Using ESL Students’ First Language to Promote College Success: Sneaking the Mother Tongue through the Backdoor 9781138296770, 9781315099767

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Using ESL Students’ First Language to Promote College Success

Emerging from a critical analysis of the glocal power of English and how it relates to academic literacy and culturally responsive pedagogy, this book presents translanguaging strategies for using ESL students’ mother tongue as a resource for academic literacy acquisition and college success. Parmegiani offers a strong counterpoint to the “English-only” movement in the United States. Grounded in a case study of a learning community linking Spanish and English academic writing courses, he demonstrates that a mother tongue–based pedagogical intervention and the strategic use of minority home languages can promote English language acquisition and academic success. Andrea Parmegiani is a Distinguished Fellow at the CUNY Advanced Research Collaborative and Associate Professor of English at Bronx Community College (CUNY).

Routledge Research in Language Education

Researching Chinese Language Education Functional Linguistic Perspectives book cover Edited by Mark Shiu-kee Shum, Peter Mickan Addressing Difficult Situations in Foreign-Language Learning Confusion, Impoliteness, and Hostility Gerrard Mugford Interdisciplinary Research Approaches to Multilingual Education Edited by Vasilia Kourtis-Kazoullis, Themistoklis Aravossitas, Eleni Skourtou, Peter Pericles Trifonas From Language Skills to Literacy Broadening the Scope of English Language Education Through Media Literacy Csilla Weninger Critical Literacy with Adolescent English Language Learners Exploring policy and practice in global contexts book cover Jennifer Alford Education Policy for the Promotion of Trilingual Education at Primary Level A comparative analysis of Ireland and Catalonia Elena Prats Porcar Using ESL Students’ First Language to Promote College Success Sneaking the Mother Tongue through the Back Door Andrea Parmegiani For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com

Using ESL Students’ First Language to Promote College Success Sneaking the Mother Tongue through the Back Door Andrea Parmegiani

First published 2019 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 Taylor & Francis The right of Andrea Parmegiani to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-29677-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-09976-7 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

To anyone who has ever made the effort to learn another language, especially if as part of a quest for a better life

Contents

List of Tablesviii Acknowledgmentsix Contributorxi Introductionxii I

Linguistic Diversity and the Achievement Gap in the United States

1

II Language Inequality: Theoretical Perspectives and Implications for Academic Literacy

21

III Using Spanish as a Resource at Bronx Community College

56

IV Impact on Learning Outcomes

87

V Conclusion

121

Index133

Tables

4.1 4.2

Target Class Pass Rates 96 Percentage of Students Who Enrolled in First-Year Composition97 4.3 Number of Semesters to First-Year Composition 97 4.4 Average Credit Accumulation While Enrolled in the Learning Community (target semester) 98 4.5 Average Credit Accumulation the Semester after Completing the Learning Community (target + 1) 98 4.6 Average Credit Accumulation the Second Semester after Completing the Learning Community (target + 2) 98 4.7 Average GPA While Enrolled in the Learning Community (target semester) 98 4.8 Average GPA the Semester after Completing the Learning Community (target + 1) 99 4.9 Average GPA the Second Semester after Completing the Learning Community (target + 2) 99 4.10 One-Year Retention Rates 99 4.11 Current Enrollment Status: Graduated 99 4.12 Current Enrollment Status: Still Enrolled 99

Acknowledgments

Writing a book has been a dream since I was a child. The people who have helped me make this dream come true, one way or another, are way too numerous to be acknowledged individually in these pages. This doesn’t take anything away from my gratitude. Among these people, my husband Murray Edelman and my friends and colleagues Hope Paris, Rebecca Mlynarzyk, and Rafael Coste deserve a special thanks. Murray spent countless hours helping me navigate the treacherous waters of quantitative research, dealing with my meltdowns with the patience of a saint. I would still be lost in a sea of numbers without his stewardship and intellectual elbow grease. Murray’s patience was also immense in dealing with my mood swings that came with the writing of this book. Hope Parisi and Rebecca Mlynarczyk of Kingsborough Community College found the time to read earlier drafts of this book in the midst of their multiple responsibilities as scholars, professors, mothers, and in Rebecca’s case, grandmother. I am immensely grateful for their time, cogent input, and faith in me. Without their support, I would not have been able to claim the “right to speech” the way I have with this book. Former ESL student and current Bronx Community College administrator Rafael Coste was a sine qua non for the interview process. Without Rafael, the interviews—and this book—simply could not have happened. Without his magic, I would not have been able to find my former students, nor would they have opened up the way they did without his inspiring presence. Special thanks, of course, to my students, especially to those who took their precious time to speak to me so candidly and intimately during the interviews. It has been a blessing, an honor, and a joy to teach and learn with you and to share what I have learned in the pages of this book. Many colleagues at Bronx Community College are among the many people that have helped me make this dream come true “one way or the other.” I can only mention a few: Robert Beuka, Marianne Pita, Laurel Cummins, Alexander Lamazares, who have supported the English–Spanish link as chairs of the departments of English and Modern Languages.

x  Acknowledgments I am thankful to Alicia Bralove-Ramirez, for being part of the linchpin of the learning community as the Spanish instructor; to Shirley Skelt, Maria Treglia and the CLIP program for their help with recruitment; to Sharon Utakis and Laura Kaplan for writing papers with me and dragging me into other exciting scholarly adventures that have fed into this book; to Jan Robertson and the writing center community for being in the vanguard of celebrating linguistic diversity and using the mother tongue as a resource on campus. Last but certainly not least, I am especially grateful to Maryann Russo, pillar of the English Department, for being so graceful in helping absent-minded college professors such as myself deal with the practicalities of life. Special thanks Dan Robothan and the CUNY Advanced Research Collaborative for having offered me the luxury of a fellowship that provided me with full release from my teaching duties for a semester and the opportunity to present my work in progress in South Africa and in New York. This time release was vital in my ability to complete the manuscript by the deadline I had agreed to with my editor. The opportunity to discuss my work in progress in a forum that was so engaging, supportive, and effective at giving me food for thought from multicultural perspectives was also essential in my ability to forge ahead with the completion of the book. Lots and lots of gratitude to my South African colleagues and friends who organized an academic homecoming that was long overdue: Rosemary Wildsmith, Robert Balfour, Susan Coetzee-Van Roy, Henk Low, Tobie Van Dyk, and Zanden Janse Van Rensburg of Northwest University, Potchefstroom; Christa Van der Walt of the University of Stellenbosch; Leila Kajee and Pia Lamberti of the University of Johannesburg; and Belinda Mendelowitz and Leketi Makalela of the University of the Witwatersrand. Thanks to Jerry Weiss for his help with data entry and copy editing; to Kabir Khanna for his help with quantitative data analysis; to Daniel Tehrani for his help with the bibliography. Thanks to the Routledge team, especially the editors that have helped me move my book idea from an email to a book in print: Matt Friberg, Karen Adler, Naomi Silverman, and Katherine Tsamparlis. Thanks to my parents, for their unconditional love and all the gifts that have come from it; to Henry for ten years of special friendship that helped me keep my sanity while living in New York; to all my friends across the globe, whom I don’t see enough of; to the radical faeries, for having given me a sense of belonging I have craved all my life; to Terry Cavenaugh for being such great role model; to the City of Portland and the Pacific Northwest for making it possible for me to be all that I can be and live life to the fullest.

Contributor

Andrea Parmegiani is Associate Professor in the English Department at Bronx Community College of the City University of New York, where he teaches academic writing courses to both English as a Second Language and native English speakers. He was educated in Italy, Kuwait, the United States, and South Africa and has taught on three different continents. His research in South Africa explores language attitudes and practices and their implications for social change. In the United States, his work has focused on using language minority students’ mother tongue as a resource for second language and literacy acquisition. This book is based on a program he started to promote academic success among Spanish-speaking students at Bronx Community College. His home is planet Earth.

Introduction

This book presents  strategies for using English as a Second Language (ESL) students’ mother tongue as a resource for academic literacy acquisition and college success. In the United States, immigration has grown exponentially in the past several decades. According to the Pew Research Center, there were 9.7  million foreign-born individuals living in this country in 1960; by 2015 this number went up to 43 million, accounting for 13.4% of the total population (Lopez  & Redford, 2017). The presence of languages other than English spoken in the U.S. has also increased dramatically: By 2000, the number of speakers of “other home languages” had risen to approximately 47 million, accounting for almost 18% of the population (Census, 2000). Because of these demographic trends, more and more educators are finding themselves having to serve a student population who experience a discrepancy between their home language and the medium of instruction. The National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) refers to these students as English Language Learners (ELLs); I shall refer to them as language minority students (LMSs) to highlight the fact that they often find themselves in a vulnerable position when interacting in a world that privileges the language of the majority. The presence of LMSs has grown very rapidly: From 1995 to 2005, the number of LMSs in U.S. schools increased by 56%, whereas the general school population increased only by 2.6% (Bratalova et  al., in Garcia  & Kleifgen, 2018, p.  10). In the school year 2014–2015, it was estimated at 4.6 million students, or 9.4% of the public school population (NCES, 2018). Probably not many people would dispute the idea that experiencing a discrepancy between the home language and the medium of instruction can complicate the learning process significantly until LMSs have become proficient in the additional language they need to succeed academically. What is hotly contested is the role the home language should play—if any—in helping getting LMSs to the point where they are fully functional in the language of instruction, which, in the United States, like many other countries, is a language that functions as a gatekeeper to educational attainment, employment, and political participation. Language

Introduction xiii rights activists and supporters of bilingual education claim that using LMSs’ mother tongue as a resource is essential to make the education systems more equitable by giving all students a fair chance to succeed. Their claim is supported by decades of research on bilingual education and learning outcomes. Nevertheless, among the U.S. public, there is some skepticism and outright hostility toward the use of languages other than English (LOTE) in education. The fear is that moving away from “English-only” learning situations will prevent LMSs from mastering the dominant language, which will exclude them from employment opportunities and sociocultural integration, and undermine national unity. There is not much in the way of empirical evidence to justify this fear; nevertheless, the fear itself is real, and the resistance it engenders is a reality progressive educators need to take into account when looking for ways to use LMSs’ mother tongue as a resource for academic success, especially in a political climate where xenophobic ways of thinking are becoming increasingly acceptable among substantial segments of the population. This book offers a set of concrete pedagogical and programmatic strategies for implementing mother tongue–based pedagogical interventions when creating formal bilingual programs is just not possible. Because these strategies are designed to promote English acquisition and academic success through the medium of this language, and because they don’t involve the use of what Crawford has termed the “b-word” (2004, p. 35), they can help circumvent resistance against the use of minority languages in education. The intervention I discuss was implemented at Bronx Community College (BCC) of the City University of New York (CUNY) as an attempt to improve success rates among Spanish-speaking students, which account for a very big part of BCC’s student population. This intervention comprises two main pedagogical components. The first component is a link between ESL courses that I teach and Spanish courses for native speakers offered by the Department of Modern Languages. This link was formed within the framework of a learning community, or clusters of classes characterized by curricular integration that students take in the same cohort. The second component was my participation in the Spanish course with my students as a language learner/participant observer to enhance the integration between first and second language and literacy development within the learning community and to collect data for this book. Taking a college-level Spanish class for native speakers with my limited proficiency in this language was immensely useful from both an ethnographic and a pedagogical perspective. First of all, trying to put myself in my students’ shoes provided me with glimpses of the difficulties they face in trying to meet the demands of college-level academic literacy in a language they haven’t fully mastered. English is not the first language I learned, and while it is my strongest language for academic purposes,

xiv  Introduction I speak it with an accent that, more often than not, is perceived as “nonnative.” I never forgot the struggle I went through at the age of 11, after my family left Italy for Kuwait and all of a sudden, I found myself being an LMS at an American school without any knowledge of the language of instruction. I have always thought of my personal language history and of my memories of my own struggle with language as precious resources that allowed me to empathize with my LMSs and consequently to be an effective English and ESL instructor. Over the years, however, my ownership of English had become such an intrinsic part of who I am and what I do as an academic that it wasn’t until I started taking Spanish composition courses for native speakers with my students that I realized how often I had underestimated the difficulties my students have to overcome to participate in the academic discourse I  was trying to co-create with them in my class. My role as a language learner/participant observer helped equalize power relations in the classroom, as I  found myself having to turn to my students as experts in order to make sense of the academic discourse that emerged in the Spanish class. As critical and culturally responsive pedagogy theories teach us, valuing the knowledge base students bring to the class is crucial for promoting academic success, especially when this knowledge base is rooted in languages, dialects, discourse, and cultural practices that tend to be discounted by learning institutions and mainstream society. Both the link between Spanish and English and my role as a language learner provided plenty of opportunities to approach language and literacy development from a translingual perspective, or a situation in which students were able to use all their linguistic resources (in both English and Spanish) as they grappled with the complexities of academic discourse in English. Last but not least, both components of the program went very far in building an “additive learning situation” based on “authentic caring” as envisioned by the pioneer studies of Valenzuela (1999) and Bartlett and Garcia (2011). Because students were given the opportunity to take ownership of English and academic literacy (Parmegiani, 2010, 2014, 2016) in a pedagogical space where the language and cultural referents that are so important for their identity construction were valued, they felt valued and safe enough to take those emotional risks that are part and parcel of a language and literacy acquisition process. The book is organized into five chapters. Chapter 1 situates the need to use the mother tongue as a resource in the context of linguistic diversity in the United States and the persistence of an achievement gap that is particularly harmful to LMSs. I problematize the notion that the United States has ever been a monolingual English-speaking country and address the issue of hostility toward linguistic diversity. I then examine current statistical data showing that the presence of LOTE spoken in U.S. homes is increasing exponentially. Turning my attention to the achievement gap,

Introduction xv I examine its causes and argue that language inequality is partly responsible for the re(production) of systemic barriers to academic success. The goal of Chapter 2 is to provide a conceptual apparatus for understanding language inequality and its implications for teaching a dominant language (English), a dominant dialect (Standard English), and a dominant set of discourses (academic literacy), which I refer to conjointly as “dominant codes.” LMSs, such as those of the Spanish-speaking population I focus on, are trying to take ownership of dominant codes within the context of asymmetrical relations of power that shape identity construction and social interaction. A theoretical exploration of how these asymmetries operate is fundamental for designing pedagogical strategies that can put dominant codes within reach of LMSs. Bourdieu’s (1997) theory of linguistic inequality and Gee’s notion of “Discourse ‘with a capital D’ ” (1996) will be central to my analysis. Within this theoretical paradigm, the traditional conception of academic literacy—based on the exclusive use of one language, one dialect, and a set of indisputable rhetorical conventions—is constructed as a dominant code that excludes LMSs, whose home languages, dialects, discourses, and identities are not valued by learning institutions, from academic success. To make this dominant code more accessible, I call for the need to reduce power differentials in the classroom by creating an academic discourse that welcomes students’ subjectivities, social realities, and translingual practices. It is within this student-centered pedagogical approach, I  argue, that the mother tongue becomes a resource for second language and literacy acquisition. Chapters  3 and 4 provide a case study discussing how Spanish has been used as a resource for English acquisition and academic success at BCC. Chapter 3 gives a snapshot of the institutional context, highlighting the need to improve success rates among its student population, which is characterized by a strong presence of LMSs, especially native Spanish speakers. After reviewing studies of systemic barriers to academic success focused on Latin@ and Dominican students, I discuss how I designed a mother tongue intervention to mitigate the impact of those barriers based on the critical, culturally responsive pedagogical approach I  lay out it Chapter 2. I then explain how I was able to circumvent potential resistance against bilingual education by linking preexisting ESL and Spanish composition courses within a learning community. Finally, I discuss how my involvement with the Spanish course as an additional language learner/participant observer allowed me to establish an ethnographic partnership with my students that played a crucial part in achieving the educational outcomes I had envisioned. Chapter  4 provides both quantitative and qualitative data to assess these outcomes. Given the administration’s preoccupation with “measures” and “accountability,” I collected evidence that students who took an ESL course that was linked to Spanish tended to perform better in

xvi  Introduction terms of course pass rates, retention, grade point averages (GPAs), credit accumulation, and progression through the developmental English course sequence. As encouraging as these numbers have been, I did not want to confine my assessment of the program to a narrow, measurable conception of assessment, especially given my theoretical focus on power asymmetries and my student-centered pedagogical approach. I have therefore collected qualitative data right from the inception of the program. Some of these data emerged in the ESL and Spanish classrooms in the form of group discussions, free-writing assignments, personal conversations, and reflections that were recorded as ethnographic observation. Some emerged in focus-group and individual interviews carried out after students completed the program. These qualitative findings, which Chapter  4 presents thematically, suggest that the mother tongue facilitates second language and literacy acquisition by creating a “safe space” where students feel comfortable expressing themselves using dominant codes, which, in other situations, make them feel excluded from the learning process. The ability to use the mother tongue in conjunction with English (or to “translanguage”) allows students to engage agentively with an academic discourse of greater complexity while developing positive identities as learners. Far from constituting an impediment for second language and literacy acquisition, if used effectively, the mother tongue provides additional opportunities for strengthening students’ command of lexical, syntactical, and rhetorical features of the dominant code by building on what they already know. My participation in the Spanish course facilitated a shift from “coercive” to “collaborative” power relations in the classroom (Cummins, 1996), which made students more willing to take risks in their efforts to appropriate the dominant code. The concluding chapter addresses not only the limitations of the case study but also its potential to reduce language inequality in education by highlighting the value minority languages can have in facilitating access to dominant codes. I  recommend looking beyond formal bilingual education programs to find creative ways to “sneak in the mother tongue through the back door” to help language minority students succeed. Finally, I discuss ways in which the pedagogical and programmatic principles that emerged from the BCC model could be adapted to other learning scenarios, even in situations where LMSs do not share the same mother tongue. My hope is that this book will be taken as a starting point for designing context-specific approaches for using the mother tongue as a resource in other learning institutions while circumventing potential resistance against bilingual education. While the case study explores the needs of a particular student population (Dominican students who have recently immigrated to the United States) the theoretical and pedagogical underpinnings of my arguments apply to any learning situation characterized

Introduction xvii by the presence of LMSs. Linguistic diversity and inequality are by no means uniquely U.S. phenomena, and they are on the rise worldwide, as are conservative political climates that do not bode well for cultural pluralism. The stories my students shared with me so generously show that there is something universal about the struggle to appropriate a dominant language and literacy from a marginal position. Their narratives are indeed colored by specific details related to their subjective experience as recent U.S. immigrants from the Dominican Republic, but what they share about the sacrifices they make to appropriate the language of power and the value they find in their mother tongue throughout this process is likely to resonate with many readers regardless of their linguistic background.

