (Shannon 2011) where parents from mostly white2 and middle-class backgrounds are begin- ning to acknowledge the benefits of bilingual education. This is a shift from seeing bilingualism as a CONTACT Suzanne García-Mateus [email protected] © 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group 2 S. GARCÍA-MATEUS problem, especially the bilingualism of language minoritized speakers, to seeing bilingualism as a resource (Ruiz 1984). Many of these metropolitan locations are also experiencing gentrification (Tang and Falola 2016). A key feature of TWBE programs is the strict separation of languages by time-of-day, subject area, and in the case of the TWBE model implemented at Nico’s school, according to the day of the week (e.g. with some parts of the day taught in English, others in Spanish). In fact, literature that describes TWBE design emphasizes oral language use and instruction rather than the use of language labels (Howard, Sugarman, Christian, Lindholm-Leary, and Rogers 2007). In earlier grades, language labels, both written and spoken identifiers, were placed upon students. Language labels were also placed throughout the classroom, color coded according to the named language they belonged within. The labels served to promote the use and status of the minoritized language by designating a secured space in the classroom where it was visible and used during content area instruction. Data for this paper is from a larger ethnographic and longitudinal study about identity construc- tion in a TWBE elementary school in Central Texas. This paper examines how the notion of a ‘language expert’ emerged from teacher and student interviews as connected to students racial and social class backgrounds. The following research questions guided this analysis: (1) How do students understand the role that language labels play in a TWBE classroom? (2) How do language labels position students in one TWBE classroom? Literature review Valdés (1997) prescient cautionary note warned scholars and practitioners in the field of bilingual education about social inequities that could affect children of color in TWBE programs. TWBE class- rooms can negatively impact students of color from marginalized backgrounds if they do not identify and connect with the curriculum (Caldas 2018; García-Mateus 2020). Valdés’ warning included critical implications for TWBE models that serve both language majority and minoritized language speakers and are designed to label students as either a ‘Spanish speaker’ or an ‘English speaker,’ as these con- structs can perpetuate racialized perceptions of bilingualism (Nuñez and Palmer 2017; Rosa and Flores 2017; Rosa 2019). In other words, if not used mindfully and critically, these language label con- structs can dichotomize notions of language users based on the racial and social class backgrounds of students. Other studies have examined the impact of labeling students through a binary lens (Chaparro 2019; de Jong 2016; Hamman-Ortiz 2019; Lee, Hill-Bonnet, and Gillispie 2008; Palmer 2019). The class- room in one study (Palmer 2019), as in many TWBE contexts, used red labels for all words in English and blue labels for all words in Spanish. Palmer problematized the use of labels and referred to chil- dren who are already bilingual in a kindergarten classroom as ‘the purple kids’. She described how there is no ‘purple label’ for students who enter TWBE classrooms on various points of the biliteracy continuum and whose linguistic realities and proficiencies are not fully represented by the desig- nated language labels. As a result, students are limited in how they are encouraged to use their lin- guistic repertoire and practitioners can miss learning opportunities to develop students’ metalinguistic awareness. Chaparro (2019) also problematized the TWBE model’s lack of a label for children who are already bilingual. She urges us to consider how ‘…the regimentation of children and families into discrete language categories – as ‘English speakers’ and ‘Spanish speakers’–fails to capture the complexity of both the lived experiences of students as well as their linguistic practices (2)’. Chaparro’s study showed how students do not fit into these binary categories and, furthermore, there are extralinguis- tic factors, such as class and race, that shape students’ experiences in the TWBE classroom. As a result of not considering class and race, practitioners can also miss opportunities to develop students criti- cal cultural awareness (García-Mateus 2020) and to deconstruct notions of what it looks and sounds like to speak one or more languages in culturally and linguistically diverse contexts. INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF BILINGUAL EDUCATION AND BILINGUALISM 3 A plethora of studies have explored how the co-construction of positive academic and bilingual identities is related to the ways in which immigrant students learning English are perceived by their teachers and peers (Fitts 2006; Bartlett and García 2011; Martínez, Hikida, and Durán 2015; Scanlan and Palmer, 2009). Language labels ultimately serve as markers of an individual’s identity and can be representative of how society perceives and stigmatizes students especially those from Latinx, Spanish-speaking backgrounds. As these other studies have shown, children’s linguistic iden- tities do not conform to such rigid binary language labels; on the contrary, students