Social Identities and Bilinguals’ Language and Literacy Development

Abstract

This is a qualitative case study that investigates bilinguals’ language and literacy practices on the intersection of social identities, speaking and writing learning, and translanguaging in a Spanish-English two-way classroom.[1] The study proposes that certain bilinguals’ language and literacy learning is closely related to the performance of their social identities, along with the language and literacy practices that they performed in school and home contexts, including translanguaging practices. Two cases of Spanish-English emergent bilinguals’ and two cases of English-Spanish emergent bilinguals’ speaking and writing practices are presented from a qualitative sociocultural and poststructuralist (Davis H Peirce, 1995; 2016) theoretical perspectives. Findings show that certain emergent bilinguals’ speaking and writing practices are closely associated with their identities that they constructed in school and at home. Specifically, the way the emergent bilinguals were positioned on the continuum of the classroom social networks, from central to peripheral influenced their diverse ways of learning to speak and write, as well as the other way around. Further findings show that the ways how emergent bilinguals were invested in language and literacy practices in Spanish in classroom as well as in the literacy practices that they performed at home directly influenced the processes of social identity construction. In this way, these findings confirm the assumption that additional language learning can be reinforced when the linguistic, emotional and social dimensions of their developing identities were legitimized applies for certain emergent bilinguals’ language and literacy learning.[1]This is one chapter of my doctoral research on translanguaging and identities.