References Bartlett, L., & Garcia, O. (2011). Additive schooling in subtractive times: Bilingual education and immigrant youth in the heights. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press Bourdieu, P. (1997). The economics of linguistic exchanges. Social Science Information, 16(6), 654–668. Crawford, J. (2004). Educating English learners: Language diversity in the classroom. Los Angeles, CA: Bilingual Educational Services. Cummins, J. (1996). Negotiating identity: Education for empowerment in a diverse society. Ontario, CA: California Association for Bilingual Education. Garcia, O., & Kleifgen, J. (2018). Educating emergent bilinguals: Policies, programs, and practices for English language learners. New York, NY: Teacher’s College Press. Gee, J. (1996). Social linguistics and literacy: Ideologies in discourse. London: Falmer Press. Lopez, G., & Redford, J. (2017). Facts on U.S. immigrants 2015. Washington, DC: Pew Research Center. Retrieved July  6, 2018, from www.pewhispanic. org/2017/05/03/facts-on-u-s-immigrants/ National Center for Educational Statistics. (2016). English language learners in public school. In The condition of education. Retrieved July  8, 2018, from https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cgf.asp Parmegiani, A. (2010). Reconceptualizing language ownership: A case study of attitudes towards language, power, and identity among students at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. Language Learning Journal, 38(33), 359–378. Parmegiani, A. (2014). The dis(ownership) of English: Language and identity construction among Zulu students. The International Journal of Bilingualism and Bilingual Education, 17, 683–694. Parmegiani, A. (2016). Gender and ownership of English in South Africa. World Englishes, 36(1), 42–59. U.S. Census Bureau. (2000). Census 2000: Summary files of language use and ability: 2000 (PHC-20). Retrieved July  3, 2018, from www.census.gov/ population/www/cen2000/briefs/phc-t20/index.html Valenzuela, A. (1999). Subtractive schooling: U.S. Mexican youth and the politics of caring. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

I Linguistic Diversity and the Achievement Gap in the United States

1.  Linguistic Diversity in the United States What do you call a person who speaks two languages? A bilingual What do you call a person who speaks three languages? A trilingual What do you call a person who speaks only one language? An American —A joke I have heard somewhere that I find so unfair

Americans are often thought of as being monolingual English speakers, but in reality linguistic diversity has always had a strong presence on the continent. More than 500 indigenous languages were spoken before colonial languages (Spanish, English, French) became hegemonic (Macias, 2014, p.  19). At the time the United States gained its independence, European immigrants of non-English extraction made up one quarter of the population (Shell, 1993). This number of immigrants, combined with “an unknown but presumably significant” number of the colonized and enslaved population, which spoke American Indian or African languages, suggests that when the nation was founded “perhaps a third or more of Americans spoke a language other than English” (Rumbaut & Massey, 2013, p.  1). The annexation of territories formerly controlled by France (the Louisiana Purchase of 1803), Spain (the Adams-Onis Treaty of 1819), and Mexico (the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo of 1848) increased the number of speakers of European, indigenous, and African languages other than English, but the biggest impetus for the growth of linguistic diversity in the United States came from voluntary migration. From the middle of the 19th century until World War I, migrants arrived mainly from the Old Continent. The first wave (1840s and 1850s) was dominated by German speakers and speakers of Celtic languages, and it was followed by a large influx of Scandinavians (1870s and 1880s) and Southern and Eastern Europeans from 1880 to the early 20th century. The 1910 Census reported that out of a population of 92 million,

2  Linguistic Diversity and the Achievement Gap 10  million immigrants had a mother tongue that was neither English nor a Celtic language. This group included 2.8 million German speakers, 1.4 million Italian speakers, 944,000 Yiddish speakers, and 683,000 Polish speakers (Rumbaut & Massey, 2013, p. 1). Migration flows to the United States dropped drastically between 1910 and 1970 as a consequence of the world wars, of more restrictive immigration policies, and of European economic development. “As a result, the percentage of foreign born fell steadily in the United States, going from 14.7% in 1910 to reach a nadir of 4.7% in 1970.” Mass migration resumed again after 1970, although no longer mainly from Europe, and by 2010 the percentage of foreign-born had risen to 12.9% (Rumbaut & Massey, 2013, p. 1). These flows of new Americans brought a sharp, steady increase of linguistic diversity that has been well documented by the U.S. Census Bureau with three language questions that appeared in the 1980, 1990, and 2000 decennial censuses and, starting from 2010, in the yearly American Community Surveys (Ryan, 2013, p. 2). Census data on language are collected through three questions asked to a population 5 years or older. The first question is, “Does this person speak a language other than English at home?” If the answer is yes, respondents are asked to name the other home language and to rate their ability to speak English selecting one of the following options: “Very well, Well, Not well, Not at all.” Since these three questions were first asked by the Census Bureau, the presence of languages other than English (LOTE) spoken in American homes has grown exponentially. In 1980, the number of people living in America aged 5 or older who spoke a LOTE at home was 23.1 million; this number went up to 59.5 million by 2010, which constitutes an increase of 148%. During the same period, the total U.S. population only increased by 38% (Ryan, 2013, p. 5). It is worth noting that the composition of the LOTEs spoken at home also changed significantly in these three decades. The number of speakers of the European languages that were prevalent in the first part of the 19th century, such as Italian, German, Polish, and Yiddish, decreased sharply as a result of a language shift to English and reduced immigration flows. On the other hand, the presence of Spanish grew enormously with a 26 million increase from 1980 to 2010, accounting for nearly two thirds of LOTE speakers by 2010 (Rumbaut, 2014, p. 183). Other languages whose presence grew significantly during the same period include Vietnamese (which had the largest percentage increase), Russian, Chinese, Korean, Persian, and Tagalog (Ryan, 2013, pp. 5–6). In terms of geographical distribution, linguistic diversity is not evenly represented throughout the country but is concentrated in “the nation’s periphery rather than the heartland, in cities and states along the coasts, the Great Lakes, and the Mexico-U.S. border” (Rumbaut  & Massey, 2013, p.  3). In 2010, California had the largest percentage of LOTE

Linguistic Diversity and the Achievement Gap 3 speakers (43.8%), followed by New Mexico (36.5%), Texas (34.7%), New Jersey (30.4.%), and New York (30.1%; Ryan, 2013, pp. 11–14). Larger metropolitan areas, especially in the “nation’s periphery” tend to have a stronger presence of LOTE speakers, which is not surprising, given that they tend to function as points of entry into the country and offer more employment opportunities. Smaller metropolitan areas, too, however, especially those located along the Mexican border, can have very high rates of linguistic diversity, which can reach beyond 90% of the population aged over 5 (Ryan, 2013, p. 10). The question of how well speakers of LOTE can speak English in the United States is fundamental because it has deep implications in terms of access to public services—especially education—political participation, employment opportunities, and national economic development. In fact, the reason why the Census Bureau monitors language demographics is to collect data that “are used in a wide variety of legislative, policy, and marketing decisions” and to ensure government service delivery to the part of the U.S. population who might not be proficient in English (Ryan, 2013, p. 1). To estimate rates of English proficiency in the country, the Census Bureau groups respondents who speak only English at home with LOTE speakers who self-report speaking English “very well” in the third language question of the Censuses and American Community Surveys. This group is assumed to be English proficient. On the other hand, respondents who self-report speaking English “well,” “not well,” or “not at all” are deemed as having limited English proficiency (LEP) (Ryan, 2013, p.  4). Among people who speak a LOTE at home, the majority (58%) reported speaking English “very well” in 2011, and the percentage of this population with LEP decreased from 44% in 1980 to 40% in 2015 (Ryan, 2013, p.  4). Not surprisingly, most of the population with LEP is foreign-born. It is also not surprising that among this group, English proficiency is related to “age of arrival, years of education, and time in the United States” (Rumbaut & Massey, 2013, p. 6). Projections based on data provided by the Census Bureau from 2010 to 2020 indicate not only that the United States will continue to be a multilingual country in the years to come but also that linguistic diversity poses no threat to the dominance of English as a national, albeit not official, language (Shin & Ortman, 2011, p. 5). Rumbaut and Massey’s (2013) study of language shift patterns toward English across in the United States has found “no support for those who believe that mass migration will produce a fragmented and balkanized linguistic geography in the United States” (p. 8). Even in areas such as Southern California, “the nation’s premiere immigrant megalopolis, where non-Hispanic whites are no longer the majority” (p.  8), English gradually supplants LOTE in American homes, even among Spanish-heritage speakers, who are likely to lose proficiency in this language by the third generation. If anything, this study suggests that rather than being concerned about the

4  Linguistic Diversity and the Achievement Gap alleged threat that multilingualism could pose to the “integration and cohesiveness of U.S. society,” Americans should be concerned about the “the progressive death of immigrant tongues” and “the loss of human, social, and cultural capital” it represents in a global economy (Rumbaut & Massey, 2013, p. 9).

2. Language Attitudes and Language in Education: A Brief Historical Excursus We should erect a sign at each point of entry into the United States. “Welcome to the United States-We cannot speak your language.” —Senator Paul Simon (1988, p. 1)

The United States does not have an official language, and as we have seen (in Section 1.1), linguistic diversity has always had a strong presence on the continent. Yet, the “ideology of normative monolingualism,” or the idea that Americans should speak only one language, and that English should be that language is pervasive. This ideology constructs “linguistic diversity as an impediment to unity” and “and relies on the erasure of the fact of multilingualism in the U.S.” (Fuller, 2013, p. 10). It can be found in the form of political discourse, Internet postings, private conversations, and “signs and merchandise,” such as “bumper stickers that say ‘why the hell should I have to press 1 for English?’ ” (Fuller, 2013, p. 11). Nevertheless, it wouldn’t be true to say that language attitudes in the United States are invariably shaped by bigotry and intolerance, just like it wouldn’t be true to say that Americans are monolingual by definition. Throughout much of the history of this country, the language question was largely left alone, unless it posed a threat to existing power structures. Of course, these power structures were far from equitable, and linguistic tolerance did not extend to the languages spoken by the subjugated racial groups. For instance, the enslaved African population was forced to “develop a limited proficiency in English speech (enough to understand commands in English) during a ‘seasoning’ process” whose goal was to socialize captive Africans into their new role as forced laborers (Macias, 2014, p. 20). Not surprisingly, slave traders and owners, fearing a revolt, felt threated by the use of African languages: “Had a slave the courage to speak his native language, punishment was sometimes severe; there are reports of blacks having their tongues removed” (Shell, 1993, p. 105). With respect to the First Nations, the Indian Peace Commission established by Congress in 1867 identified the use of indigenous languages as a major factor of “Indian hostility.” In 1868, the commission reported that in the difference of language today lies two-thirds of our trouble. Schools should be established which children would be required to

Linguistic Diversity and the Achievement Gap 5 attend; their barbarous dialects would be blotted out and the English language substituted. (Quoted in Leibowitz, 1971, p. 67) Following the recommendations of the report, the federal government began replacing “Indian-created, and Indian-run schools that had previously flourished” and bilingual missionary schools with governmentcontrolled “English only” schools of “domestication” (Macias, 2014, p. 24). Initially created as local day schools these “domestication” centers eventually morphed into the notorious “off-reservation, boarding school” system, which was to dominate Indian education for the next 50 years (Leibowitz, 1971, p. 69). The fact that these schools “blotted out” students’ alleged “barbarous dialects” with appalling levels of violence is well documented: “If we spoke Indian, they would whip us until our hands were blue on both sides” (Tschantz, 1980, p. 10). Cases of violent repression of the use of LOTE among students in schools were reported much later too. In the 1970s, for instance, “the U.S. Civil Rights Commission reported comments from students who said that getting caught speaking Spanish meant that they were fined, forced to stand on a special black square, or made to write ‘I must not speak Spanish.’ ” In a school, “children are forced to kneel in the playground and beg for forgiveness if they are caught talking to each other in Spanish; some teachers require students using the forbidden language to kneel before the entire class” (Epstein, 1977, p. 55). During the colonial period and early republic, however, there was a certain level of acceptance of linguistic diversity, at least as far as European immigrant languages were concerned (Baker, 2011, pp. 184–185). Until the turn of the 20th century, a primarily rural population “lived in cohesive European-language speech communities throughout the colonies” (Macias, 2014, p.  19), where heritage language maintenance was sustained through the use of the mother tongue in religious practice, newspapers, and schools (Baker, 2011, p. 184). German, French, and Dutch were the most widely spoken languages within these enclaves. The presence of German was particularly strong, which led to a widespread use of this language as a medium of instruction among communities throughout the country, especially the Midwest (Baker, 2011, p.  185). Other European languages, such as Italian, Polish, Russian, Spanish, Czech, and Scandinavian, were also used as media of instruction throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries (Kloss, 1998). As long as the languages brought by Europeans immigrants existed within the confines of isolated social enclaves that were not in competition for economic and political power with the white, Anglophone elite, authorities saw no need for restrictive language policies. The moment LOTE speakers threatened to break out of these confines, calls for language restrictionism ensued. One of the first examples of this was

6  Linguistic Diversity and the Achievement Gap Franklin’s efforts to curb the use of German, once the presence of its speakers was strong enough to become a political and economic force that had to be reckoned with in Pennsylvania. His pamphlets warned that “great disorders and inconveniences may arise among us” if German was allowed to coexist alongside with English: Why should the Palatine Boors be suffered to swarm into our settlements, and herding together, establish their Language and Manners to the Exclusion of ours? Why should Pennsylvania, who was founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them? (In Crawford, 2000, p. 11) Political efforts to discourage the use of LOTE became more systematic in the first two decades of the 20th century as a result of a massive influx of immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe and a greater concentration of LOTE speakers among workers in the manufacturing sector. Capitalist forces began to be concerned about immigrant workers’ participation in labor movements and began to push for an “Americanization campaign,” which would stem out destabilizing political elements by using the English language as a means of acculturation into values that supported the interests of industrialists. In 1916, Kellor, one of the promoters of this campaign, argued that “strikes and plots that have been promoted by un-American agitators are not easily carried out among men who have acquired, with the English language and citizenship, an understanding of American industrial standards and an American point of view” (in Crawford, 2000, p. 21). Forced Americanization classes sometimes became a requirement for foreign-born employees; at the same time, the Federal Bureau of Education “got behind the Americanization effort, producing publications and patriotic events aimed at immigrant workers, and funded entirely by outside ‘philanthropists,’ that is, by financiers and ‘industrialists’ ” (Crawford, 2000, p. 21). World War I exacerbated distrust of LOTE when U.S. residents who were not native English speakers were questioned about their loyalty and were increasingly seen as a potential threat to national security (Willey, 2007). German speakers, in particular, “who were the most populous linguistic group at the time, suddenly found themselves stigmatized and forced to use English” (Willey, 2007, p. 97). The federal government exercised censorship on the non-English press, while some local governments outlawed the use of German in public places (Macias, 2014, p.  27). Roosevelt’s calls for supplanting “hyphenated Americans” with “unadulterated Americans” equated patriotism with English monolingualism: “We must have but one flag. We must also have but one language” (n.d.). Explicit Americanization campaigns ended in the 1960s as a result of the strictest immigration quotas in U.S. history, which Congress passed

