Using social network analysis to investigate sociocultural competence among kindergarteners in a two-way immersion classroom

Abstract

ABSTRACT Sociocultural competence is the third goal of TWI programs, yet there is a lack of consensus on what it looks like in terms of student outcomes in the classroom. As an inherently social construct, sociocultural competence leads to successful interactions with people who are different from each other along various dimensions. Sociocultural competence in TWI classrooms, specifically, may manifest in successful friendship formation among students across different language and cultural groups. We use Social Network Analysis to investigate a friendship network in one TWI kindergarten classroom in Costa Rica using a measure of “homophily” – the tendency for people to create ties with people who are similar to themselves. Findings from the data in this study reveal patterns of friendship that indicate higher levels of sociocultural competence for bilingual students, both individually and as a group, in that they more regularly establish friendships across language groups in their classroom (showing less homophily) than do English or Spanish dominant students. A major contribution of this paper is to show how social network theory can be leveraged to help better specify and measure sociocultural competence in the TWI classroom by looking across different levels of analyses.