Bilingual Practices Research Articles

Ideologizing age in an era of superdiversity: A heritage language learner practice perspective

Abstract SLA research on age in naturalistic contexts has examined learners’ ultimate attainment, while instructed research has emphasized the rate of learning (Birdsong 2014. Dominance and age in bilingualism. Applied Linguistics 35(4). 374–392; Muñoz 2008. Symmetries and asymmetries of age effects in naturalistic and instructed L2 learning. Applied Linguistics 29(4). 578–596). However, both streams of research, which view age as a biological construct, have overlooked this construct through an ideological lens. To address this gap, and in keeping with Blommaert’s (2005. Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) call to examine language ideologies and related ideologies in an era of superdiversity, our paper explores the ideology undergirding age-based research and examines it in conjunction with the practice-based approach to better understand the use of Burmese as a heritage language, a language characterized by a hierarchical and an age-determined honorific system. Drawing on data from a larger ethnographic study involving Burmese migrants in the US, analyses of the bilingual practice of address forms of generation 1.5 Burmese youth demonstrated that age was relationally constructed. While these youth strategically adopted ‘traditional’ linguistic practices ratified by Burmese adults when interacting with their parents, such practices were invoked and subverted in interactions involving their siblings and other Burmese adults less familiar to them. In focusing on the social and linguistic struggles encountered by these transnational multilingual youth, this paper also addresses the complexities surrounding heritage language learning.

English in Malaysia: Identity and the Market Place

The paper examines Malaysian and Singaporean state policies and examples of literary works that directly or indirectly address the position of English to analyse some of the discursive contradictions and tensions undergirding the use of English in their societies. Contention over the role of English, rejected as a colonial threat to national identity – constructed as essentialist Malay monolingualism – has historically and continuously riven state, public and literary policies and discourse in Malaysia. Ee Tiang Hong's early work articulates the dilemma of the Malaysian Anglophone poet whose voice is critiqued as mimicry of “foreign” tongues. Muhammad Haji Salleh emerged as an elite Malay intellectual with his unnuanced disavowal of English use in Malaysia as a dark psychological depredation of the national soul. This total English language rejection, however, is called into question and undermined by his later bilingual practice of dual Malay and English publications of his work and his praise for the two language rivers that compose him as a single poet-subject. English is now viewed as an instrumental language necessary for competing in the global economy. In Singapore, where this instrumentalist language policy remains uncontested, the state has positioned Singlish, the local variation of English that serves as a major expressive marker of Singaporean identity, as a threat to global economic ambitions.

Monolingual and Bilingual Practices: Reversing Power Relations during a Festivity in Pondala

Monolingual and Bilingual Practices: Reversing Power Relations during a Festivity in Pondala

Creating Equitable Ecologies: Broadening Access through Multilingualism

Museums reflect the practices of the dominant culture within the particular society in which they are located. This article examines the effects of museums offering texts, cultural artifacts and experiences in English only, which function to exclude patrons, often visiting in family groups, from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. This article includes explanations of various theoretical frameworks that help to explain how the construction and dynamism of social boundaries impact museum participation and guide considerations about designing and implementing bilingual and multilingual practices. Examples of successful institutional implementation are included. Recent research findings indicate that positive results for museums and visitors are supported when multilingual practices are central to mission statements and institutional sustainability goals.

Multilingual faculty across academic disciplines: language difference in scholarship

Due to the dominance of the English language in scholarship, multilingual academics often encounter challenges in achieving academic biliteracy and identifying successful language negotiation practices in academia. Through personal interviews with self-identified multilingual academics across academic disciplines, this paper explores how they respond to the dominance of English in academia while maintaining multilingual practices. While participants cited multiple challenges in academic biliteracy, their sense of awareness of language hegemony serves as a lens that enables them to identify a variety of language practices representative of their respective language background. Multilingual academics’ language experiences also illustrate that their academic engagement with language difference is diverse, which suggests a reconceptualization of traditional views of bilingual or multilingual practices. Analysis of personal interviews both affirms the dominance of the English language in academia and promotes a need for the inclusion of language difference in academia via Writing Across Communities efforts.