Linguistic Diversity and the Achievement Gap 7 in 1924 to maintain the racial and ethnic “purity” of the nation. As we have seen (in Section 1.1), these quotas created an unprecedented level of linguistic uniformity in the United States, which reduced the need for coercive Anglicization policies (Crawford, 1990). At the same time, this period of linguistic uniformity, combined with the language homogeneity ideology that was promoted during the first half of the 20th century sowed the seeds of the English-only movements of the 1980s and 1990s, which has fought the resurgence of linguistic diversity and tolerance of the 1960s and the 1970s. A combination of factors paved the way for this resurgence. The Cold War, the growing influence of international organizations such as the United Nations, issues of national security, and the need to keep up with Russia in terms of scientific progress led to the 1958 National Defense Education Act, which promoted foreign language instruction in American schools (Baker, 2011, p. 186; Macias, 2014, p. 31). The 1965 Immigration Act terminated the national immigration quota system instituted in 1924; this termination marked the beginning of massive immigration flows from Latin America and Asia, bringing more and more language minority students (LMSs) into U.S. classrooms (Ovado, 2003, p.  7). Wealthy Cuban exiles who had fled Castro’ s revolution of 1959 established the first modern bilingual public school, Coral Way Elementary School in southern Florida. The success of this educational initiative, a growing awareness of the research showing the benefits of bilingual education in Canada, and the progressive political change brought about by the civil rights movement created a climate that was more conducive to the growth of bilingual education (Macias, 2014, p.  32). The 1967 Bilingual Education Act brought bilingual programs under the umbrella of federal educational policy. Bilingual programs grew throughout the United States as a result of this act, community activism, and successful lawsuits that challenged monolingual English instruction as violations of the civil rights LMSs (Ovado, 2003, p. 9). Attitudes toward linguistic diversity became less tolerant again in the 1980s with the resurgence of a “English-only movement,” which attempted to make English the official language of the states and the nation, to eliminate the use of non-English language in economic activities (e.g., protested the use of bilingual menus at McDonald’s restaurants in Miami, Florida), schools, public libraries and government, and sought to return to the English-only policies of the early 20th century. (Macias, 2014, p. 35) While this movement functioned as a “more politically correct” channel to express xenophobic sentiments, especially toward Hispanics, Crawford warns that it would be a mistake to reduce it to the product of

8  Linguistic Diversity and the Achievement Gap white-supremacist ideology, given that it “included luminaries across the political spectrum” (2000, p. 5). Nevertheless, ties between language in the U.S. English movement (which sought to make English the official language of the United States and exclude other languages from the public domain) and immigration restriction movements (which accepted donations from white-supremacist organizations) have been exposed, as have been the Hispanophobic views of the chairman of U.S. English, John Tanton, who, in an internal memorandum that was leaked, warned that immigration from Latin America combined with higher birthrates would lead to whites seeing “their power and control over their life decline” and “deadly disunity” (in Crawford, 2000, p. 23). Despite the scandal that ensued from the leaking of this email, the U.S. English movement came very close to fulfilling its mission in 1995 with HRS 123, when the House of Representatives approved a bill that sought not only to make English the official language of the federal government but also to forbid the use of other languages “by its agencies, employees, and officers, except in very limited circumstances” (Crawford, 2000, p. 39). The bill was rejected by the Senate, and since then, there have not been concerted efforts to give English official status, in part because its hegemonic power in the United States is well established but also because the Republican Party has become increasingly aware of the importance of linguistic minorities—especially Latinos—as a voting bloc. Before the language question became dormant, however, in 1997 a campaign spearheaded by Silicon Valley millionaire Ron Unz succeeded at making bilingual education illegal in California (with Proposition 227, passed in 1997) and, later, in Arizona and Massachusetts (Baker, 2011, pp. 190–191). The Bush administration did not seek to outlaw bilingual education, but the 2011 “No Child Left Behind” (NCLB) legislation eliminated the Title VII Bilingual Education Act and washed off the term bilingual education from government educational institutions and programs. For example, the National Clearinghouse for Bilingual Education was renamed National Clearinghouse for English Language Acquisition and Language Educational Programs (Baker, 2011, p. 192). Most important, NCLB curtailed the use of ESL students’ mother tongue as a resource by failing to make any reference to first-language development, expanding English-only instruction and by increasing pressure on ESL students to pass standardized tests (Macias, 2014, p.  36; Baker, 2011, p.  193). According to Garcia and Kleifgen (2018), it has not been only the government—whether federal, state, or local—that has carried out this discursive shift. Educators and scholars of bilingualism have also been complicit in this discursive shift by not naming “bilingualism,” perhaps fearful of more backlash against it (p. 46).

Linguistic Diversity and the Achievement Gap 9 They argue that this change “is not just discursive; it is real,” in the sense that it brought about a sharp decline in enrollment in bilingual programs, in spite of a sharp increase of learners who could benefit from these programs (Garcia & Kleifgen, 2018, p. 46). I strongly disagree with the idea that scholars who do not specifically refer to bilingual education when arguing for the need to use LOTE as media of instruction are somehow “complicit,” albeit indirectly, in a trend toward a lesser use of LMSs’ mother tongue in education. As I show in this book, in some cases, avoiding the “b-word” (Crawford, 2004) and language rights rhetoric can make it easier to push for mother tongue–based educational initiatives that promote the use of minority languages in education while increasing access to English language and literacy and academic success across the curriculum. I agree with Garcia and Kleifigen, however, that the expunging of the term bilingual education from policy statements has important implications for language rights activism and that NCLB “heralded a period focused solely on closing the achievement gap through testing and English” (Garcia & Kleifgen, 2018, p. 40). During the Obama administration, “education took a backseat in the debate over other major national issues,” but he did speak favorably of bilingual education and at times, acknowledged NCLB’s excessive focus on standardized testing. While LMSs’ advocates felt that his reforms continued to rely excessively on testing (Baker, 2011, p.  195), Obama must be credited for releasing federal guidelines highlighting the civil rights of English language learners in the tail end of his administration. While these guidelines do not specifically recommend using LOTE as a resource, they do provide a toolkit to assess whether or not English is a students’ primary home language and mandate that parents be provided with translation services if unable to communicate effectively in English with school districts (Brown, 2015). In 2009 the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State Officers released the Common Core State Standards, or a set of learning objectives to be met in Grades K to 12 in language arts and math. Aimed at “increasing global competencies” of American students, “the Common Core Standards call for increasing academic rigor in students’ development of knowledge and skills” (Lin, 2014, p. 53). These standards have been criticized for their narrow conception of academic literacy, which delegitimizes forms of discourse that are more familiar to LMSs (Lin, 2014) and for lacking “a coherent theory of language,” which has led to a reinforcement “of the teaching of grammar and vocabulary using English only” (Garcia & Kleifgen, 2018, p. 43). The Every Student Succeeds Act was signed by Obama at the end of 2015, continuing “the goal of preparing all students for success in college and career while providing flexibility for some of NCLB’s more restrictive requirements” (Garcia & Klefigen, 2018, p. 44). Changes affecting

10  Linguistic Diversity and the Achievement Gap language minority students include the requirement of a “language proficiency indicator” as part of schools’ Adequate Yearly Progress evaluations, and the requirement that “states identify languages that are present to a significant extent” (Garcia & Kleifgen, 2018, p. 44). It is too early to assess where the Trump administration stands with respect to issues related to language policies and the education of linguistic minorities, but Trump’s attempts to build a wall with Mexico, to impose a travel ban on Muslims, and to repeal the Dream Act, which provides a pathway to citizenship for illegal residents who arrived in the United States as children, do not bode well for diversity of any kind. While his administration has not yet made any attempts to resuscitate the “English-only” agenda, it did delete the Spanish version of the White House website. In an op-ed piece published by the New York Times, Stavanas (2017) predicted that this is only a taste of what is to come. In the English version of El Pays, the former director of the Cervantes Institute of New York warns that “to deny the importance of Spanish in the United States is as insane as denying climate change, something that incidentally, the Trump administration does with impunity” and that “speaking Spanish in public could be dangerous in the face of the threat of a massive wave of deportations” (Lago, 2017). As we will see later in this section, this danger is real, not just hypothetical. For Garcia and Kleifgen the “socioeducational climate has never been less auspicious” for LMSs: For newcomers and immigrants, stern immigration policy is affecting how they are viewed in schools and society, with talk of ‘walls’ and ‘keep them out.’ Many are afraid of walking home from school, fearful that they will be deported. Children of immigrants, and even grandchildren of immigrants, are also afraid that their loved ones might be deported (2018 p. xxiii) The screams of the immigrant children being torn apart from their parents at U.S. detention centers are not helping LMSs feel safe in the United States.

3. Polarization and Current Public Opinion on Linguistic Diversity It is hard to gauge where U.S. public opinion stands with respect to linguistic diversity, but it is probably safe to say that it is as polarized as it is with respect to many other political issues in the United States. Attitudes toward the use of LOTE in education might have shifted considerably among certain segments of the U.S. population. In 2016, 73% of California’s voters chose to repeal Proposition 227, which made English-only

Linguistic Diversity and the Achievement Gap 11 instruction mandatory in public schools (Ulloa, 2016). In the summer of 2017, the Massachusetts State Senate and House passed a bill allowing school districts to reintroduce a bilingual education option (Vaznis, 2017). Nationally, two-way dual-language immersion programs have become extremely popular (Christian, 2016). These are programs “in which students who speak English at home and those who speak a language other than English at home learn academic content instruction for both English and the partner language” (Menken & Avni, 2017, p. 185). They “instruct roughly equal numbers of students from two different language backgrounds [. . .] The students spend half the day studying some of their subject[s] in English and half of the day with another teacher studying other subjects” in the partner language (Dorner, 2015, p. 2). Two-way dual-language immersion programs have been criticized for allegedly serving “fewer English learners” (Garcia  & Kleifgen, 2018, p. 72), given that they reserve roughly 50% of the slots available to native English speakers; for being driven by the interests of globalizing market forces, rather than educational justice for linguistic minorities (Flores & Garcia, 2017); and for using LMSs as “commodities that can be consumed by White English-speaking children” (Pimentel, 2011, p.  351). Their rapidly increasing popularity and expansion have been described metaphorically as a “gentrification” process that is displacing the traditional residents of bilingual education programs (Valdes & Freire, 2016). These critiques are problematic for several reasons. First of all, it is hard to see how the creation of more dual-language programs where 50% of enrollment is devoted to LMSs would lead to “fewer English learners being served.” This would be true only within a single school, if the school in question switched from offering a one-way dual-language program (serving exclusively LMSs) to the two-way model (serving a 50% LMS–50% Anglophone population). This reduction in LMS service isn’t necessarily happening at district, state, and national levels, in a school system where more and more schools that used to be English-only are adopting dual-language instruction (Harris, 2015). In fact, “while the number of schools offering two-way dual language education has grown steadily, the last two decades has brought a dramatic increase in new programs” (Christian, 2016, p.  2); for some, this dramatic increase is best characterized as an “explosion” (Flores & Garcia, 2017, p. 602). The demands of globalization probably have something to do with an increase in interest in LOTE, but we cannot make assumptions and sweeping generalizations about what motivates Anglophone parents to have their children instructed in a minority language. If the need to be competitive in a global economy were the only motivation behind the demand for two-way dual-language instruction, it would be hard to explain why English-speaking parents would choose to enroll their children in programs with partner languages such as Bengali, Urdu, or Haitian Creole (Menken & Avni, 2017, p. 186), which don’t exactly have a

12  Linguistic Diversity and the Achievement Gap lot of cachet as linguae francae in a globalized economy. But regardless of their motivation, the fact that native English speakers are willing to stand in line to enroll their children in schools where they are taught in languages spoken by linguistic minorities is a radical step toward raising the status of those languages, promoting linguistic diversity, and valorizing the cultural capital and identities of the native speakers of those languages. For decades, language rights activism and critical/multicultural pedagogy have been trying to expose the connection between linguistic and socioeconomic inequality and how schools reinforce this connection by excluding marginalized languages and dialects from the learning process. The fact that more and more language majorities are starting to value minority languages and want to have their children educated in a diverse environment should be more of a cause for celebration than outcry, especially at a time when U.S. citizens can be detained by border patrols for speaking Spanish while buying gas for their car while in the United States and restaurant staff can be harassed by patrons for talking to each other in Spanish while carrying out their job (BBC News, May  22, 2018). It should also be a cause for celebration that within such a xenophobic political climate, a school model that is promoting racial, ethnic, socioeconomic, and linguistic desegregation is becoming extremely popular. As for the idea that LMSs are exploited by “White English-speaking children” who consume them “as a commodity,” (Pimentel, 2011), I do not see how learning another person’s language robs that person of anything, especially in a situation where the learning process is mutual, or “bidirectional” (Parmegiani, 2014a, 2017, Section 2.4.b), given that linguistic minority and majority students learn each other’s language simultaneously. If anything, as my student Clare said in her interview, making the effort to learn another person’s language is a way to express appreciation for who that person is. This is particularly true when the person making the effort to learn is in a position of power, as is often the case with a language majority speaker. Claire pointed out quite poignantly that seeing someone going out of the way to learn your language feels wonderful because it means that he is taking an interest in you. He is taking interest in something that belongs to you, your language, your culture. That person is saying to you that everything you are is important. (Clare; see Section 4.5.f) At a time when overtly xenophobic rhetoric has become an acceptable form of political discourse and acts of hatred against Americans who do not fit nativist conceptions of who belongs to this country have increased exponentially, there are much more important things to do in the fight for linguistic diversity and social justice than attacking programs that

Linguistic Diversity and the Achievement Gap 13 are making bilingual education more popular because these programs are bringing the benefits of bilingualism to language majority students too. I fully agree that bilingualism “cannot be valued only as an instrument of neoliberal economy” (Garcia & Kleifgen, 2018, p. 48) and that in order to promote social justice, it also needs to empower “those who have been minoritized as bilinguals and who have seldom been able to use their full linguistic repertoire in schools without fear, shame or stigma” (Garcia & Kleifgen, 2018, p. 48). Schools that are desegregated by design, which level the playing field by making both language minorities and language majorities learn through a language they don’t speak at home and which raise the status of marginalized languages by using them as media of instruction are a very good model for empowering “those who have been minoritized as bilinguals.” If calling these schools “dual medium” rather than “bilingual” and highlighting their value for a globalized economy helps circumvent the sort of hostility that gets triggered by the use of the “b-word,” it might not be such a bad thing to do so. Given the political climate we are living in, we are probably going to need more of such sneaky stratagems to promote linguistic diversity in education rather than strident claims such as “Latinx children are being treated as a commodity to boost the resumes of White middle-class children” in two-way dual-medium schools (Flores & Garcia, 2017, p. 26). Claims such as these, which conveniently overlook the fact these schools are racially integrated, are helping close the achievement gap (LindholmLeary  & Borsato, 2006; Rolstad, Mahoney,  & Glass, 2005), and are turning monolinguals into bilinguals, are more likely to impede, rather than promote, linguistic diversity.

4. Linguistic Diversity and the Achievement Gap They’re the fastest growing ethnic group, but the least educated. Do we have what it takes to close the gap? —Patricia Gandara (2010)

The United States is often thought of as the “land of opportunities,” but even a cursory look at national statistical indicators suggests that access to educational opportunities is far from equitable: a persistent achievement gap makes it harder for students of lower socioeconomic status to succeed academically. The achievement gap is glaring with respect to race and ethnicity. In terms of educational attainment, black and Latin@ students continue to lag behind their white and Asian counterparts both at the secondary and postsecondary level. According to the Census Bureau, in 2015, 93.3% of the white non-Hispanic population aged 25 or older had earned at least a high school degree, while only 87% of the black population and 66.7% of the Latin@ population did. The gap

14  Linguistic Diversity and the Achievement Gap between the white and the Hispanic population grows even wider at the postsecondary level: 46.9% of non-Hispanic whites had earned at least an associate degree as opposed to 22.7% of Hispanics; 36.2% of nonHispanic white earned at least a bachelor’s degree, as opposed to 15.5% of the Hispanic population. Only 4.7% of Hispanics earned an advanced degree, as opposed to 13.5% of non-Hispanic whites (Ryan & Bauman, 2016, p. 2). Status dropout rates, or the percentage of the 16- to 24-year-old population that is not in school and has not earned a high school diploma, paints a similar picture. According to the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) “in each year from 1990 to 2014, the status dropout rate was lower for white youth than for black youth, and rates for both white and black youth were lower than the rate for Hispanic youth” (NCES, 2016, p. 2). National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) reports, which provide the largest longitudinal assessment of educational outcomes in the United States based on standardized tests, show that Hispanic and black students continue to score below white students in terms of reading and math achievement (NCES, 2016). Among Hispanic students, there is also “a glaring gap between drop-out rates of U.S.-born and foreign-born” students (Lukes, 2015, p. 2). LMSs also tend to be on the wrong side of the achievement gap. Despite their conspicuous presence and rapid growth, there is not as much information available about the educational attainment of this group of students as there is for racial/ethnic groups, but NAEP reports published by NCES (2016) indicate that LMSs tend to perform well below white students both in terms of reading and math skills and that this gap widens as students progress with their elementary school education (see also Fry, 2007). In terms of postsecondary education, an analysis based on the data collected by the National Education Longitudinal Study (NELS) has found that “only one in eight ELL [English Language Learners] in the NELS data earned a bachelor’s degree, while 1 in 4 English proficient linguistic minority students and 1 in 3 English monolingual speaker did” (Kanno & Cromley, 2013, p. 2). Language plays an important role in the race/ethnicity achievement gap. Given the demographic trends that have characterized U.S. immigration flows since the 1970s (see Section 1.1), the vast majority of foreignborn LMSs are students of color, but so are the ones that were born in the United States: 78.1% are Hispanic, 10.6% Asian, 3.5% black, and 5.8% white (Garcia  & Kleifgen, 2018, p.  19). Fry’s study of dropout rates among Latin@ youth has found that LEP is a major factor in the decision to leave school (2003, p. 8). But even among monolingual Englishspeaking students of color, who would not be considered ELLs, differences in dialectal and discursive practices contribute to the achievement gap, as it emerged during the Ebonics debate or the controversy triggered by the Oakland school district’s decision to use the home language

