Language Making in Classrooms with Emergent Bi/Multilingual Children: Recognizing Additional Ways of Engaging
Open Access
- Author:
- Bose, Frances
- Graduate Program:
- Curriculum and Instruction
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- January 14, 2020
- Committee Members:
- Mari Haneda, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Mari Haneda, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Gail Louise Boldt, Committee Member
Kimberly A. Powell, Committee Member
Athelstan Canagarajah, Outside Member
Christopher M. Schulte, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Rose Mary Zbiek, Program Head/Chair - Keywords:
- emergent bilingual
technology
intra-action
translingualism
ethnography
literacy
video
English language learners
science
elementary education - Abstract:
- This dissertation research is a longitudinal classroom ethnography in a second-grade classroom in a public Northeastern suburban school. It is a story of surprise for me as researcher, as I discover the multiplicity of how engagement can be conceptualized in this English-medium classroom with emergent bi/multilingual children. As tensions flowed through children and teachers of different ethnolinguistic backgrounds often not able to communicate and connect across the boundaries of English and Chinese, engagement was not only the participation and contribution of children working with peers and teacher. Engagement was also what transpired when children worked in alliance with mobile technologies, objects, and sounds, such as video cameras, translation software, and tablet computers. Responding to multiple perspectives of language in the classroom, I approach this study of language and engagement by activating two different theoretical orientations. One is translingualism from socio and applied linguistics, where language practices are understood as semiotic and mobile resources. The other is the feminist new materialist concept of intra-action, as it is engaged in young children’s literacies. With these theoretical orientations, I give voice to the different ways in which children, teachers, and researcher conceptualize language differently. Furthermore, I suggest language practices are conceptualized as ethico-onto-epistemological fusions among participants in a classroom. As such, the focus is on what transpires in the connections between children, researchers, teachers, mobile technologies and objects in the classroom, and how this changes ways of recognizing engagement. Methodologically, this dissertation takes a diffractive approach to classroom ethnography. Throughout the school year, second graders and I filmed activities in the classroom with different cameras and then analyzed video footage of three specific moments, along with parents, peers, and teachers. These three moments were designated as the most significant of their first year in a U.S. school by two emergent bi/multilingual girls, Xi Xi Lu and Madeline. With the aim of centering the perspectives of these emergent bi/multilingual children, the dissertation focuses on in-depth video analysis and storying of the three moments. Critical to this analytical approach is the involvement of the multiple perspectives of Xi Xi Lu and Madeline’s teachers, parents, peers, as well as camera lenses, and the algorithmic language of software that influences what produces video and translations. I entangle my researcher involvement in the analysis such that my own parenting moments raising a child with multiple home languages for the first time intra-act with my experiences as novice researcher and experienced language educator. Building on critical and socioculturally-oriented work in elementary language and literacies, this work suggests participation and contribution in classrooms is realized through more than a human-oriented understanding of language practices such as different culturally-oriented ways of knowing, and social identities available when home languages and multimodal ways of expression are incorporated in classroom curriculum and pedagogy. Contributing to scholarship in K-5 language and literacies of emergent bi/multilinguals, my research extends this work by making explicit the multiplicity of ways engagement and language can manifest in culturally and linguistically diverse classrooms that we are not able to notice through humanist discourses. That is, I argue that opportunities to engage in a classroom change when language is reconceptualized as performatively constructed in the affective, semiotic, and material relations between human and non-human players and partners. From this reconceptualization of language, engagement can be theorized as the multiple ways of conceptualizing taking part in and/or contributing in classroom literacies, not necessarily foregrounding a child actively working with peers, teacher, or curriculum. Contributing to another body of work in scholarship in young children’s literacies taking a posthuman orientation, I assert there is a diversity of sonic material through diverse tones, pitches, rhythms of linguistic sound that is overlooked in classrooms with multilingual children. There are additionally varied ways of working with material objects that are overlooked. This is significant as both sonic diversity and material objects can create additional opportunities for engagement. Furthermore, I suggest how language and literacy intra-actions involve memories and ways of knowing from spaces and times across transnational school settings. Across the research areas of K-5 teaching emergent bilinguals and young children’s literacies, my research demonstrates that as educators we must harness the synergy of and recognize the productive differences and tensions emerging between classroom participants’ different ways of seeing, hearing, and feeling language. Pedagogically, this research is significant because it suggests that despite linguistic and cultural differences in classrooms, other ways of engaging that generate connections and bridges in intercultural classrooms can be recognized. Such connections have the potential to create larger changes across classrooms, schools, while engaging with families across communities.