Creating a bilingual pre-school classroom: the multilayered discourses of a bilingual teacher

Teachers have an agentive role as they interpret, evaluate and develop language policies and practices. In the current study we interviewed a bilingual pre-school teacher in Finland during the first year of implementing a new way of working bilingually with a class of monolingual children. Applying nexus analysis, we explored the teacher discourses on the trajectory of the development of the new approach; the concepts, places and people that were circulating in her reflections; and how these connected with larger societal discourses. The analysis showed that the teacher's new bilingual language practices demanded the renegotiation of previously held personal and professional beliefs. The teacher reflections were aggregates of discourses presenting different perspectives and voices. While her bilingual practices challenged prevailing norms in society – especially those on separating languages in teaching – she also recycled discourses which confirmed the idea of Finland as a society built on parallel monolingualism. We argue that it is important to acknowledge the perspectives of teachers, and that there are all kinds of factors which drive and affect the work of a bilingual pre-school teacher. We also call for cross-cultural studies, as teachers' work is always embedded in a sociolinguistic setting.

Dual Language Graduates’ Participation in Bilingual and Biliterate Communities of Practice Across Time and Space

Through a Communities of Practice Network Analysis, this research illustrates the ways in which dual language graduates participate in multiple, varied, and overlapping communities of practice across time. Findings highlight that the dual language school as a shared community of practice represents a critical and formative part of participants’ later bilingual and biliterate practices, creating an enduring foundation for their values and beliefs surrounding bilingualism and biliteracy and opening up increased opportunities to participate in expanded bilingual and bicultural practices. However, the school was not in and of itself enough to produce long-term bilinguals and biliterates. Of equal importance were the out-of-school contexts for participation in language and literacy practices across diverse contexts. As participants in this study traverse the various social fields of their everyday lives, bilingual and biliterate skills are leveraged within socially situated communities of practice. Similarly, we might view the changing circumstances and contexts for biliteracy practices as dynamic spaces within which previous patterns might be altered or transformed.

Unpacking Ideologies of Linguistic Purism: How Dual Language Teachers Make Sense of Everyday Translanguaging

This article draws on qualitative data from two Spanish-English dual language elementary classrooms to explore how teachers in these classrooms made sense of the everyday practice of bilingualism. Methodologically, this study relied on participant observation, video recording, and semi-structured interviews. Conceptually, this article draws on the notion of translanguaging to describe how these teachers and their students moved fluidly across multiple languages and dialects in their everyday interactions. Drawing on language ideological inquiry, this article illustrates that these teachers’ perspectives on translanguaging sometimes echoed ideologies of linguistic purism that emphasize language separation, while also reflecting counterhegemonic ideologies that privilege Spanish and promote bilingualism. Teachers’ everyday language use and instructional practices both reflected and contrasted with their stated ideologies. It is argued that a more nuanced understanding of teachers’ complex language ideologies can inform efforts to help them embrace translanguaging pedagogies that recognize and build on students’ everyday bilingualism.

Transmodal redesign in music and literacy: Diverse multimodal classrooms

Two classrooms of diverse 5-year-old children were set the task of exploring ways of realising music invention through the semiotic import of composing resources. In both a rural and an inner-urban setting in Australia, children demonstrated syncretism in bilingual practices in communication. Visual multimodal analysis demonstrated how children were enabled to import music modes or conceptual elements of music within the overriding mode of music during music improvisation. By giving status to these minority literacies through music invention, children imported semiotic resources as elements of music (music modes) and cultural meanings across borders and contexts. These case studies investigated new ways of engaging diverse students beginning school. They explored the interconnectedness of cultures increasingly circumscribed in realities of classroom music and literacy. Conceptual understanding was established across modes of linguistics and music in both a rural and an inner-urban setting in Australia. Using social semiotic multimodal theory, the studies documented ways children create literacy forms through transmodal redesign of situated practices in music invention. Two focal composing activities, one from each setting, were selected as thematic cases. The first demonstrated how conceptual understanding was established across modes from linguistic (picture book literacy) to audio (music invention) and the second, from audio to verbal linguistics, through children’s music invention. The pedagogical implications of a conceptual framework, the Space of Music Dialogue, were demonstrated in this study. Through this multimodal framework, educators can explore the full extent of student voices in classrooms and evaluate their growth in conceptual understanding in music and linguistics.