Linguistic Diversity and the Achievement Gap 15 variety of many African Americans as a learning tool (Perry & Delpit, 1998; Smitherman, 1997). According to Corson, “the reaction of children of diversity to academic literacy is often resistance to pressures to conform to the unwanted standard varieties and literacies of the school” (2001, p. 92) when the schools don’t recognize their home dialect and literacy practices. Many children from nondominant backgrounds find that just being “successful” in education involves rejecting the social origins evidenced in their language varieties, so different are the literate and standardized academic practices of school from much that the children themselves are familiar with or value (Corson, 2001, p. 92). Consequently, “when these students look at educational success realistically from their own social positions, that ‘success’ is out of reach for most of them” (Corson, 2001, p. 92). It must also be highlighted that as a structural barrier to academic success, language seldom operates alone but, rather, functions with a host of other socioeconomic factors that put LMSs at a disadvantage when it comes to academic success: “The majority of ELL today are racial/ ethnic minorities; they also tend to be poorer and have less educated parents than native-English speaking students” (Kanno & Cromley, 2013). Zehler et  al. (in Garcia  & Kleifgen, 2018, p.  17) estimated that based on the number of LMSs who receive free or discounted school meals, more than 75% of this student population lives in poverty. Not surprisingly, “poverty has extraordinarily negative implications for learning” (Nieto, 2010, p. 15). Studies have shown that poverty alleviation policies such as the provision of affordable housing, medical care, and acceptable wage levels go very far in reducing the achievement gap (Rothstein, 2004; Anyon, 2005); “the evidence of the positive influence on student achievement when families are able to leave poverty is consistent and replicable” (Berliner, 2005, p. 11). Another important predictor of educational attainment is the quality of education students receive. Unfortunately, the vast majority of LMSs attend underfunded, underperforming, and racially and linguistically segregated schools that, even without a language barrier, would undercut their chances of academic success. Schools with a high concentration of LMSs tend to be characterized by “large enrollments, larger class sizes [. . .], higher incidents of student poverty, student health problems, tardiness, absenteeism, and lack of preparation; greater difficulty filling teaching vacancies, greater reliance on unqualified teachers, and lower levels of parental involvement” (De Cohen, Deterding, & Chu, 2005, p. 17). In addition to having to learn through a language they have not yet fully mastered, many LMSs have to deal with the challenges that come with adjusting to a new life in a new country and “thrust them into adult

16  Linguistic Diversity and the Achievement Gap roles at a young age” (Luke, 2015, p. 18). These include expanded family responsibilities (Bartlett & Garcia, 2011, p. 157), which can include having to contribute to living expenses from an early age, sending remittances to relatives in their countries of origin, having to translate for their parents, taking care of younger and older relatives, and doing the bulk of the house chores. These responsibilities are often in competition for time and energy with academic demands, making it harder for them to do well in school. Finally, it must be mentioned that the challenges that come with being an LMS have a strong psycho-emotional component that is exacerbated whenever their identities are devalued. “The reality is language learning is difficult,” and “it is also inherently threatening to one’s pride and positive self-image to be forced to communicate in childishly simple language, to have to admit you don’t understand, and to struggle to pronounce things correctly while others laugh” (Fuller, 2013, p. 88). Cummins (1996) explained very eloquently the importance of negotiating identity in the learning process, especially for culturally and linguistically diverse students: When students’ developing sense of self is affirmed and extended through their interactions with teachers, they are more likely to apply themselves through academic effort and participate actively in instruction [. . .] By contrast, when students’ language, culture, and experience are ignored or excluded in classroom interactions, students are immediately starting from a disadvantage. Everything they have learned about life and the world up to this point is being dismissed as irrelevant for school learning, and so students are expected to learn in an experiential vacuum. (p. 2) This “experiential vacuum” triggers a vicious circle whereby students’ silence in the learning process is misconstrued by teachers as “a lack of academic ability or effort,” which convinces many students that “academic effort is futile” and makes them withdraw “from participation in the life of the school” (Cummins, 1996, pp. 2–3). Schooling situations that do not acknowledge the linguistic and cultural resources LMSs bring to the classroom but, rather, construe them as impediments for academic success, are bound to engender psycho-emotional obstacles that reinforce language barriers and undermine LMSs’ self-esteem (Valenzuela, 1999; Bartlett & Garcia, 2011). Addressing issues related to poverty, the “savage inequality” of the school system (Kozol, 1991) and the challenges of LMSs’ multiple responsibilities are beyond the scope of what committed educators can do in the classroom to fight the achievement gap. As Anyon points out,

Linguistic Diversity and the Achievement Gap 17 the failures of many public city schools are “a logical consequence of the U.S. macroeconomy—and the federal and regional policies and practices that support it. Teachers, principals and students are not the culprits” (2005, p. 2). Nevertheless, there is a lot of committed educators can do in partnership with their students to mitigate the dire effects of structural inequality by tapping into the resources their students possess.

References Anyon, J. (2005). Radical possibilities: Public policy, urban education and a new social movement. New York, NY: Routledge. Baker, C. (2011). Foundations of bilingual education and bilingualism. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Bartlett, L., & Garcia, O. (2011). Additive schooling in subtractive times: Bilingual education and immigrant youth in the Heights. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press. BBC. (2018, May  22). Why Spanish speakers in the U.S. are getting into trouble. BBC News. Retrieved June  21, 2018, from www.bbc.com/news/ world-us-canada-44201444 Berliner, D. (2005). Our impoverished view of educational reform. Teachers College Record. Retrieved July 6, 2018 from http://epsl.asu.edu/epru/documents/ EPSL-0508-116-EPRU.pdf Brown, E. (2015, January  7). New federal guidelines highlight civil rights of English language learners. Washington Post. Retrieved July  6, 2018, from www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/new-federal-guidelines-highlightcivil-rights-of-english-language-learners/2015/01/07/870f952e-961f-11e48005-1924ede3e54a_story.html?noredirect=on Corson, D. (2001). Language diversity and education. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Christian, D. (2016). Dual language education: Current research perspectives. International Multilingual Research Journal, 10(1), 1–5. Crawford, J. (1990). Language freedom and restriction: A  historical approach to the official language controversy. In J. Reyner (Ed.), Effective language education practices and native language survival (pp.  9–22), http://jan.ucc.nau. edu/~jar/NALI_Contents.html Chocktaw, OK. Crawford, J. (2000). At war with diversity: U.S. language policy in an age of anxiety. Clevedon: Multilngual Matters. Crawford, J. (2004). Educating English learners: Language diversity in the classroom. Los Angeles, CA: Bilingual Educational Services. Cummins, J. (1996). Negotiating identity: Education for empowerment in a diverse society. Ontario, CA: California Association for Billngual Education. De Cohen, C., Deterding, N., & Chu, C. B. (2005). Who’s left behind? Immigrant children in the high and low LEP schools. Urban Institute. Washington, DC: Program for Evaluation and Equity Research. Retrieved July 4, 2018, from www. fcd-us.org/whos-left-behind-immigrant-children-in-high-and-low-lep-schools/ Dorner, L. (2015). What is dual language education? In Cambio Center eBrief. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri. Retrieved July  4, 2018, from www. cambio.missouri.edu/Documents/ebrief1dorner.pdf

18  Linguistic Diversity and the Achievement Gap Epstein, N. (1977). Language, ethnicity, and the schools. Washington, DC: Institute for Educational Leadership. Flores, N., & Garcia, O. (2017). A critical review of bilingual education in the United States: From basements and pride to boutiques and profit. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 37, 14–29. Fry, R. (2003). HIspanic youth dropping out of U.S. Schools: Measuring the challenge. Washington: Pew Hispanic Center. Fry, R. (2007, June 6). How far behind in math and reading are English language learners? Retrieved July 4, 2014, from Pew Hispanic: http://www.pewhispanic. org/2007/06/06/how-far-behind-in-math-and-reading-are-english-languagelearners/ Fuller, J. (2013). Spanish speakers in the U.S. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Gandara, P. (2010). Meeting students where they are. Eduational Leadership, 67(5), 24–30. Garcia, O., & Kleifgen, J. (2018). Educating emergent bilinguals: Policies, programs, and practices for English language learners. New York, NY: Teacher’s College Press. Harris, E. (2015, October 8). Dual language programs are on the rise even for native English speakers. New York Times. Retrieved July 4, 2018, from www. nytimes.com/2015/10/09/nyregion/dual-language-programs-are-on-the-riseeven-for-native-english-speakers.htm Kanno, Y.,  & Cromley, J. (2013). English language learners’ access to and attainment in postsecondary education. TESOL Quarterly, 27(1), 89–121. doi:10.1002/tesq.49 Kloss, H. (1998). The American bilingual tradition. Rowley, MA: Newbury House Publishers. Kozol, J. (1991). Savage inequalities: Children in America’s schools. San Francisco, CA: Crown Pub. Lago, M. (2017, February 3). The danger of speaking Spanish in the U.S. El Pais in English. Retrieved June 21, 2018, from https://elpais.com/elpais/2017/02/03/ inenglish/1486124276_729304.html Leibowitz, A. (1971). Educational policy and political acceptance: The imposition of English as the language of instruction in American schools. ERIC Clearinghouse for Applied Linguistics. Retrieved July  6, 2018, from https:// files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED047321.pdf Lin, C. C. (2014). Storytelling as academic discourse: Bridging the cultural linguistic divide in the era of the Common Core. Journal of Basic Writing, 33(1), 52–73. Lindholm-Leary, K.,  & Borsato, G. (2006). Academic achievement. In F. Genesee, K. Lindholm-Leary, W. Saunders,  & D. Christian (Eds.), Educating English language learners: A  synthesis of research evidence (pp.  176–222). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Lukes, M. (2015). Latino immigrant youth and interrupted schooling. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. National Center for Educational Statistics. (2016). English language learners in public school. In The condition of education. Retrieved July  8, 2018, from https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cgf.asp Nieto, S. (2010). The light in their eyes: Creating multicultural learning communities. New York: Teachers College Press.

Linguistic Diversity and the Achievement Gap 19 Macias, R. (2014). Benefits of bilingualism: In the eye of the beholder? In R. Calhan & P. Gandara (Eds.), The bilingual advantage: Language, literacy, and the U.S. labor market (pp. 16–44). Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Menken, K., & Avni, S. (2017). Challenging linguistic purism in dual language bilingual education: A case study of Hebrew in a New York City public middle school. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 37, 185–202. National Center for Educational Statistics. (2016). English language learners in public school. In The Condition of Education. Retrieved July 8, 2018, from https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cgf.asp Ovado, C. (2003). Bilingual education in the United States: Historical developments and current issues. Bilingual Research Journal, 27(1), 1–24. Parmegiani, A. (2014a). Bridging literacy practices through storytelling, the mother tongue, and ethnographic partntership: A  case study of Dominican students at Bronx Community College. The Journal of Basic Writing, 33, 23–51. Parmegiani, A. (2017). Promoting academic achievement through the mother tongue and a critically compassionate intellectual praxis. Latino Studies, 15(3), 365–372. Perry, T., & Delpit, L. (1998). The real Ebonics debate: Power, language, and the education of African American children. Boston: Beacon Press. Pimentel, C. (2011). The color of language: The racialized educational trajectory of an emerging bilingual student. Journal of Latinos and Education, 10(4), 335–353. Rolstad, K., Mahoney, K., & Glass, G. (2005). Weighing the evidence: A metaanalysis of bilingual education in Arizona. Bilingual Research Journal, 29(1), 43–67. Roosevelt, T. (n.d.). America for Americans: Afternoon speech of Theodore Roosevelt. Retrieved November 23, 2018, from www.theodore-roosevelt.com/ images/research/txtspeeches/672.pdf Rothstein, R. (2004). Class and schools: Using social, economic, and educational reform to close the Black-White achievement gap. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Rumbaut, R. (2014). English plus: Exploring the socioeconomic benefits of bilingualism in Southern California. In R. Callahan,  & P. Gandara (Eds.), The bilingual advantage: Language, literacy and the U.S. labor market. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Rumbaut, R., & Massey, D. (2013). Immigration and language diversity in the United States. Daedalous, 142(3), 141–154. Ryan, C. (2013). Language use in the United States: 2011. American Community Survey Reports. Washington, DC: U.S. Census Bureau. Retrieved July 6, 2018, from www.census.gov/prod/2013pubs/acs-22.pdf Ryan, C., & Baumann, K. (2016). Educational attainment in the United States: 2015. U.S. Census Bureau, Washington, DC Retrieved July 4, 2018, from www. census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2016/. . ./p20-578.pdf Simon, P. (1998). The tongue tied American: Confronting the foreign language crises. London: Continuum. Shell, M. (1993). Babel in America or the politics of linguistic diversity in the United States. Critical Inquiry, 20(1), 103–127.

20  Linguistic Diversity and the Achievement Gap Shin, H., & Ortman, J. (2011). Language projections: 2010 to 2012. Federal Forecasters Conference. Washington, DC Retrieved July 3, 2018, from www. census.gov/hhes/socdemo/language/. . ./Shin_Ortman_FFC2011_paper.pdf Smitherman, G. (1997). Talking and testifying: The language of Black America. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Stavanas, I. (2017, January 30). Trump, the wall and the Spanish Language. New York Times. Retrieved January 6, 2018, from www.nytimes.com/2017/01/30/ opinion/trump-the-wall-and-the-spanish-language.html Tschantz, L. (1980). Native languages and government policy: An historical examination. In Native Language Research Series No. 2. London: Center for Research and Teaching of Canadian Native Languages, The University of Western Toronto. Ulloa, J. (2016, November  22). Bilingual education is making a comeback in California. But some educators say the fight is only just beginning. Los Angeles Times. Retrieved July  3, 2018, from www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-cabilingual-education-challenges-20161122-story.html Valdes, V.,  & Freire, J. (2016). The gentrification of dual education. Urban Review, 48, 601–627. Valenzuela, A. (1999). Subtractive schooling: U.S. Mexican youth and the politics of caring. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Vaznis, J. (2017, November  22). New law clears way for bilingual teaching in Mass. Public schools. Boston Globe. Retrieved July  3, 2018, from www. bostonglobe.com/metro/2017/11/22/baker-signs-bilingual-education-bill/ XtYnsI3vW7ZQEXBpUxN0VN/story.html Wiley, T. (2007). Accessing langauge rights in education: A brief history of the U.S context. In O. Garcia, & C. Baker (Eds.), Bilingual education: An introductory reader (pp. 89–107). Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters.

