Student Commons
- Spanglish is spoken here: Making sense of Spanish-English code-switching and language ideologies in a sixth-grade English Language Arts classroom
- Moroccan immigrant children in a time of surveillance: navigating sameness and difference in contemporary Spain
- Talking About Text: Engaging in Critical Metalinguistic Talk
- A Loving Translation for Abuelita: Matters of the Heart and the Academy
- Language as Graffiti: Situated Language Discourse and Awareness of a Teenager
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Spanglish is spoken here: Making sense of Spanish-English code-switching and language ideologies in a sixth-grade English Language Arts classroom
Author(s): Ramon A. Martínez
Abstract:
This study of language and ideology among bilingual Latina/o sixth-graders at a middle school in East Los Angeles examined students' engagement in Spanish-English code-switching, a hybrid language practice that many of them referred to as " Spanglish ," as well as their beliefs, feelings, and awareness--or language ideologies --with respect to this language practice. Methodologically, this study relied on participant observation, video-recording, and audio-recording to document the verbal interactions that took place across multiple social and instructional contexts in these students' English Language Arts classroom. In addition, semi-structured interviews were conducted as a means of engaging students in participant retrospection . During these interviews, students were presented with data on their use of Spanglish and then asked to reflect on this language use. Their language ideologies were further elicited through a series of questions specifically related to the instances of Spanglish that had been observed.
Analysis of the data revealed that students used Spanglish in creative, skillful, and intelligent ways, and that their use of Spanglish mediated both conversation and the broader social organization of the classroom, contributing to the construction of a social space in which bilingualism and hybridity were normative. Further analysis revealed parallels between the skills embedded in students' use of Spanglish and the skills that they were expected to master according to California's sixth-grade English Language Arts standards. Students' use of Spanglish displayed a mastery of specific academic literacy skills, including adeptness at (1) shifting voices for different audiences, and (2) communicating shades of meaning. It is argued that students' skillful use of Spanglish could be leveraged as a resource for helping them to develop academic literacy skills. Analysis also revealed variation with respect to students' language ideologies. Overall, students exhibited both practical and discursive forms of awareness, and they articulated and embodied both dominant and counter-hegemonic language ideologies. It is argued that this variation provides fertile ground for rich and transformative dialogue that could potentially help students develop critical language awareness. The dissertation concludes with specific implications for leveraging these skills and ideologies in order to help students further cultivate both academic and critical literacies.
APA Citation:
Martínez, R. A. (2009). Spanglish is spoken here: Making sense of Spanish-English code-switching and language ideologies in a sixth-grade English Language Arts classroom. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles.
Link: http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=1971760601&sid=2&Fmt=2&clientId=48051&RQT=309&VName=PQD
Moroccan immigrant children in a time of surveillance: navigating sameness and difference in contemporary Spain
Author(s): Inmaculada Garcia-Sanchez
Abstract:
Moroccan Immigrant Children in a Time of Surveillance: Navigating Sameness and Rooted in twenty months of ethnographic fieldwork in Southwestern Spain, this dissertation analyzes the socio-cultural and linguistic lifeworlds of 8-11 year-old Moroccan immigrant children as they navigate family, school institutions, and peer groups in Spain. To illuminate the constraints and affordances in Moroccan immigrant children's emerging processes of identification, this study focuses on how these children negotiate (and are impacted by) both local and macro politics of inclusion/exclusion in light of the increased levels of tension and surveillance directed towards Muslim and North African immigrants. This dissertation draws from theoretical and methodological approaches in linguistic and socio-cultural anthropology, sociology, and philosophy to provide a grid for mapping the complex issues that emerge in the lives of immigrant children growing up in multicultural and multilingual settings. First, children's social encounters in educational settings are analyzed. In spite of the discourse of inclusion that characterizes the public school's stated ideology, children's social engagements with peers and teachers reveal that Moroccan immigrant children are racialized as the 'Other' and constituted as 'outsiders' through routine participation in exclusionary practices and linguistically mediated regimes of surveillance. Second, in medical visits in which these children translate for their families and for Spanish doctors, children's modified translations are examined to illuminate how these children understand and traverse conflicting cultural spaces of host and immigrant communities. Third, the investigation of children's interactions with peers in ludic activities focuses on the socio-cultural and linguistic resources that children draw on to explore imagined transgressional possible identities and moral worlds. Within the framework of pretend-play, Moroccan children (re)produce and contest the everyday constraints that they must navigate in their communities. The coexistence of Moroccan Arabic and Spanish in children's games encapsulates a heteroglossic polyphony of voices that not only brings to bear the gendered, socio-political and cultural valences of these languages, but also distinct points of view on ways of being in the world. In addition to its relevance as a case study of language socialization in immigrant communities undergoing rapid change, this dissertation has implications for broader debates regarding Muslim immigrant children's educational and socio-cultural welfare in Europe.