Reframing the Debate on Language Separation: Toward a Vision for Translanguaging Pedagogies in the Dual Language Classroom

The policy of strict separation of languages for academic instruction dominates dual language bilingual education programming. This article explores the dynamic bilingual practices of two experienced bilingual teachers in a two‐way dual language public school in Texas and contributes to current research problematizing language separation. Data included interviews, field notes, and classroom interaction video in a pre‐kindergarten and a first grade classroom. The instructional practices of the two teachers suggested powerful strategies to promote bilingual identities. Drawing on identity theory, particularly the notions of positioning and investment, we attempt to contribute to recent research offering teachers potential translanguaging instructional strategies. These strategies include: (a) modeling dynamic bilingual language practices, (b) positioning students as bilingual (even before they are), and (c) celebrating and drawing attention to language crossing. In combining these strategies, teachers move toward using students' bilingual language practices as a resource for academic instruction.

Language dispute and social change in new multilingual institutions in Chaco, Argentina

Intercultural bilingual education (IBE) programmes in Latin America pose interesting questions for sociolinguistics, since their implementation interrogates the link between language and the nation resulting from the emergence of nation-states, but also from processes of decolonization. In the case of Argentina, a new legal framework and the recent implementation of new public policies at national and provincial levels have caused key social and linguistic transformations in educational institutions in indigenous contexts. This paper aims to show some current transformations in multilingual management in Chaco's educational institutions. To do this, I consider the case of public schools, traditionally monolingual in Spanish, to which new actors are incorporated, i.e. Wichi bilingual teachers. Their presence at school and their linguistic practices illustrate the tensions between different language ideologies that coexist today in the Argentinean educational system. As I try to show, bilingualism – as an ideological sign and as symbolic capital – and bilingual practices constitute a contested terrain that can be explored through a sociolinguistic ethnography.

A Study of Bilingual Education in Electrical Information Courses Based on Information Technology

This paper explores the ways to improve efficiency of bilingual education in electrical information courses. Based on the bilingual education practice of Electric Circuits and Data Communications and Networking, a questionnaire was done to illustrate the current problems of bilingual education in our college. After analyzing the factors, the paper argues that bilingual teachers’ training is necessary; bilingual textbooks have to be introduced; dual language immersion works well and autonomous learning platform needs to be developed. The integration of those strategies with information technology contributes to the improvement of bilingual education.

From High School to theNoviciado: An Adolescent Linguistic Minority Student's Multilingual Journey in Writing

This five‐year longitudinal case study explores a linguistic minority student's experiences learning to write during high school and in a postsecondarynoviciado(novitiate) program in a bilingual Catholic institute to understand how features of an English‐medium high school experience supported and/or hindered writing development and transitions to a bilingual postsecondary setting. Writing samples, interviews, and observations were analyzed using Ivaniĉ's (2004) multilayered view of language, insights from sociocultural (Moje & Lewis, 2007; Lantolf, 2000) and biliterate (Hornberger, 2002, 2003) theories of language and literacy, and Schleppegrell's (2004) genre classification of written texts. Findings suggest that the student's English‐medium high school encompassed a range of oral and informal bilingual practices in support of writing, and her development and transition from secondary to postsecondary schooling was facilitated not by a match in written genres, languages, or expectations found in the two settings but by the development of L2 literacy skills during high school (facilitated by interactions with bilingual and monolingual texts and individuals) that she drew upon to cope with the new demands of her novitiate program.

Flexible bilingualism through multimodal practices: studying K-12 community languages online

Community language schools are complementary schools set up and run by minority communities in Australia. They aim to assist in intergenerational language and identity transmission, but previous research has indicated that these schools position their students in monolingual ways that contradicts how bilingual speakers use their language in contemporary society. As a result, it has been proposed to teach these students through bilingual practices. Drawing on findings from research into the learning sciences, this study aims to explore how students construct their participation in a monolingual learning environment when taught online. Two students aged 14–16 taught in a blended mode (every second lesson online and every second lesson in a classroom) video recorded themselves during their online lessons. Data were analysed using multimodal interaction analysis. The results show how student agency increased outside of the learning environment where students repositioned themselves as peripheral learners and drew on scaffolding with humans and technology through bilingual practices to construct new knowledge.