II Language Inequality Theoretical Perspectives and Implications for Academic Literacy

1.  Language and Power There is no such thing as linguistic communism. —Pierre Bourdieu (1997, p. 43)

The idea that language is not politically neutral but a social mechanism that shapes identity construction and power relations is a fundamental theoretical starting point for understanding how linguistic inequality contributes to the achievement gap. Ferdinand de Saussure, who is considered the father of modern linguistics, approached language as an abstract system of signs that “exists perfectly within a collectivity” of speakers who have equal access to it (Saussure, in Rivkin & Ryan, 1998, p. 267). Similarly, Chomsky’s approach assumes that language exists in its perfect state within the mind of an “ideal speaker-listener, in a completely homogeneous speech community, who knows its language perfectly, and is unaffected by such grammatically irrelevant conditions as memory limitations, distractions, shifts in attention, and errors” (1965, p. 3). Breaking away from this tradition, Hymes argued that a study of language based on these kinds of abstractions “did not say enough of this world, where meanings might be won by the sweat of the brow and communication achieved in labor” (1971, p. 272). To move away from these abstractions, he suggested looking at language from the perspective of communicative competence, a concept that emphasizes that acquiring a language entails not only mastering its grammar but also understanding the social norms that shape the way in which language must be used in different situations: A normal child acquires knowledge of sentences, not only as grammatical, but also as appropriate. He or she acquires competence as to when to speak, when not, and as to what to talk about with whom, when, where, in what manner. In short, a child becomes able to accomplish a repertoire of speech acts, to take part in speech

22  Language Inequality events, and to evaluate accomplishments by others. This competence, moreover, is integral with attitudes, values and motivations concerning language, its features, and uses, and integral with competence for, and attitudes toward, the interrelation of language with the other code. (Hymes, 1971, p. 278) Bourdieu takes the notion of competence further by arguing that it should “include the capacity to command a listener,” or “the right to speech,” given that “language is not only an instrument of communication, or even knowledge, but also of power [. . .] an adequate science of discourse must establish the laws which determine who (de facto and de jure) may speak to whom and how” (1997, p. 648). This means that rather than focusing on grammaticality, linguists should focus on “legitimacy,” or the symbolic value attached to speech acts by subjects who are constantly using language to negotiate power relations. Verbal exchanges take place in inequitable linguistic markets, where subjects use language differently and where there is no such thing as “linguistic communism” (Bourdieu, 1997, p.  43): Some ways of speaking are considered better than others and are preconditions for being able to compete for symbolic and material resources, such as prestige and wealth. Hierarchies among languages, dialects, and registers reflect hierarchies among their speakers. In any linguistic market, the ways of speaking of the elite are taken as the “norm” or the “standard” to which all speakers should aspire but which only a few are be able to master. For example, in the United States, Standard English, which mirrors the speech patterns of the more privileged segments of society, is often labeled as “proper English,” whereas the language varieties used in my students’ working-class communities of color is referred to as “broken English,” even by some of my students themselves. In order to function as a mechanism that re(produces) inequitable power relations, access to dominant ways of speaking needs to be restricted. Indeed, Standard English is harder to master for students who are not exposed to it in their home environment, and these additional difficulties affect educational outcomes and employment opportunities. This level of difficulty is even greater for students who speak a totally different language at home. Bourdieu refers to the gatekeeping effect of language with this concept of “profit of distinction”: Since the profit of distinction results from the fact that the supply of products (or speakers) corresponding to a given level of linguistic (or more generally, cultural) qualification is lower than if all speakers had benefited from the condition of acquisition of the legitimate competence to the same extent as the holders of the rarest competence, it is logically distributed as a function of the chances of access

Language Inequality 23 to these conditions, that is, as a function of the position occupied in the social structure. (1991, p. 56) Bourdieu’s theory of linguistic market is very helpful for understanding how linguistic diversity is implicated in power relations. Although the United States has never had an official language policy, it would be hard to deny that English dominates over all the other languages spoken in this country and that Standard English dominates all other dialects. It can be argued that in part, this is due to the fact that it is the only home language of the vast majority of the population and to the fact that for centuries, with the exception of a few ethnolinguistic enclaves, it has functioned as the language of national unity and public discourse. It would be hard to argue, however, that the dominance of English is not tied to power struggles. As we saw in Section  1.1., the most obvious example is the imposition of this language onto the racially subjugated populations during the colonial period and the early republic who were literally forced to become English speakers (Macias, 2014; Shell, 1993). Even among linguistic minorities who voluntarily chose to migrate to the United States, however, the pressure to abandon the heritage language was often very strong (Crawford, 2000; Macias, 2014). Without this pressure, English today would probably not be the only home language of approximately 80% of the U.S. population. While barbaric acts of linguistic coercion, such as the ones that were inflicted on the enslaved and the indigenous population, would probably not be tolerated today, the pressure for linguistic minorities to anglicize continues to be strong. In most situations, English is a precondition to claim the “right to speech” in the United States. It is a precondition for being heard in school, for the vast majority of language minority students do not have the luxury of being heard in their mother tongue. English is a precondition for the right to speech in the job market, as employment without English proficiency is restricted to menial labor in the informal sector, which often comes with exploitative working conditions. And while the U.S. government does try to accommodate linguistic diversity to make sure all citizens can vote and some politicians have started to speak in Spanish in public forums to woo Latin@ voters, the right to speech in the political arena would be impossible to exercise without a very strong command of the dominant language. Given this pressure, it is not surprising that mastering the dominant language is a very high priority for non-English-speaking immigrants. In fact, Cummins pointed out the hypocrisy in the U.S. English mission statement, as articulated by its chairman/CEO Mauro Mujica: “US English is a national, non-partisan non-profit organization committed to making sure every single immigrant has the chance to learn English” (in Cummins, 1996, p. 44). This claim would have been more credible, Cummins

24  Language Inequality argued, if “U.S. English were using even a fraction of its funds to sponsor English language classes for immigrants” at a time when an “enormous demand for English language and literacy classes among immigrants far exceeded the availability of affordable classes” (1996, p. 44). At the time that California passed a proposition to make English the official language of the state, “more than 40,000 adults were on waiting lists for ESL instruction in Los Angeles alone” (Crawford, 1992, p. 17). The idea that, generally speaking, immigrants don’t want to learn English is also disproved by the inexorable language shift from LOTE to English, which continues today, even for the Spanish-speaking population in areas such as Southern California, where there is a very high density of speakers of this language. A language shift away from English, however, is virtually nonexistent. According to Rumbaut and Massey, the United States has “a well-established reputation as a graveyard for immigrant languages” (2013, p. 4), and it is only because of new arrivals of LOTE speakers into the country that linguistic diversity is maintained. Even after a shift to English has occurred, a speaker’s ability to “impose reception” is not a given, especially in sociolinguistic domains where material and symbolic power is allocated, such as education and the job market. Even if we were to take LOTE out of the equation, the U.S. linguistic market would still be far from equitable, as there is significant dialectal diversity among native English speakers and the symbolic value attributed to each dialect varies enormously, especially when speech patterns are perceived as being indicative of race and class (Fuller, 2013, p. 8). For instance, the Ebonics debate, which came to the national attention with the decision of a school district to use African American Vernacular English (AAVE) to help African American students master standard English, has shown that in terms of grammaticality, there is nothing “broken” about AAVE; it is as rule-governed as Standard English (Labov, 1972). Nevertheless, in terms of the social norms that govern the linguistic market, AAVE, like other nonstandard English varieties, is not given legitimacy as a language of learning and teaching (Smitherman, 1997; Perry  & Delpit, 1998). It is very unlikely that an employer would take a job application seriously, if it were sent with a cover letter and resume that presented features of AAVE or a white working-class English dialect. The exclusion of nonstandard English varieties from the classroom has profound implications for the learners who use them as home languages. Mastering academic literacy, which is based on Standard English and on literacy practices that are more prevalent among the elite, is more challenging for students of lower socioeconomic background, whose dialects and discourses can differ significantly from what school authorities expect for reading, writing, speaking, and listening. These unmet expectations can drastically limit the right to speech in the classroom, making

Language Inequality 25 it harder for linguistically diverse students to master the language and discourses of power and to succeed academically (Au, 2011, p. 32). While Bourdieu’s theory of linguistic market is extremely useful for understanding how language inequality is implicated in the achievement gap, pedagogical solutions cannot start from the premises that native speakers of marginalized languages and dialects speak in languages that are worthless and that, therefore, they have to suppress their home codes if they want to advance academically and professionally. As Yosso warned (2005), Bourdieu’s theory should not be misconstrued to argue that students who are at a higher risk of failure do not succeed because they are linguistically or culturally deficient. On the contrary, the exclusion of LOTE and nonstandard English varieties from the classroom should be challenged by showing the value these languages and dialects have as resources for academic success. This value is part and parcel of the “community cultural wealth” marginalized students possess, which is too often overlooked (Yosso, 2005, p. 70). Yosso’s argument focuses on students of color, but it has relevance for all students who find themselves at a disadvantage because of the way they speak at home is not valued in the classroom. In Section 2.3, I discuss ways in which in “community cultural wealth” can be activated to help marginalized students take ownership of dominant codes, or those languages, dialects, and discourses that are fundamental in the competition for symbolic and material resources in a given linguistic market and that tend to be much more accessible to groups that are socioeconomically dominant.

2.  Discourse and Power Discourses are intimately related to the distribution of social power and hierarchical structures in society. —James Paul Gee (1996, p. 132)

Gee’s notion of “Discourse ‘with a capital D’ ” is very important for understanding how dominant codes involve much more than “just language” in creating gatekeeping mechanisms that reproduce socioeconomic inequality and the implications of these mechanisms for the teaching of academic literacy. According to Gee, “Discourses ‘with a capital D’ ” involve speech acts but also values and cultural norms which shape identity construction: Discourses are ways of being in the world, or forms of life which integrate words, acts, values, beliefs, attitudes, and social identities as well as gestures, glances, body positions, and clothes. . . . A discourse, then, is composed of ways of talking, listening (often, too, reading and writing), acting, interacting, believing, valuing, and using

26  Language Inequality tools and objects in particular settings at specific times, so as to display a particular social identity. Discourses create social positions. (1996, pp. 127–128) Discourses provide “identity kits” which come “complete with costumes and instructions on how to act, talk, and often write, so as to take on a particular social role that others will recognize” (Gee, 1996, p. 127). These social roles yield different levels of material and symbolic resources; hence, “Discourses are intimately related to the distribution of social power and the hierarchical structure in society. . . . Control over certain discourses can lead to the acquisition of social goods (money, power, status)” (Gee, 1996, p.  132). Although the notion of discourse I use in this book is greatly indebted to Gee’s “with a capital D,” I will not uppercase this term in the rest of my analysis, unless it appears in an excerpt I am quoting. Applying this notion of discourse to the situation faced by students who use marginalized codes at home points to the fact that their challenges are related not only to second language and dialect acquisition but also to the need to navigate divergent—and sometimes clashing— discursive practices. As we will see in the next section, mastering literacy, just like mastering language, is not simply about the ability to decode an abstract system of signs, but it involves the ability to navigate social norms and cultural values that find expression through discourses that are deemed appropriate. For example, the difficulties many of my Dominican students face when writing college essays in the United States should be attributed not only to the fact that they are still developing English proficiency but also to clashing discursive expectations around knowledge (see Section 3.8). Centering a piece of writing on a student’s personal opinion by articulating as a thesis statement and supporting it with factual evidence found through independent research is a task many of my students never had to do in the secondary schools they attended in their countries of origin. Not only that: The expression of a personal opinion in an essay was actually frowned upon by my Dominican students’ high school teachers, especially if this opinion was rooted in a student’s life experience. One of my learners clinched this fundamental clash of expectations around academic discourse very clearly in a comment she made in class: If I  gave to a teacher in the Dominican Republic an essay like the ones my professors want at BCC they would be very surprised. They would probably give me a bad grade and tell me ‘I don’t care about your opinion or your life. If you want to share your experience, go and see a counselor.’ For Gee, it would be almost impossible for nonmainstream students to master academic literacy, which is based on a dominant language, a

Language Inequality 27 dominant dialect, and a set of discourses that do not reflect the social practices, cultural values, and identity constructions that are fostered at home. According to his theory, access to dominant discourses, “which can lead to the acquisition of social goods (money, power, status)” (Gee, 1996, p.  132) can only happen through primary socialization, which takes place in a home environment. Hence, it is only granted on the basis of birth into the right set of socioeconomic circumstances. In fact, dominant groups “apply rather constantly tests of the fluency of the discourses in which their power is symbolized . . . to exclude nonnatives.” Deliberate attempts to learn a discourse that a person has not been socialized into from birth can lead, at best, “to partial acquisition” which marginalizes (Gee, 1996, p.  146). Gee envisions only three possible subject positions vis-à-vis discourse: “insiders” (people who have had full access to the discourse by virtue of birth), “outsiders” (people who are excluded completely from the discourse), and “colonized” (people who occupy a marginal position because they can only claim a partial command of the discourse; (Gee, 1996, p. 155). In such a scheme, students who speak marginalized languages and dialects at home could never pass “the nativity test,” therefore they could never hope to harness the power that comes with the appropriation of English, Standard English, and academic literacy.

3.  Taking Ownership of Dominant Codes Members of society need access to dominant discourses to have economic power. —Lisa Delpit (1992, p. 300)

Given the way the achievement gap affects linguistic and dialectal minorities, it would be hard to deny that taking ownership of the dominant discourses that shape academic literacy can be a daunting process, especially when this process entails mastering an additional language. Nevertheless, the “birthright paradigm,” or the idea that languages, dialects, and discourses can only be inherited by birthright, has epistemological, political, and pedagogical limitations for understanding how dominant codes can be owned (Parmegiani, 2010, p. 360; Parmegiani & Rudwick, 2014, p. 112). First of all, this assumption does not do justice to the millions of multilingual speakers who have been able to develop full mastery of their additional languages, dialects, and discourses, although these codes might not be considered their “mother tongue.” Politically, like Delpit (1996, p. 300), I find Gee’s assumption that dominant discourses are simply beyond the reach of basic writers problematic because it can lead to a “dangerous kind of determinism as flagrant as that espoused by the geneticists: Instead of being locked into your place by your genes, you are now

28  Language Inequality locked into a lower-class status by your discourse.” I would also add that restricting the ownership of dominant codes to those privileged speakers who inherit them by birth reifies the “profit of distinction,” or the gatekeeping power of language: Unless a person is born within a small group of native speakers, he or she will not be considered a “legitimate” speaker (Bourdieu, 1997, p. 648), no matter how well that person has learned the language in question, and this will contribute to systemic disadvantage. Pedagogically, it makes no sense to assume that the ownership of dominant codes, such as English, Standard English, and academic discourse is beyond the reach of students who do not inherit them from birth. As Delpit (1992, p.  300) points out, “members of society need to access dominant discourses in order to have economic power,” so they need to be taught. If these codes are presented as being beyond the reach of LMSs, although indispensable for upward socioeconomic mobility, it is not hard to see how students could easily lose faith in academic learning and join the ranks of school dropouts. Fortunately, dominant codes can be mastered as a result of an “appropriation process” (Parmegiani, 2010, pp. 90–94) that can happen later in life, as attested by the countless nonnative speakers who have excelled in every imaginable professional field using languages, dialects, and discourses that they did not grow up speaking at home: Increasing numbers of Blacks and other minorities have entered a variety of business and professional arenas, from anchoring the news to running for President. All of them publicly use a very “standard” English, at least in grammatical terms. Although other aspects of their language use (pronunciation, intonation, vocabulary) may at times reflect regional and ethnic characteristics, the grammar is standard. They may retain aspects of other cultural and linguistic heritages for use in other contexts but they certainly know how to use standard English so as to be taken seriously by those in power. (Farr, 1985, p. 109) Standard English has also been successfully appropriated by native speakers of languages that are completely different in countries that were dominated by the British Empire, and it has been used as a weapon to fight against colonial oppression (Parmegiani, 2014b; Achebe, 1975; De Klerk, 2002). The fundamental question, then, is what can we do, as educators, to facilitate the appropriation of dominant codes so that more and more LMSs are able to use them to empower themselves and their communities? How do we turn academic discourse and the language(s) and dialect(s) and social practices through which it finds expression into instruments of inclusion rather than exclusion? How do we move beyond binaries and “either/or” logic when looking at language and power relations?

Language Inequality 29 Looking at what happens to students’ negotiation of identities (Cummins, 1996) as they struggle to appropriate dominant codes is a good place to start looking for answers to these questions. Gee maintains that, especially for women and minorities, the mastery of a dominant discourse is likely to require the adoption of “values that deny their primary identities” (Delpit, 1996, p. 153). I do not doubt that nonmainstream students can face pressure to assimilate as they seek to take ownership of dominant codes that shape academic literacy and that this pressure can have a detrimental effect on the learning process. Nevertheless, human beings have the ability to straddle a multitude of discourses as they create subject positions and to approach these discourses critically as agents. In fact, as Bhabha points out, what is “theoretically innovative” and “politically crucial” (1994, p.  1) in identity politics is to approach subjectivities as being constantly formed and reformed in hybrid cultural spaces where discourses clash and overlap, challenging the meaning of monolithic, static conceptions of fundamental identity markers such as race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexual orientation. Issues of language, power, and identity, then, are a lot more complex than establishing whether a subject is an “insider,” “outsider,” or colonized with respect to a particular discourse (Gee, 1996, p. 155): How are subjects formed “in between,” or in excess of the parts of difference (usually intended as race/gender/class, etc.)? How do strategies of representation or empowerment come to be formulated in the competing claims of communities where, despite shared histories of deprivation, and discrimination, the exchange of values, meetings, and priorities may not always be collaborative and dialogical, but may be profoundly antagonistic, conflictual, and even incommensurable? (Bhabha, 1994, p. 3) Questions such as these need to be explored to help students own rather than be owned by dominant codes. This does not necessarily need to be done using Bhabha’s abstract formulation. Students might be invited to compare their lives in the United States and in their countries of origin through the medium of a personal narratives focusing on the roles they have been expected to fulfill in their homes, their schools, and their communities. More often than not, these narratives can be used as springboards for discussions about how subject positions evolve as students grapple as discursive agents with the “competing claims of communities,” where values “may be profoundly antagonistic” (Bhabha, 1994, p. 3). For instance, my Dominican students, and also students from other parts of the world, will often mention that their move to the United States and their encounters with a new language have exposed them to ways of thinking that have changed the way they see themselves and the way they

30  Language Inequality would like to be seen in society. Female students, in particular, mention that discourses about gender identity accessed through their new language, while empowering, might put them in a conflictual position with respect to the discourses they were socialized into as they learned their place in the world through their mother tongue. Conversely, students have shared having experienced racism and linguicism, or discrimination based on language (Skutnabb-Kangas & Phillipson, 1995), while interacting in their second language but resisting the disempowering subject positions by using their first language as a discursive resource: “So you think I am less than you because I don’t speak English as well as you? Let me talk to you in Spanish, and then we will see how much you can understand.” Students have also brought up the idea of having to find a sense of themselves in an “in-between space” as they travel back and forth between New York and the Dominican Republic, a space where they are seen as wealthy Americans in their countries of origin (where they are expected to live the lives of luxury “people see on TV” and “bring lots of presents back for everybody”) and immigrants who don’t fully belong while they are in the United States (where they have to deal with the stereotypes that come with being from a developing country). Whatever shape or form these explorations of identity, language, and power relations take, they should facilitate the appropriation of academic literacy by preventing “subtractive schooling” (Valenzuela, 1999; Bartlett & Garcia, 2011), or learning situations where students feel pressured to make a choice among discourses, dialects, and languages that are important for their identity construction and the dominant codes they need to succeed academically and professionally. As Delpit points out, the goal of academic literacy instruction should not be “to eliminate students’ home languages, but rather to add other voices and discourses to their repertoires” (1992, p. 300) so that they have a much better chance to fulfill their dreams and aspirations. As we will see (in Section 2.4.e), a translanguaging approach that welcomes the home language, dialects, and ways of thinking that shape “the complex discursive practices of bilinguals” (Garcia, 2009, p. 53) can do a lot to reduce the sense of alienation many LMSs feel when they are under the impression that the codes they need to empower themselves, academically, socially, and economically and their home codes are incompatible. The idea behind translanguaging is not to restrict students’ access to dominant codes by confining them to what they already know but, rather, to increase this access by building on what they already know. In the case of my recently immigrated Dominican students living in the United States, this means that they should be given the opportunity to develop a high level of Standard English proficiency and a strong command of academic discourse, as shaped by U.S. college sociolinguistic expectations. As they work toward these goals, however, students should not be pressured to keep their Spanish and cultural values out of the classroom, but rather, they should

Language Inequality 31 be encouraged to use these resources to make sense of their new language and discourses, as they engage with them critically.