APA Citation:
Garcia Sanchez, I. (2009). Moroccan immigrant children in a time of surveillance: navigating sameness and difference in contemporary Spain. Unpublished Dissertation. University of California, Los Angeles.
Link: http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=1930909361&sid=3&Fmt=2&clientId=48051&RQT=309&VName=PQD&cfc=1
Talking About Text: Engaging in Critical Metalinguistic Talk
Author(s): Jacqueline D'warte
Abstract:
In this paper discourse analytical methods are applied to data from two middle school classrooms, as a teacher, researcher, and students’ engage in research based curricula (Martínez et al., 2008; Orellana, & Reynolds, 2008) designed to leverage students’ language brokering skills and facilitate discussion about languages. Analysis centers on talk that mediates understandings of voice and register as participants recognize, and explore, the appropriateness and application of their linguistic skills in multiple settings.
Students document their linguistic practices, which include translation, interpretation, codeswitching, register-shifting, and use of dialects. Students examine the linguistic resources they use, for example, while translating, talking to authority figures, and communicating with parents and friends, more generally they explore the choices they make and the ways they use language for different audiences and purposes, and why some ways are valued over others.
This paper argues that engaging in talk about how language meets our social needs is an important first step in building on students’ strengths, while also deepening students’ metalinguistic awareness and enhancing students’ linguistic repertoire. Creating a space for critical talk about language in the classroom curriculum can support students and also teachers in learning language, learning about language, and learning through language (Halliday, 1977).
APA Citation:
D’warte, Jacqueline (submitted). Talking About Text: Engaging in Critical Metalinguistic Talk. Submitted to the American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting (AERA 2010), Denver, Colorado.
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037TalkingTextP016.pdf
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A Loving Translation for Abuelita: Matters of the Heart and the Academy
Author(s): Karla C. Pérez
Abstract:
In this piece, written for a graduate class at UCLA, the author utilizes her own method of translation, one cultivated through many years as a child and, now, adult family translator. She illuminates the powerful role of empathy in translation by exposing her own human experience with mourning. This attempt to unveil the process of translation is also a continued quest for transparency in research that allows the author to be vulnerable and human alongside the once termed “subjects.” Divided in three parts, she first introduces a text read for class: “A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures,” by the New London Group. She offers her own understanding of this text. After this, she evokes matters of the heart by translating the academic text to her dear abuelita who recently came to pass. This is a fictitious conversation between the author and her grandmother, translated through the memories of a mourning granddaughter. Ultimately, what this loving translation reveals is that behind translation work and academic work are vulnerable beings who to be considered viable professionals must hide behind a veil of objectivity. The question the author poses through her own experience as a vulnerable graduate student and researcher is: How can the great power of vulnerability transform and enrich our work as translators, academics and researchers in Education? In Education we often speak of students as a vulnerable population without connecting our own vulnerability to that of those we study. What would be gained if as researchers, academic writers, and translators we understood our own vulnerability as fundamental to empathizing with our audience and those we serve? Would our policies, recommendations and methods also reflect a connected vulnerability fundamentally grounded in our common human experience?
APA Citation:
Pérez, K. C. (2010). A loving translation for Abuelita: Matters of the heart and the academy.Unpublished manuscript.
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038LovingTranslationP017.pdf
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Language as Graffiti: Situated Language Discourse and Awareness of a Teenager
Author(s): Clifford H. Lee
Abstract:
This paper examines the language practices of a middle school native-Spanish speaker in various school and out-of-school settings and interview data from the student and some of his teachers. Data was collected through participant observations and semi-structured interviews of this student in different settings. Observations and analyses were made about the complexity of his language practices, the switches that occur and his meta-linguistic awareness of them. Semi-structured interviews with teachers were analyzed to gauge the potential influence of their language ideology in shaping the student's language practices. The purpose of this ethnographic case study was focused on the question of how the intersectionalities of setting, audience, purpose, activities, participants’ discourse(s) and ideology inform the language practices of a middle school native-Spanish speaker in a major metropolitan community in America?
APA Citation:
Lee, C. (2010). Language as graffiti: Situated language discourse and awareness of a teenager.Unpublished manuscript.
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036RunningHeadP015.pdf
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