Construction of bilingual abilities through monoglossic literacy assessments

Abstract

Schools and classrooms are positioned as sites where various community members come together with the shared goal of fostering and developing bilingual abilities in bilingual education programmes in the United States. In relation to the specific social, political and historical framings relevant to the school or classroom context, individuals in these settings separately and collectively operate in ways that not only support but conversely also erode the possibilities of meeting this goal. The limited purview of currently available and/or well-established forms of assessments in particular around bilingualism often constrains actions. When these assessments are used for decision-making processes in the classroom, the forms of language supported in the assessment can have consequences for understanding bilingualism throughout the school. Through the analysis of recorded assessment interactions, and building on the research which has illustrated how monoglossic literacy assessments, developed for monolingual children, fail to capture bilingual abilities, we illustrate the process of how children’s bilingual abilities become constructed through a monoglossic lens. Together with the narrow definitions of literacy which characterise these assessments, children’s emerging biliteracy becomes invisibilised. The data for this study come from an ethnographic, discourse analytic study of one bilingual, Two-Way Immersion programme that was part of a large urban K-8th school. Using the lens of Language Policy and Planning (LPP), we describe how confusing and contradictory policies were communicated and enacted from the multilingual teacher leaders to the classroom teachers, who were required to assess all students with reading assessments used for benchmarks by the district. Through the analysis of field notes as well as audio transcriptions of testing interactions, we show how literacy assessments that assume monolingualism as the norm fail to capture the multilingual knowledge and repertoires of emergent bilingual children. Through this analysis we show how, in this context, bilingual abilities were defined through multiple, flawed layers of language policies and decision-making – from school leaders with limited knowledge of bilingualism, to frustrated teacher-leaders with differing opinions, to stressed teachers who have no choice but to carry out the decisions made by others – so that children in the end are categorised and assessed in ways that do not show their bilingual knowledge.