4. Implications for Teaching English and Academic Literacy No emancipatory pedagogy will ever be built out of theories of behavior which view students as lazy, deficient, lacking in ambition, or genetically deficient. —Peter McLaren (2009, p. 80)

The term academic literacy is widely used to refer to the field that investigates reading and writing in practices in school, especially from a pedagogical perspective. Coming up with a clear-cut, monolithic definition of this term would be theoretically unproductive, as these practices vary significantly across languages, cultures, academic disciplines, and writing genres. As Kalman argued, “direct definitions prove deficient for understanding the complexity of literacy,” but a fundamental principle of “the use of reading and writing” is that “it is accomplished through the interaction with other readers and writers and the appropriation of discourses” (2008, p. 54). This means that while the way literacy is conceptualized and performed may vary enormously across sociolinguistic domains, it is invariably couched in a set of social practices that have implications for power relations and identity construction (Street, 1994). First of all, as a language-mediated activity, literacy requires the use of linguistic codes, and which codes are chosen, and which codes are excluded from reading and writing events affects who gets and doesn’t get the right to speech. As we will see (in Section 4.5.b), LMSs often feel silenced when taking courses with native English speakers because they are not allowed to use their first language and sometimes are ridiculed when they express themselves in their second. In most situations, academic literacy is based on dominant languages and dialects, which puts certain socioeconomic groups at an advantage and other at a disadvantage in the “appropriation of discourses” that are essential for academic and professional success. But it is not only through the choice of linguistic code that academic literacy offers different levels of accessibility to students of different backgrounds. Studies have shown that regardless of the code, “ways with words” (Heath, 1983), or the sociocultural practices that govern linguistic exchanges in different communities, vary significantly, but schools only tend to value those of the elite (Wiley, 2005, pp.  137–153; Ladson-Billings, 2009, p.  460). It follows that academic discourse “favors students from bourgeois backgrounds, who rediscover in its medium their natural linguistic milieu, and sets further obstacles in

32  Language Inequality the path of working class students” (Bourdieu, Passeron, & Saint Martin, 1996, p. 87). Corson argues that because education fails to take account of the fact that many children’s discursive relations before and outside school are inconsistent with the kinds of lexico-semantics demands that schools and their high status culture of literacy place upon them, many English as a first language and English as a second language students from some cultural linguistic and social backgrounds are almost guaranteed to fail in the middle levels of present-day education before that have a chance to show that they can succeed. (2001, p. 23) These obstacles are not simply linguistic but also psycho-emotional, as they affect students’ identity construction as learners, their sense of belonging to the institution, and their conceptions of what they are and are not capable of doing with the educational opportunities that are provided to them: “Affective or motivational factors and academic achievement” are inseparable (Au, 2011, p. 35). To remove these obstacles, or at least reduce them, it is essential to remove academic literacy instruction from the “experiential vacuum” (Cummins, 1996, p. 2) that often surrounds it and ground it in the social realities of the students. “No learner is a blank slate. In reading, for example, we construct meaning by bringing our prior knowledge of language and of the world to the text” (Cummins, 1996, p.  75). Building on Dewey (1966) and Freire (1970), Shor points out that “the power of experience” plays a central role as a “curricular resource” and that devoid of connections with personal experience, theory obscures, rather than promotes, critical thinking: Theorizing theory produces abstract discourse where reference to experience in history gets lost. Yet, in academic life, as we know, the more abstract a spoken or written discourse, the more prestige of the speaker or the text represents. Herein lies the immense problem of the elite discourses already dominating academic work in the classroom. (Shor, 2009, p. 294) On a similar note, Giroux argues that “student experience must be given prominence in an emancipatory curriculum,” which entails “understanding the cultural and social forms for which students learn how to define themselves” (2009, p. 199); McLaren maintains that “knowledge is relevant only when it begins with the experiences students bring with them from the surrounding culture” (2009, p.  80). Academic literacy is no different: to be an instrument of inclusion and progressive social change,

Language Inequality 33 “it must be made personally meaningful to students of diverse backgrounds” (Au, 2011, p. 42). a.  Bridging Academic Literacy and Students’ Social Realities Among critical language and literacy scholars, whose work approaches education as an inequitable linguistic market, there is a lot of consensus about the idea that traditional conceptions of academic literacy, based exclusively on a dominant language, a dominant dialect, and a set of dominant discourse practices, create a sense of alienation in nonmainstream students. This is because sociocultural elements that are fundamental to students’ identity construction are excluded from the learning process. Au refers to this phenomenon as “cultural incongruence,” or “a disparity between typical schooling, or the way we usually ‘do school’ and the literacy learning needs, preferences, and interests of students of diverse backgrounds” (2011, p.  58). To reduce this type of incongruence, “the literacy offered in present-day schools needs to be linked into students’ lives and identities much more than it has traditionally been” (Corson, 2001, p. 93). Reflecting on her experience as a workingclass student, hooks (2009, p. 137) recalls that she and other “individuals from class backgrounds ‘deemed undesirable’ ” were “encouraged, as many students are today, to betray [their] class origins. Rewarded if [they] chose to assimilate, estranged if [they] chose to maintain those aspects of who we were.” As a professor, she sees “many students from ‘undesirable’ class backgrounds become unable to complete their studies because the contradictions between the behavior necessary to ‘make it’ in the academy and those that allowed them to be comfortable at home, with their families and friends, are just too great” (hooks, 2009, p. 137). As a way out of this predicament, she recommends rejecting the notion that students “must choose between experiences.” Instead, they must believe they can inhabit comfortably two different worlds but they must make each space one of comfort. . . . All too often, students from non-materially privileged backgrounds assume the position of passivity–they behave as victims as though they can only be acted upon against their will. Ultimately, they end up feeling they can only reject or accept the norms imposed upon them. This either/ or often sets them up for disappointment and failure. (hooks, 2009, pp. 137–138) Rejecting “either/or” logic while navigating clashing discursive universes lies at the heart of Valenzuela’s call for the need to move from a “subtractive” to an “additive” approach to schooling. Focusing on students of Mexican descent, her ethnographic study has made a compelling argument for the idea that students whose languages and cultural

34  Language Inequality practices are not valued by learning institutions face “subtractive schooling situations,” whereby academic success is perceived as coming at the cost of a loss of fundamental aspects of their identities and social ties to their primary community. This trade-off results in “the erosion of students’ social capital” (Valenzuela, 1999, pp.  5, 27–29) at a time when they need to build on all the capital they possess in order to surmount the challenges presented by academic literacy. In fact, when so many obstacles are stacked against students, social capital is a factor “that may make or break a student’s educational progress” (Lukes, 2015, p. 137; see also Astin, 1997; Tinto, 1975). The idea that nonmainstream students possess a wide range of cultural, linguistic, and social resources that can provide solid foundations for the learning process is well known among critical educators (Freire, 1970; Shor, 2009; McLaren, 2009) and culturally responsive pedagogy advocates (Ladson-Billings, 2009; Gay, 2000; Au, 2011), but unfortunately, it is not uncommon for teachers, administrators, and policy makers to mistake students’ limited command of dominant codes for a categorical “lack of skills.” As Nieto points out, there seems to be a curious refusal on the part of many educators to accept as valid the kinds of knowledge and experiences with which some students come to school, and this is particularly true with students from low-income and bicultural backgrounds. For instance, speaking a language other than English, especially those languages considered to have low status, generally is thought of by teachers as a potential detriment rather than a benefit to learning. (2010, p. 39) Rather than looking for pedagogical solutions starting from these premises, I have found it more productive to take the time to investigate what resources my students possess. Yosso refers to the socio-cultural resources students bring to the classroom as their “community cultural wealth,” which includes “at least six forms of capital” “that most often go unacknowledged or unrecognized” (2005, p. 70). Of these, I have found the following most useful for exploring and activating the resources my students brought to the classroom: • Aspirational capital: “the ability to maintain hopes and dreams for the future, even in the face of real and perceived barriers” (Yosso, 2005, p. 77) • Linguistic capital: the ability to use, with different levels of proficiency, multiple linguistic codes (Yosso, 2005, p. 78) • Social capital, or “networks of people and community resources” that “can provide both instrumental and emotional support to navigate through society’s institutions” (Yosso, 2005, p. 79)

Language Inequality 35 • Navigational capital: the ability to function within different social institutions while juggling multiple roles, responsibilities, and cultural contexts (Yosso, 2005, p. 80) It was also clear to me that in order capitalize on students’ cultural wealth, it was not enough to research it theoretically, relying exclusively on studies that were carried out by other academics, but that I needed to involve my students in this exploration. While it can be argued that all students, regardless of their command of dominant codes, possess aspirations, extensive linguistic skills, community resources, and the ability to navigate different social settings, the specifics of their cultural wealth are shaped by their personal life experience. Sociodemographic descriptors, such as class, race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, play a big role in shaping an individual’s experience and therefore should be discussed in the classroom, but it would be a mistake for educators to assume they are familiar with their students’ cultural wealth simply because they are familiar with studies that have theorized about these identity markers. While these studies can be a good starting point for understanding students’ social realities, relying exclusively on them can cause us to overlook students’ complexity as individuals and lead to essentializing forms of generalization that can be quite disempowering (Parmegiani, 2014b). To truly understand who students are, what kind of resources and challenges they bring to the classroom, and how their personal experiences can be used as a springboard into academic literacy and college success, educators need to invite their students to bring their life vicissitudes into the classroom and make academic literacy personal. Fortunately, personal narratives have great pedagogical values as tools for helping students master academic literacy; consequently, an instructor’s ethnographic need to learn about his or her students’ lives and social realities is most compatible with students’ need to appropriate dominant codes. Not only do narratives constitute “an engaging entry point into academic discourse,” but they also provide “a means for students to make sense of new and complex concepts in a contextualized, personal way,” helping them “develop some of the critical and reflective thinking/writing skills that are essential for academic discourse” (Mendelowitz & Ferreira, 2007, p. 487). Challenging the notion that personal/expressive writing is incommensurable with the type of argumentative writing that is the cornerstone of academic literacy in the United States, Mlynarczyk argues that students cannot “write a strong convincing argument unless they have grappled with the subject in a deep, personal way” (2006, p. 23). Especially for LMSs, it doesn’t seem feasible to join a discursive community that mystifies them “without using the primary resource they bring with them to college–their own expressive language, language that is close to the self” (Mlynarczyk, 2006, p. 13). I will add that it is precisely by making room for students’ selves and social realities that dominant codes can

36  Language Inequality be stripped of their gatekeeping effects and be appropriated by LMSs. First of all, inviting students to bring their life experience into a prestigious discourse whose mastery is correlated with socioeconomic empowerment is a way to validate who they are and the knowledge they bring to the classroom. This is crucial to promote success among students who tend to be marginalized by Academic discourse because of their racial, socioeconomic, and/or linguistic background: “When students’ developing sense of self is affirmed and extended through their interactions with their teachers, they are more likely to participate actively” (Cummins, 1996, p. 2). Cohen (in Bartolome, 2009) has shown that creating situations where marginalized students are put in the position of experts can help them develop more positive identities as learners who are knowledgeable and capable. For Delpit (1992), a teacher’s belief in his or her students can make it possible for nonmainstream students to “transcend the circumstances into which they were born” (p. 298) and achieve what for Gee is almost impossible in terms of mastery of dominant discourses. Welcoming students’ personal narratives into academic discourse is not only a way to validate who they are but also an ethnographic tool for instructors to understand their students’ community cultural wealth on which the appropriation of dominant codes must be built. As we will see in the next section, this ethnographic tool has also great pedagogical value as it can be the starting point of a student-centered academic discourse that can help students make connections between home and dominant codes while facilitating a shift from coercive to collaborative power relations (Cummins, 1996) in the classroom or a social situation in which teachers and learners work together to empower each other through mutual learning, as opposed to fighting for power through acts of coercion and disruption. b. Bidirectional Learning: Teachers Learn from Their Students Centering academic discourse around who students are, where they come from and what they bring to the classroom has important implications for power relations in the classroom, given that students know a lot more about their own cultural community wealth than their teachers do and given that it is important for teachers to learn about this cultural wealth in order to promote academic success. This approach precludes the possibility of a “banking model” pedagogy (Freire, 1970), which assumes that the minds of learners are empty vessels to be filled with the knowledge imparted by their instructor; instead, it presumes that knowledge must be co-created through an academic discourses that involve both dominant codes, which the instructor is an expert on, and marginalized codes, which students use to tap into their community cultural wealth. As such, it is a discourse that is intrinsically translingual, in the sense that it transcends the use of a single language, a dialect, and a finite set

Language Inequality 37 of discursive practices intended as “whole bound systems” (Heller, 2007, p. 11). Instead, it finds expression through the use of multiple codes. It is a discourse that reduces power/knowledge differentials between teacher and students by valuing all forms of cultural capital and linguistic codes, increasing the “right to speech” of students who are more likely to be silenced by dominant codes. It is a discourse that inevitably leads to bidirectional learning, or a pedagogical situation in which, to be effective, teachers need to learn from the students while students learn from their teachers (Parmegiani, 2014a, 2017). The idea that the learning process should not move only in one direction and that to be effective, teachers need to learn from their students is well known among critical and culturally responsive educators (Freire, 1970; Delpit, 1996; Shor, 2009). For Bartolome (2009), in order for teachers to truly “discard deficit notions and genuinely value and utilize students’ existing knowledge bases in their teaching,” they “must remain open to the fact that they will also learn from the students. Learning is not a one way undertaking” (p. 345). Nieto (2009) argues that without denying the need to teach students the cultural capital that they need to help them negotiate society, teachers also need to make a commitment to become students of students. This implies at least two kinds of processes. First, teachers need to learn about their students, a change from the one-way learning that usually takes place in classrooms. For this to happen, teachers must become researchers of the students. Second, teachers need to create spaces in which they can learn with their students and in which students are encouraged to learn about themselves and one another. (p. 478) Focusing on composition courses taught at U.S. colleges, Ruecker (2015) rightly points out that “what goes on outside the classroom greatly matters in terms of one’s academic literacy development” (p. 146) and that the “writing classroom” is “a site with great potential to promote student engagement” (p. 8) by learning from students about those aspects of their social realities that play such a critical role in academic success. Creating the conditions for bidirectional learning, however, can be challenging, especially when teachers’ identities are shaped by racial, ethnic, socioeconomic and linguistic determinants that put them in a privileged position with respect to their students. Farr and Daniel’s cautionary point is well taken: “Inviting students’ engagement (and vulnerability) by encouraging them to write personally significant topics may raise special challenges for students from poor, inner-city neighborhoods,” accustomed to social scenarios where “you don’t see a lot of problems being solved by not being tough. You don’t like people to know that you need help. It’s toughness and reserve that gets you through the day” (1986, p.  56). Also, as we will see (in Section  3.9),

38  Language Inequality students often come from educational backgrounds where the expression of personal experience and opinions is frowned upon, so they can be baffled when asked to do this while engaging with a literacy task, especially using a second language that comes with all sorts of unfamiliar rhetorical expectations. By telling students to talk about themselves, their histories, their communities, and their aspirations, teachers are asking them to take great emotional risks in an environment that they have often learned to mistrust as a result of subtractive schooling. There is no easy recipe for building this trust, as each student and each teacher is a different human being with different sensibilities. Nevertheless, it is clear that somehow “teachers must prove their own trustworthiness first by creating a safe atmosphere in the classroom. Students may have to be gradually led towards deepening personal engagement with writing topics, with teachers steadily offering them increasing levels of authority as their comfort and confidence increase” (Farr and Daniels, 1986, p. 36). In order to help students adapt to a more critical, experiential, and personal approach to academic literacy, Peterson recommends developing “transitionary models and activities [. . .] to enhance students’ self-esteem and reduce the anxiety level” (2009, p.  31). I  have found that beginning the term by sharing personal stories of empowerment written by former students and, whenever possible, inviting these former students-authors for readings and question-and-answer sessions goes very far in creating trust and establishing emotional safety. Former students can turn out to be ideal role models with whom current students can identify, and can offer powerful testimonials that can move and inspire current students to trust the learning process that is unfolding. As I  have discussed more fully elsewhere (Parmegiani, 2016b), sharing personal stories of empowerment creates peer-mentoring moments that can help new students find a sense of community that is so important for increasing their chances of academic success (Tinto, 1975; Mlynarczyk & Babbit, 2002). As one of my students mentioned, “the opportunity to know that I am not alone made me find the support, motivation, and courage not to leave college for any reason” (Parmegiani, 2016b, p.  110). Building trust, community, and a sense of agency actually go hand-in-hand, as another student of mine explained. Sharing narratives of empowerment made her see that things are not easy, but I can do everything I put my mind to. The stories we read helped me see that everybody has problems, but reading how people succeeded help me not to let my troubles overcome my goals. (Parmegiani, 2016b, p. 111) De-emphasizing spelling and mechanical correctness, especially in the earlier stages of the writing process, has also helped students take