"I Don’t Want to Write for Them": An At-Risk Latino Youth’s Out-of-School Literacy Practices

This single-case study demonstrates one bilingual Latino youth’s out-of-school literacy practices and how he has learned to disconnect them from his academic work. Qualitative data taken from interviews, the participant’s social networking sites, poetry journal, and observations of him in community organizations demonstrate the frequency and purposes of his out-of-school literacy practices of writing poetry, language brokering, reading, technology use, and activism. The findings suggest that the participant has many sophisticated and bilingual literacy practices that were never viewed as funds of knowledge in his linguistically and culturally subtractive schooling environment, contributing to his lack of educational success.

The Impact of Bimodal Bilingual Parental Input on the Communication and Language Development of a Young Deaf Child

This study explores the impact of bimodal bilingual parental input on the communication and language development of a young deaf child. The participants in this case study were a severe-to-profoundly deaf boy and his hearing parents, who were enrolled in a bilingual (English and Australian Sign Language) home-based early intervention programme. The parents typified the challenges faced by hearing parents of deaf children seeking to provide a bimodal language environment for their deaf child. Data were collected over 20 months when the boy was aged between 23 and 42 months. The parents' level of Auslan proficiency, bilingual practice, and sensitivity to their son's communication needs were measured. Findings indicated that although communication and language outcomes were delayed compared with hearing peers, English and Auslan vocabulary growth over time was strongly correlated with the parents' sensitivity to his communication needs. Findings also indicated that there were several child-led changes in language modality preferences throughout the study.

Word search sequences in bilingual interaction: Codeswitching and embodied orientation toward shifting participant constellations

This study explores the way a group of Japanese/English bilingual teenagers makes use of embodied and bilingual practices in accomplishing word searches. The investigation draws on video-recorded data of the participants’ talk during focus group sessions in order to undertake a micro-analysis of several cases of codeswitching in forward-oriented repair. When alternating between languages, speakers use bilingual practices conjointly with other embodied practices, such as eye contact and gaze direction, to select or design some element of the turn-in-progress for a specific sub-set of recipients. This was found to be one interactional locus in which discourse identities became relevant for the turn-in-progress. The study focuses on the locally negotiated and interactionally accomplished emergent functions of specific codeswitches, referring first and foremost to the way that language choice shapes interaction and makes public moment-by-moment participant understandings of identity.

Becoming Bilingual, Becoming Ourselves: Archival Memories of Spanglish in Early Californian Epistolary Texts

In the early 1960s, Dr. George I. Sanchez, a pioneer in the education of Mexican-American students explained that acculturation means that Mexican-Americans have the obligation to become Americanized and have the obligation to become (Salazar and Garcia 1995: 90-91). Sanchez's comment is ironie in the ideologically monolingual English-speaking United States following the conquest and annexation of the Mexican speaking territories of North America in the nineteenth Century. However, there was a time when Anglos living in California, Arizona, Texas, and New Mexico routinely became—and in fact, embraced becoming—Spanish-speaking Anglos who communicated freely in with Spanish-speakers and in richly bilingual practices with other Mexicanized or Mexicanized Yankees. Examining letters written in the 1830s and 1840s, here, I explore the bilingual language practices (Spanglish) and identities of two prominent Anglo immigrants in Mexican Los Angeles, Hugo Reid, and Abel Stearns. This study is part of a larger project to reassemble the historical presence of in what has always been complex multilingual ecologies of language use, policy, and ideology in California. In order to re-establish the place of Spanish, language educators and linguists need to rethink and Spanglish beyond English-centric memory. Language use in California has always been about complex between speakers with diverse and different practices of language, culture, and identity. In an ever-changing contact (Pratt 2008), speakers in California inhabit complex ecologies (van Lier 2004) that extend well beyond the common-sense ideology of discrete language-community-identity and beyond notions of bilingual language-identity-culture practices that would conceptualize Spanglish as the mixing of supposedly pre-existing unitary English and Spanish languages and cultures. English-speaking immigrants began coming to Alta California upon Mexican independence from Spain in the early decades of the nineteenth Century. Most early immigrants like Reid and Steams became naturalized Mexican Citizens and Catholics, which enabled them to do business, marry into propriety-owning Mexican families and hold elected office. Juridically, linguistically and culturally, for example, Hugh Reid, an immigrant from Scotland, became Mexican using his baptismal name of Perfecto Hugo Reid. This archivai evidence suggests that the languages we learn are deeply connected to shifting spaces of speakership and personhood. Despite the thinness of the archivai record from the Mexican national period of prestatehood California, appears to have been the lingua franca among immigrants. Officiai correspondence in Mexican California was a sort of Spanish-only zone in which gringos demonstrated their skill in successfully navigating monolingual conventions of written genres as they wrote letters, both in their officiai capacities as elected officiais and as Citizens, directed to Mexican governors and other officiais. Education was almost synonymous with bilingual, even multilingual, competence and literacy, which was highly valued throughout the and Mexican periods. This bilingual competence was grounded in literate practices, as well as spoken communication, that opened doors to engaging in commercial ventures and holding public office where knowing how to read and write in was required by law. This highly valued bilingual competence and multilingual literacy extended into the very early years of US statehood.

