Languages across Borders: Social Network Development in an Adolescent Two-Way Language Program (original) (raw)
Related papers
Linguistics and Education, 2017
As schools are called on to educate an increasingly diverse student body to higher levels of academic skill, examination of the role of social resources and social contexts in the learning outcomes and experiences of students classified as English learners is urgently needed to better understand the many factors beyond instruction that contribute to adolescent English language development. Four descriptive case studies of Spanish-speaking newcomer immigrant youth in New York City public high schools examine how schools structured peer linguistic resources. Findings suggest that school policies designed to support language development created boundaries that isolated language learners from mainstream and bilingual peers and had profound repercussions for access to opportunities to use and learn academic English. Hypersegregation is used to describe the multilayered social separation experienced by emergent bilingual students in this study.
As schools are called on to educate an increasingly diverse student body to higher levels of academic skill, examination of the role of social resources and social contexts in the learning outcomes and experiences of students classified as English learners is urgently needed to better understand the many factors beyond instruction that contribute to adolescent English language development. Four descriptive case studies of Spanish-speaking newcomer immigrant youth in New York City public high schools examine how schools structured peer linguistic resources. Findings suggest that school policies designed to support language development created boundaries that isolated language learners from mainstream and bilingual peers and had profound repercussions for access to opportunities to use and learn academic English. Hyper-segregation is used to describe the multilayered social separation experienced by emergent bilingual students in this study.
Latino Language-Minority College Going: Adolescent Boys' Language Use and Girls' Social Integration
Bilingual Research Journal, 2009
This study explores the postsecondary pathways of Latino language-minority young adults in the United States. Using data from the Texas Higher Education Opportunity Project (THEOP) and controlling on background characteristics as well as high-school academic achievement, this study explores the social and linguistic integration of immigrant and native-born Latino linguistic-minority adolescents. Results suggest that home-language use positively predicts postsecondary involvement for Latino language-minority males. Alternately, social integration, either via extracurricular involvement or religious participation, predicts Latina girls' postsecondary participation, with variation in the patterns depending on girls' immigrant generational status.
Silenced Partners: Language Learning and the Role of Bilingual Peers in High School
Teachers College Record, 2018
Background: In schools, a major obstacle to drawing on emergent bilingual students' knowledge and skills in their first language is a widespread lack of awareness about language use among adolescent English learners, including how peer talk can connect knowledge and abilities in both languages to school-based learning. Although research often acknowledges the importance of engaging students' home language and culture to bridge to academic litera-cies in English, few have explicitly examined bilingual peer talk as a resource for language learning during adolescence.
International Multilingual Research Journal, 2017
Peer interactions are central to student experiences and present tremendous opportunities for language learning and consequences for educational equity, yet these opportunities have often been unrecognized and underexamined. This special issue offers new perspectives examining the potential of peer interaction to foster language, literacy and identity development. Peer interaction provides an interesting context for students to play with language and try out new ideas, thus allowing educators and researchers to broaden our view of learning opportunities. By providing a nuanced and close examination of interactions multilingual students experience in diverse classrooms, the articles in this special issue advance the field, reveal challenges, and offer new directions for future research. This introduction discusses how the articles in this special issue are situated in a larger scholarly conversation that has implications for the education of culturally and linguistically diverse learners.
The Journal of Early Adolescence, 2019
Employing a social capital framework, this study investigates teachers’ role in influencing the peer dynamics between English learners (ELs) and their non-EL peers. Participants include 713 students (211 EL students). Observed teacher-student interaction quality and teacher self-reports of their peer network management were used to operationalize the teacher-directed, classroom-level factors. Peer nominations of friendships within the classroom were used to operationalize students’ same-language-status (bonding capital) and cross-language-status (bridging capital) friendships. Multilevel models reveal teachers’ reported practices and observed interaction quality account for a small proportion of the variance in students’ bridging and bonding relationships at the classroom level overall, but with differential effects for EL and non-EL students. For example, in classrooms with greater reported use of bonding practices, EL students reported more bonding and fewer bridging friendships i...
This study investigated how students learning English and students learning Spanish activated multilingual repertoires as they participated in one high school program that aimed to promote reciprocal learning and teaching of multilingual literacy practices. Grounded in sociocultural theory, we examined how students drew upon Spanish, English, and translanguaging as cultural and cognitive tools to mediate learning in a Third Space. Data collection included participant observations in 40 sessions, student writing, interviews, and audio/video recordings of peer interactions as they engaged in composing and revising of text together. Using interactional ethnography and microgenetic analysis, we analyzed mediation of learning opportunities across and between languages and found evidence of students co-constructing knowledge and expanding multilingual repertoires. Findings contribute to second language acquisition research by revealing fluid and reciprocal affordances for language learning during interactions among linguistically diverse peers as they draw upon translanguaging practices. By shedding light on an alternative educational context that mobilizes young people's diverse funds of knowledge, the findings have implications for educational practices that support equity for culturally and linguistically diverse students.
Hispanic Journal of …, 1998
Children who interpret for their immigrant parents are referred to as language, brokers. The present study examines the relationship of language brokering to academic performance, biculturalism, academic self-efficacy, and social self-efficacy. The many adultlike experiences of children who broker on a regular basis suggest that their cognitive and Socioemotional development may be accelerated relative to children of immigrant families who broker infrequently or not at all. Latino adolescents (n = 122) from immigrant families were participants in the study. Results showed that, as expected, language brokering was positively related to biculturalism, and in turn, both of these variables were positively related to academic performance. In addition, the strongest predictor of academic performance was academic self-efficacy. Results also indicated that, to some degree, language brokering is a gendered activity, with females reporting more brokering than males.