Language Inequality 39 ownership of their writing and move beyond the idea that venturing into an essay is like stepping into a minefield. Shaughnessy could not have put this more cogently: for LMSs, academic writing is a trap, not a way of saying something to someone. . . . Writing is but a line that moves haltingly across the page, exposing as it goes all that the writer doesn’t know, then passing into the hands of the stranger who reads it with a lawyer’s eyes searching for flaws (1977, p. 7). To help students overcome the notion that academic writing is some kind of trap rather than a means of self-expression and intellectual engagement, I have found it useful to adopt Mlynarczyk and Babbit’s “exploratory talk” method, which builds emotional safety in the classroom by encouraging students to make personal connection “with challenging reading materials they are encountering in their academic courses” by discussing them in small groups, using a kind of language that feels comfortable and natural to them. In the case of LMSs, this would include languages and dialects that are normally excluded from academic conversations. As Barnes pointed out, “a small group of peers is less threatening than the full class, and the absence of the teacher temporarily releases [students] from the search of the right answers that so often distorts their learning strategies” (1993, p. 30). I would add that this low-stakes, personal-expressive learning modality can do a lot to help students appropriate dominant codes. The sort of “exploratory talk” Mlynarczyk and Babbit (2002, p. 79) envision makes a challenging text “talk in the [students’] own voices,” as students take ownership by “building on it in their own words, and making its words their own” (Lemke, quoted in Mlynarczyk & Babbit, 2002, p. 79). c.  Bidirectional Learning and Teachers’ Vulnerability Whatever strategy instructors use to create a safe classroom climate where students’ personal narratives can blossom within academic discourse, it is clear that students cannot be expected to be willing to take the emotional risks involved within the framework of coercive power relations. In other words, teachers cannot demand that students make themselves vulnerable based on the power they have because of their role within a learning institution. Again, this is particularly true when students come from social groups that have experienced high levels of oppression, such a Latin@ in the United States: In rethinking the expectations we have of students, it is important for professors to consider a history of silencing Latina/o students, and the challenge it may be for some to approach someone in a position

40  Language Inequality of authority, someone they may not identify with culturally, physically, or economically. (Ruecker, 2015, p. 149) What professors can do is invite students to participate in a collaborative power situation, where students and teachers use their mutual expertise to create power for the whole classroom, rather than fighting for it through acts of coercion or disruption as part of a zero-sum game. As I have mentioned, in my courses this invitation is presented as an opportunity for students to take ownership of academic discourse to discuss the challenges they have overcome to get where they are in life; how they used their social, linguistic, navigational, and aspirational resources to empower themselves; and how they plan to capitalize on them to deal with the hurdles they face as college students while juggling multiple responsibilities. The narratives of empowerment that emerge from these discussions not only provide precious ethnographic insights for teachers into students’ cultural community wealth, but they also constitute opportunities to “saturate the dominant discourse with new meanings” through the “glorification of the students” (Delpit, 1992, p. 301). This glorification can go very far in dispelling the sense of distrust LMSs, students of color, and working-class students might have developed against institutions that treated their minds as empty vessels and their cultural wealth as a learning impediment. In order to make the learning process truly bidirectional, however, and in order to make it more likely for students to accept the invitation to be vulnerable in the classroom, it is important for teachers to take steps in the same direction. Teachers can start by sharing how their own life vicissitudes shaped their own cultural wealth and the role played by their social, linguistic, navigational, aspirational resources and acknowledging the limitations of their cultural wealth, even in terms of literacy. For example, it could be reassuring for my students to know that while my linguistic capital might allow me to make sense of a sonnet written in early modern English, I am often at a loss when making sense of hip-hop lyrics due to my limited familiarity with nonstandard English varieties and pop cultural references. I  also make sure my students realize that while, to a large extent, my linguistic capital came from privilege, it also came with tears. I might mention that I grew up in a prosperous part of Italy, attending an elementary school that had high expectations, speaking standard Italian at home, with parents and grandparents that had the time to read to me, all of which programmed me to succeed academically from a very early age. At the same time, I make sure students are aware that “there is no such thing as bilingualism without tears any more than there is ‘growing up without tears’ or ‘life without tears’ ” (Cummins & Swain, 1986, p. 99) and that I am no exception. To illustrate this point, I might share personal stories about how horrible it felt to go from

Language Inequality 41 being one of the best students who was constantly praised for expressing himself so well in Italian schools to being considered “remedial” and sometimes even “lazy” in an American school, despite the fact that after English became my new language of instruction, in eighth grade, I probably spent more time studying than I did much later in life as a graduate student. Similarly, as narratives of empowerment flow, I might touch on how my social and navigational capital—and my tears—have propelled me toward a doctorate and an academic career. I would also admit, however, that I would be ill equipped with my cultural wealth to deal with some of the situations my students have to face on a regular basis to meet their family obligations. I  will also be quite open about the fact that faced with a situation that I have trouble handling, I try to look for someone who can help me; I can’t be an expert on everything. Nieto’s thoughts on vulnerability resonate: Once teachers admit that they do not know everything, they make themselves as vulnerable as their students. But it is precisely this attitude of learner on the part of teachers that is needed, first, to convey to linguistically diverse students that nobody is above learning and second, to let students know that they are also knowers, and that what they know can be an important source of learning for others as well. (2009, p. 478) Whether or not teachers can make themselves “as vulnerable as the students” might be debated, but it is important that they take steps in this direction by being upfront about their need to learn from their students in their quest to be pedagogically effective. It is in this sense that in a multicultural learning context, teachers’ and students’ needs are inexorably complementary and therefore require a bidirectional learning process. It is in this sense, too, that teachers need to develop a keen ethnographic eye to be able to understand where students are coming from, what resources they bring with them, and how education can help them steer their lives in the direction of the goals students set for themselves. When multiple codes come together in a classroom, the learning process can, indeed, become a transformative experience if students feel safe enough to open up the languages, dialects, and discourses that shape their community cultural wealth knowing that by doing so, they help their teachers teach them the language, dialect, and discourses they need to meet their personal and professional goals. A  bidirectional learning scenario can be transformative for instructors too. As safety spreads in the classroom, teachers might find it easier to share their expertise of dominant codes at a more personal level, in a way that can help students connect and engage with academic discourse agentively, as they

42  Language Inequality grapple with its lexical, grammatical, rhetorical, and ideological workings in partnership with their teachers and with each other. While it can take a lot of work, commitment, and vulnerability on teachers’ parts to form this kind of partnership, the rewards can be immense. A  class in which students and teachers want to learn from each other because they value each other is a lot more gratifying to teach than is a class in which teacher–student interactions are shaped by mistrust, defensiveness, coercion, and disruption. d. The Mother Tongue as a Resource for Academic Literacy Acquisition in a Second Language In the words of the seminal UNESCO report The Use of Vernacular Languages in Education (1953), it is “axiomatic” that the best starting point for promoting academic success is the mother tongue. For a learner, the mother tongue represents the following: Psychologically, it is the system of meaningful signs that in his mind works automatically for expression and understanding. Socially, it is a means of identification among the members of the community to which he belongs. Educationally, he learns more quickly through it than through an unfamiliar linguistic medium. (Garcia & Wei, 2014, p. 13) A plethora of empirical studies that have emerged in the past half century supports the claims of the report. From a cognitive point of view, students who are able to develop communicative competence in their mother tongue and another language have advantages in terms of mental flexibility and the ability to think abstractly (Peal  & Lambert, 1962). They also present higher levels of early metalinguistic awareness (Tunmer & Myhill, 1984) and communicative sensitivity (Ben-Zeev, 1977). From a psychological and social point of view, creating a space for the mother tongue in the classroom is likely to enhance the development of students’ positive identities and self-esteem (Duff, 2008) and increase positive attitudes to learning (Lindholm-Leary, 2001). Most important for the argument of this book, educational research suggests that far from constituting an impediment to the mastery of the dominant language, the use of LMSs’ mother tongue in school is a very effective way to promote the learning and acquisition of academic literacy in a second language and academic success across the curriculum. There is no shortage of research carried out in the United States that can challenge the claim that using ESL students’ mother tongue as a resource impedes English acquisition. As early as the 1970s, single studies based on particular programs (Rosier & Farella, 1976; Troike, 1978) provided evidence of the benefits associated with bilingual education. Later, more

Language Inequality 43 statistically advanced research based on meta-analysis methodology confirmed that programs that support students’ first language lead to better educational outcomes (Willig, 1985; Greene, 1998; Rolstad, Mahoney, & Glass, 2005). A  longitudinal study of particular significance was mandated by the U.S. Congress (Ramirez, Yuen,  & Ramey, 1991). Over a period of 8  years, this study compared the academic performance of more than 2,300 Spanish-speaking learners enrolled in Grades K through 6, and it found that by the time they were in the sixth grade, students enrolled in late-exit transitional bilingual programs performed better in both math and English. Students “can be provided with a substantial amount of primary language instruction,” it was concluded, “without impeding their acquisition of English language and reading skills” (Ramirez, Yuen, & Ramey, 1991, p. 39). Other studies suggest that first and second language literacy development are interrelated and that “among students learning English as a second (or third or fourth) language, those with more solid academic grounding in their home language have a much easier time both learning English and learning new academic content and skills” through the medium of English (Lukes, 2015, p.  64; Condelli et al., 2002; Burt & Peyton, 2003). The idea that the acquisition of academic literacy in a second language can be facilitated by the use of the mother tongue is often attributed to Cummins’s seminal “Developmental Interdependence Hypothesis” (1996, pp. 109–120), which posits that a speaker’s second language competence is partly dependent on the level of competence achieved in the mother tongue. Empirical research confirms the existence of a transfer of skills and concepts from one language to another (Errasti, 2003). For example, “scanning, skimming, conceptual guessing of words, skipping unknown words, tolerating ambiguity, reading for meaning, making inferences, monitoring, recognizing the structure of text, using previous learning” are all strategies that a speaker can apply to reading a text in a second language, if he or she has mastered them in his or her mother tongue (Baker, 2011, p. 322). Additional evidence supporting the Developmental Interdependence Hypothesis can be gleaned from studies that have focused on dual-language immersion programs (Lindholm-Leary, 2001; Lindholm-Leary & Genesee, 2014). While there is no shortage of evidence indicating that using students’ first language can facilitate success in a second language, it would be a mistake to think of mother tongue instruction as a magic wand that by itself guarantees high levels of academic achievement. If that were the case, there wouldn’t be as many native English-speaking learners who fall through the cracks of the U.S. education system. “Effective bilingual education is not a simple or automatic consequence of using a [student’s] home language in school” but is the result of an “effectiveness equation” that is “complex, variable across region and politics, multivariate, and often contested” (Baker, 2011, p.  256). There is no “one-size-fits-all”

44  Language Inequality solution to this effectiveness equation, as its terms depend on the learning needs of each specific student population. Nevertheless, the principle that students’ identities and cultural capital must be valued holds true in any learning setting, especially whenever students tend to be marginalized by dominant codes. Given the fundamental role language plays in shaping identity, using students’ mother tongue is an excellent starting point for valuing who they are. e. Translanguaging and the Appropriation of Dominant Codes Many scholars have argued that in order to fully activate LMSs’ resources, educators need to move away from notions of language intended as “whole bounded systems associated with whole bounded communities” (Heller, 2007, p.  11) and adopt pedagogical approaches that take as a starting point “the complex discursive practices of bilinguals” (Garcia, 2009, p.  53), which calls for an understanding of bilingualism as a dynamic phenomenon. “Dynamic bilingualism goes beyond the idea that languages are interdependent,” but rather, “it connotes one linguistic system that has features that are most often practiced according to societally constructed and controlled ‘languages’ ” (Garcia & Wei, 2014, p. 14). According to this conception, “there are no two languages that are cognitively activated or deactivated as a social and contextual situation demands, but rather, as we have proposed, a single array of disaggregated features that is always activated” (Garcia  & Otheguy, 2014, p. 644). Studies in neurolinguistics point to the fact that even when bilinguals use their languages separately, the language not being used is still active (Hoshino & Thierry, 2011). Consequently, the language practices of bi- and multilingual speakers do not involve the use of just one language or dialect, but rather, they entail the simultaneous use of multiple codes that speakers deploy strategically to make sense of the world, construct identities, and negotiate power relations. Different scholars have used different terms to conceptualize these practices, such as “crossing” (Rampton, 1995), “polylingualism” (Jorgensen, 2008), “metrolingualism” (Otsuji  & Pennycook, 2010), multivocality (Higgins, 2009) and “codemeshing” Canagarajah (2011), each highlighting specific theoretical, political, pedagogical, and contextual elements of this phenomenon. Most often, the hybrid, dynamic linguistic practices of multilingual speakers are referred to as “translanguaging.” The term translanguaging was first coined in Welsh (trawisethiu) by Cen Williams to describe the practice of deliberately asking students to switch the language of input and output in bilingual classroom settings (Williams, 1996). Baker translated the term as translanguaging and defined it as “the process of making meaning, shaping experiences, gaining understanding and knowledge through the use of two languages”

Language Inequality 45 (2011, p. 288, in Garcia & Wei, 2014, p. 20). Garcia and Wei expanded this concept further in terms of dynamic bilingualism by arguing that “translanguaging does not refer to two separate languages, nor does it refer to a synthesis of different language practices, or to a hybrid mixture” (2014, p.  21) but, rather, to “language practices of bilinguals,” which are “complex and interrelated” and rooted in “one linguistic system” that is integrated and dynamic (2014, p. 14). Proponents of translingualism maintain that the “original complex interrelated discursive practices” of people that speak more than one language “cannot easily be assigned to one or another traditional definition of language” (Garcia & Wei, 2014, p.  22) and that “these worldwide language practices” are “the normal mode of communication that, with some exceptions in some monolingual enclaves, characterize communities throughout the world” (Garcia, 2009, p. 44). Because of this fluid, complex, and dynamic nature of the semiotic codes that are used for social interaction, Makoni and Pennycook have dismissed the notion of separate languages as a Eurocentric ideological construct: “Languages do not exist as real entities in the world and neither do they emerge from or represent real environments; they are, by contrast, the inventions of social, cultural, and political movements” (2007, p.  2). According to them, even key terms often used to discuss linguistic diversity, such as bilingualism and multilingualism, should be dismissed because they reify “the same concept of language that underpins all mainstream linguistic thought” (Makoni & Pennycook, 2007, p. 22). While I have found a translingual approach immensely helpful in looking for ways to use my students’ mother tongue as a resource to help them take ownership of dominant codes, I am uncomfortable with some of the sweeping generalizations about bilinguals and language, in general, that have come with the translingual turn. As a bilingual myself, I do not doubt that my discursive practices are complex and shaped by ways of thinking that I have accessed and critically examined through the use of more than one language. Having spent my adolescence in the Middle East and lived in South Africa as a graduate student, I have also had the opportunity to see for myself that there are plenty of multilingual communities across the world where speakers cannot be easily pigeonholed into a single language or even a finite number of languages in terms of their identity constructions. Similarly, linguistic exchanges within these communities defy rigid linguistic categorizations, as they often find expression through the use of multiple, complex, interrelated semiotic systems. Having also lived in the United States for 20 years and in Italy for 25 years, however, I cannot dismiss the millions of speakers of only one language who live in these countries, for whom the boundaries between the one language they can understand and the myriad of languages that are beyond their grasp is very clear, as “some exception” and their communities as “some monolingual enclaves.” As a bilingual who enjoys strong family ties, I am

46  Language Inequality not comfortable with sweeping generalizations such as “translanguaging is the discursive norm of bilingual families and communities” (Garcia & Wei, 2014, p.  23). Linguistic exchanges with my family members are clearly characterized by a rigid separation between my two primary languages. I speak exclusively English with my monolingual husband, who, despite his best efforts, has not been able to acquire more than a handful of words in Italian. I speak exclusively Italian when I visit my country of origin to see family and friends, who, in most cases, would not be able to put together even a simple sentence in English or any other language besides their mother tongue. Not even with my brother, who is as bilingual as I am, would the thought of using any language other than Italian to communicate with each other cross our minds unless there is someone with us who does not speak our mother tongue. As far as my students’ discursive practices go, I  am in no position to make generalizations about how they use their languages at home, just as no scholar is able to make them about how I  use mine in my home, at least not without having done some kind of empirical study. In class, however, my LMSs do translanguage while engaging with academic literacy tasks in English. For example, they might use their mother tongue to discuss a reading they have done in English, to look up a word they don’t know in the dictionary, to explain a concept to each other, or to give each other feedback on an assignment they wrote in their second language. At the same time, however, they are not necessarily more comfortable writing an essay in more than one language, and they are not always appreciative of translingual literary texts such as The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Diaz, 2008). Dismissing their reluctance to embrace translingualism as instances where they “become complicit in their own domination” by “conforming to a monolingual discursive practices that constrain their own bilingualism to two separate autonomous languages” (Garcia & Wei, 2014, p. 15) is a facile rhetorical move that does not do justice to students’ ability to make legitimate critical choices regarding their language practices. This, of course, does not mean that students should not be exposed to texts that are created using more than one language or that they should not be invited to experiment with a writing process that finds expression through more than one language. What I  argue is that their identities and practices as speakers of more than one language should not be constrained by a translingual ideology just like they should not be constrained by a monolingual ideology. While I am not comfortable with a few normalizing tendencies within the translingual paradigm, I  fully endorse a pedagogical approach that, in line with this theoretical framework, allows students to utilize all of their linguistic resources as they learn, which, in a lot of cases, will entail the use of multiple languages, dialects, and discursive practices. It is in this sense that I use the term translanguaging in my case study: the language and literacy practices that emerge in multilingual classroom settings in