“Spanglish” and Identity within and outside the Classroom

The session that AATSP organized at this year's MLA Convention in Boston (held on January 4,2013, from 10:15 to 11:30 am) was dedicated to topic that has been object of constant debate in past decades: use of as marker of identity among US Latinos. I put into quotation marks because, as I explained in my Guest Editorial from September last year, term controversial and best to be avoided. However, since it widely used in US discourse in both academie and nonacademic environments, I included it in call for papers so that potential presenters knew what it was that I expected them to focus on. It was our tacit understanding that we were all going to refer to what one of authors calis various linguistic strategies that characterize what commonly referred to as 'Spanglish'; namely code-switching, code-mixing, borrowings and other contact phenomena commonly employed by ... bilinguals (Sanchez-Munoz). The three presenters that participated in this session (which was well attended and included lively discussion at end) tackled issue of from variety of perspectives. Robert Train from Sonoma State University introduced audience to fascinating world of early nineteenth-century California and bilingual practices of some prominent Anglo to Los Angeles. These immigrants, whom Train calis Mexican ized gringos, demonstrated, as archivai evidence attest, highly skilled bilingual and multilingual abilities in their routine interactions with each other, in addition, of course, to their mastery of Spanish, which appears to have been the lingua franca among immigrants in California prestatehood period. They used code-switching as powerful communicative resource, and Train's hope that language Professionals today can connect these historical memories and identities to our present-day context in order to reconsider prevalent misun derstanding of as mixing of two distinct languages, communities and identities. A central lesson to be learn from past, he adds, is an understanding of complexity of use in lives of Spanish speakers in California across ever-shifting boundaries between monolingual-bilingual-multilingual contact zones and ecologies of use and identity. Returning us to present-day California, Ana Sanchez-Munoz from California State University-Northridge examined functions and use of (as defined in quote from her paper given above) in creative pieces of writing produced by second-generation Chicana/o (and other Latina/o) College students in class of Spanish for Heritage Speakers. For Sanchez-Munoz, Spanglish way for students to deal with complex linguistic and ethnie issues in creative manner insofar as it creâtes another level of meaning for negotiating hybridity of Chicana/o experiences, constructing and reconstructing a third space of. . . identity, linguistic nepantla. The examples she gave from some students' poems demonstrated the creative use of contact features to create an identity space that defies clear boundaries between that ' Anglonness' and 'Mexicanness' that Anzaldua wrote about. The third presentation by Regan L. Postma from The College of Idaho raised impor tant issue of use of bilingual texts in literature courses as means of engaging students in dialogues considering larger issues of language, culture and identity such as dynamic and contextual nature of language, politics and power of choice, and creative possibilites of negotiating linguistically and culturally in multiple and hybrid rather than in singular modes. She illustrated her approach to these issues by analyzing her students'

Bilingual language play and local creativity in Hong Kong

As a former colony of Britain and now a cosmopolitan city in Asia under the sovereignty of China, Hong Kong has adopted a bilingual policy in education and public administration, with English and Chinese as the two official languages. Much previous research has focused on verbal bilingual practices for social and educational communication. The present paper, however, explores the increasing use of visual bilingual texts at the societal level for playful effects. Ten examples of bilingual texts showing linguistic creativity were collected through incidental sampling mostly from the linguistic landscape and mediascape in Hong Kong and analysed for their textual properties, semantic features and socio-pragmatic use. The analysis revealed three distinct strategies of bilingual language play: phonological/lexical crossover, semantic enhancement and visual parody. Apart from displaying features of the commercial use of language play to enhance memorability, some of the examples revealed a desire to mock government policies or to achieve mental pleasure of a nonsensical nature. These examples of bilingual language play provide evidences of local creative and motivated use of bilingual resources to achieve a double-voiced social discourse.