Language Inequality 47 which students use all their linguistic resources at their disposal strategically to carry out complex academic literacy tasks while appropriating the dominant code. Among the many pedagogical advantages that can come with the adoption of a translingual approach, I  have found the following to be most helpful for my student population. Especially for learners “in the beginning points of the bilingual continuum,” giving them the opportunity to use the language they know best makes it possible for them to “engage with the rigorous content, access difficult texts, and produce new language practices and knowledge” (Garcia  & Wei, 2014, p.  92). As we will see (in Section 4.5.e), this is vital for these students’ ability to engage with academic discourse in the dominant language while developing their ownership of it; translanguaging makes it possible for them to transcend the communicative limitations imposed by their emerging second language skills and to carry out at least “three important discursive functions: to participate, to elaborate ideas, to raise questions” (Garcia & Wei, 2014, p. 103). In the case of adult students, such as the ones that take my classes at BCC, giving them the opportunity to use their mother tongue, when their second language just isn’t enough, can help them overcome the infantilizing effect of being forced to make meaning using a code does not allow them to express themselves with the intellectual complexity that characterizes their thoughts as intelligent adults in possession of a rich cultural capital. Another pedagogical advantage that can come with a translingual approach is the ability to use students’ mother tongue as a resource for understanding the lexical, morpho-syntactical and rhetorical-discursive features of their second language. Spanish and English are languages that are characterized by a lot of cognates and false cognates; students can be encouraged to identify these as they acquire new vocabulary (Jimenez, Garcia,  & Pearson, 1995) and find direct translations for English words that are not as easily understood with an explanation in English. Similarly, students can be encouraged to look at grammar contrastively to find similarities and differences between rules governing suffixes, tense usage, and sentence construction in their first and second languages. Most important, however, I  have found that a translingual approach can be extremely helpful in helping students understand and navigate clashing expectations around academic discourse that shape reading and writing activities in the United States as opposed to their countries of origin (Parmegiani, 2014a, Parmegiani & Utakis, 2014; Watkins-Goffman & Cummins, 1997; Rubinstein-Avila, 2007). As we will see (in Section 4.5.e), the students I interviewed confirmed that being able to use Spanish to make sense of unfamiliar expectations around reading and writing made a big difference in their ability to succeed academically. In line with Bartlett and Garcia’s recommendation, the Spanish professor did her best did her best to “develop academic literacy practices in Spanish that are similar to

48  Language Inequality academic English literacy practices in U.S. schools” and to give students “explicit instruction in different writing conventions and opportunities to practice them” (2011, p. 122). In particular, she spent a lot of time discussing issues related to plagiarism, citing sources, and authentic critical thinking, which students did not have a lot of opportunities to explore in the secondary schools they attended in their countries of origin, where research projects and writing, in general, largely revolved around regurgitating information that was taken from a source without necessarily acknowledging it. What attracted me the most to translanguaging, however, was its potential to equalize power relations in the classroom and to facilitate the establishment and sustainment of a bidirectional learning process. The interviews confirm that this turned out to be the case. Garcia and Wei (2014, p. 113) suggest that co-learning, or a pedagogical space that “challenges the traditional authoritative dominant and subordinate role sets and schooling environments and the unequal power relationships in wider spheres over [the] world” (Brantmeier, n.d.), comes with the territory when translanguaging is allowed to flourish. In fact, as Celic and Seltzer point out, “all that is needed is a bit of goodwill, the willingness to let go of total teacher control, and the taking up of the position of learner, rather than of teacher” ( 2013, p. 5). Unfortunately, there is no fixed step-by-step recipe that instructors can follow to switch from a monolingual to a translingual approach to academic literacy, but a good place to start is by allowing students to take the lead and observing them with a keen ethnographic eye as they deploy their linguistic resources strategically while engaging with academic literacy tasks. The following vignette described by Garcia and Sylvan (2011) paints a very clear picture of what can happen once teachers have a task, if they are willing to allow students to take control of the way they use their linguistic repertoires: Students are  .  .  . talking, arguing, trying to make their points and collaborating on a project together. In so doing, they are using different language practices, including those they bring from home. . . . You find students using bilingual dictionaries (both electronic and paper). . . . Multiple conversations are happening at multiple times in many languages with occasional breaks in the ‘chaos’ for the teacher to explain a concept or practice a skill collectively that students immediately apply in the work they are doing. Students have considerable choice in how they arrive at the final project, including the language they use to negotiate, and the eventual form the project takes, but activity guides and rubrics (often collectively designed between teachers and students) establish parameters in which students operate. . . . Students depend on one another to share their experiences, knowledge, perspectives, and understanding of the text, so they teach

Language Inequality 49 each other. The teacher is not the only expert in the room and considerable control is handed over to the students. (pp. 393–394) The translingual learning scenario described in this vignette reduces power asymmetries in the classroom significantly, not only because students have full control of the language practices they chose to complete the task but also because the locus of expertise within academic discourse becomes decentered as students turn to their own resources and to each other—not just the teacher—to complete the task assigned. The seeming ‘chaos’ that often characterizes this type of translingual, highly participatory learning environment should not be mistaken for pedagogical anarchy or the kind of situation in which the teacher has lost control of the classroom and chaos is the result of acts of sabotage of the learning process. In the situation described earlier, the learning goals are clear as are the assessment criteria, and they are meaningful enough for the students to use all the resources at their disposal to meet them. Also, it would not be accurate to assume that because the teacher steps back, he or she does not play a fundamental role in the learning process as an expert on dominant codes and language and literacy pedagogy; in a translingual, bidirectional scenario, the teacher’s role, however, is not to be the language police but, rather, to be a facilitator “generating opportunities for language use” who will help students “expand their home language practices to include those in English for academic purposes” (Garcia & Wei, 2014, p. 75). In order to expand “home language practices,” there will be times when teachers, as facilitators, will need to “build spaces where certain language practices or others are sometimes expected. This is what dominant society and government schools and their assessment mechanisms continue to require, and thus it is important to give students an opportunity to engage with these practices” (Garcia  & Wei, 2014, p.  74). The idea that a translingual approach should develop students’ ability to use their languages separately, by increasing their lexical–syntactic– discursive resources and metalinguistic awareness cannot be emphasized enough. First of all, there are pedagogical benefits to the strategic use of language separation. For example, it pushes students to be less reliant on their stronger language for comprehension, and it can promote the status of minority languages (de Jong, 2016, p. 11). In addition, in spite of the current explosion of linguistic diversity, the vast majority of the people living in the United States are monolingual English speakers, and they often find themselves in positions of power with respect to linguistically diverse speakers. Sensational literary figures and scholars, such as Junot Diaz and Gloria Anzaldua, have the luxury of being able to claim the right to speech and impose reception while translanguaging in prestigious sociolinguistic domains, but ordinary students trying to earn degrees, sending resumes, and going for job interviews do not have

50  Language Inequality that privilege. In a world where the way a person speaks the dominant language “affects a person’s chances of getting a place to live, a job, a degree, or a promotion, a teaching credential, and health care” (Zentella, 2014, p. 621), every student must be put in a position where he or she can claim the power that comes with the appropriation of the dominant code (Delpit, 1992, p. 327; Nieto, 2009).

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Language Inequality 51 Condelli, L., Wrigley, H., Yoon, K., Cronen, S.,  & Seburn, M. (2002). What works for adult ESL literacy students. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education. Corson, D. (2001). Language diversity and education. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Crawford, J. (1992). Hold your tongue: Bilingualism and the politics of “English only”. Boston: Addison-Wisely. Crawford, J. (2000). At war with diversity: U.S. language policy in an age of anxiety. Clevedon: Multilngual Matters. Cummins, J. (1996). Negotiating identity: Education for empowerment in a diverse society. Ontario, CA: California Association for Billngual Education. Cummins, J., & Swain, M. (1986). Bilingualism in education: Aspects of theory, research, and practice. London: Routledge. de Klerk, G. (2002). Mother tongue education in South Africa: The weight of history. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 154(1), 29–46. de Jong, E. (2016). Two-way immersion for the next generation: Models, policies and principles. International Multilingual Research Journal, 10(1), 6–16. Delpit, L. (1992). Acquisition of academic discourse: Bowing before the master? Theory and Practice, 31(4), 296–302. Delpit, L. (1996). Other people’s children: Cultural conflict in the classroom. New York: The New Press. Dewey, J. (1966). Democracy and education. New York, NY: Free Press. Diaz, J. (2008). The brief wondrous life of Oscar Wao. New York, NY: Riverhead Books. Duff, P. (2008). Heritage language education in Canada. In D. Brinton, O. Kagan, & S. Bauckus (Eds.), Heritage language education: A new field emerging. New York, NY: Routledge. Errasti, M. (2003). Acquiring writing skills in a third language: The positive effects of bilingualism. International Journal of Bilingualism, 7(1), 27–42. Farr, M. (1985). Review of J. Chambers (Ed.). Black English: Educational equity and the law. Language in Society, 14(1), 108–113. Farr, M., & Daniels, H. (1986). Language diversity and writing instruction. New York, NY: ERIC Clearinghouse on Urban Education, Institute for Minority Education. Teachers College/Columbia University. Retrieved July  6, 2018, from https://archive.org/details/ERIC_ED274996 Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York, NY: Seabury. Fuller, J. (2013). Spanish speakers in the U.S. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Garcia, O. (2009). Bilingual education in the 21st century: A global perspective. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Garcia, O., & Otheguy, R. (2014). Hispanic bilingualism. In M. Lacorte (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of Hispanic applied linguistics (pp. 638–658). New York, NY: Routledge. Garcia, O., & Sylvan, C. (2011). Pedagogies and practices in multilingual classrooms: Singularities in pluralities. Modern Language Journal, 95(iii), 385–400. Garcia, O., & Wei, L. (2014). Translanguaging, language, bilingualism, and education. New York, NY: Palgrave McMillian. Gay, G. (2000). Culturally responsive teaching: Theory, research, and practice. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Gee, J. (1996). Social linguistics and literacy: Ideologies in discourse. London: Falmer Press.

52  Language Inequality Giroux, H. (2009). Teacher education and democratic schooling. In A. Darder, M. Baltodano, & R. Torres (Eds.), The critical pedagogy reader (pp. 438–459). New York, NY: Routledge. Greene, J. (1998). A meta-analysis of the effectiveness of bilingual education. Claremont, CA: Tomas Rivera Publishing Institute. Heath, S. (1983). Ways with words: Life and work in communities and classrooms. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Heller, M. (2007). Bilingualism as ideology and practice. In M. Heller (Ed.), Bilingualism: A social approach (pp. 1–22). New York, NY: Palgrave. Higgins, C. (2009). English as a local language: Postcolonial identities in multilingual practices. Brisol, UK: Multilingual Matters. hooks, b. (2009). Confronting class in the classroom. In A. Darder, M. Baltodano, & R. Torres (Eds.), The critical pedagogy reader (pp. 135–141). New York, NY: Routledge. Hoshino, N., & Thierry, G. (2011). Language selection in bilingual word production: Electrophysiological evidence for cross language competition. Brain Research, 1371, 100–109. Hymes, D. (1971). On communicative competence. In J. Pride & J. Homes (Eds.), Sociolinguistics (pp. 269–293). Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Jimenez, T., Garcia, E.,  & Pearson, T. (1995). Three children, two languages, and strategic reading: Case studies in bilingual/multilingual reading. American Educational Research Journal, 32, 31–61. Jorgensen, N. (2008). Polylingual languaging around and among children and adolescents. International Journal of Multilingualism, 5(3), 161–176. Kalman, J. (2008). Beyond definition: Central concepts for understanding literacy. International Review of Education, 54, 523–538. Labov, W. (1972). Language in the inner city. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Ladson-Billings, G. (2009). Fighting for our lives: Preparing teachers to teach African American children. In A. Darder, M. Baltodano, & R. Torres (Eds.), The critical pedagogy reader (pp. 460–468). New York, NY: Routledge. Lindholm-Leary. (2001). Dual language education. Clevedon: Multingual Matters. Lindholm-Leary, K., & Genesee, F. (2014). Student outcomes in one-way, twoway, and indigenous language immersion education. Journal of Immersion and Content-Based Language Education, 2(2), 165–180. Lukes, M. (2015). Latino immigrant youth and interrupted schooling. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Macias, R. (2014). Benefits of bilingualism: In the eye of the beholder? In R. Calhan & P. Gandara (Eds.), The bilingual advantage: Language, literacy, and the U.S. labor market (pp. 16–44). Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Makoni, S., & Pennycook, A. (2007). Disinventing and reconstituting languages. Clevdon, U.K.: Multilingual Matters. McLaren, P. (2009). Critical pedagogy: A look at the major concepts. In A. Darder, M. Baltodano, & R. Torres (Eds.), The critical pedagogy reader (pp. 61–83). New York, NY: Routledge. Mendelowitz, B.,  & Ferreira, A. (2007). Engaging narratives: Using language biographies to facilitate student learning. South African Linguistics and Applied Linguistics Studies, 25(4), 487–504.

Language Inequality 53 Mlynarczyk, R. (2006). Personal and academic writing: Revisiting the debate. Journal of Basic Writing, 25(1), 4–25. Mlynarczyk, R., & Babbit, M. (2002). The power of academic learning communities. Journal of Basic Writing, 21(2), 71–89. Nieto, S. (2009). Bringing bilingual education out of the basement and other imperatives for teacher education. In A. Darder, M. Baltodano, & R. Torres (Eds.), The critical pedagogy reader (pp. 469–482). New York, NY: Routledge. Nieto, S. (2010). The light in their eyes: Creating multicultural learning communities. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Otsuji, E., & Pennycook, A. (2010). Metrolingualism: Fixity, fluidity, and language influx. International Journal of Multilingualism, 7(3), 240–254. Parmegiani, A. (2010). Reconceptualizing language ownership: A case study of attitudes towards language, power, and identity among students at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. Language Learning Journal, 38(33), 359–378. Parmegiani, A. (2014a). Bridging literacy practices through storytelling, the mother tongue, and ethnographic partnership: A  case study of Dominican students at Bronx Community College. The Journal of Basic Writing, 33, 23–51. Parmegiani, A. (2014b). The dis(ownership) of English: Language and identity construction among Zulu students. The International Journal of Bilingualism and Bilingual Education, 17, 683–694. Parmegiani, A. (2016b). Inviting the mother tongue and a freshman year seminar to promote success among Spanish-speaking ESL students at Bronx Community College. In L. Schmidt, & J. Graziano (Eds.), Building synergy for highimpacct educational initiatives: First-year seminars and learning communities (pp. 107–113). Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina, National Resource Center for the First-Year Experience and Students in Transition. Parmegiani, A. (2017). Promoting academic achievement through the mother tongue and a critically compassionate intellectual praxis. Latino Studies, 15(3), 365–372. Parmegiani, A.,  & Rudwick, S. (2014). isiZulu-English bilingualization at the University of KwaZulua-Natal: An exploration of students’ attitudes. In L. Hibbert  & C. van der Walt (Eds.), Multingual Universities in South Africa: Reflecting society in higher education (pp.  107–122). Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Parmegiani, A., & Utakis, S. (2014). Non-convergent literacy practices, translanguaging and Dominican students in the U.S. Journal of Rhetoric, Professional Communication and Globalization, 6, 22–37. Peal, E., & Lambert, W. (1962). The relationship of bilingualism to intelligence. Psychological Monographs, 76(27), 1–23. Perry, T., & Delpit, L. (1998). The real Ebonics debate: Power, language, and the education of African American children. Boston: Beacon Press. Peterson, R. (2009). Teaching how to read the world and change it: Critical pedagogy in the immediate grades. In A. Darder, M. Baltodano, & R. Torres (Eds.), The critical pedagogy reader. New York, NY: Routledge. Ramirez, J., Yuen, S., & Ramey, D. (1991). Final report: Longitudinal study of structured English immersion strategy, early-exit and late-exit programs for language minority children. In Report submitted to the U.S. Department of Education. San Mateo, CA: Aguirre International.

54  Language Inequality Rampton, B. (1995). Crossing: Language and ethnicity among adolescents. Manchester: St. Jerome. Rivkin, J., & Ryan, M. (1998). Ferdinand de Saussure. In J. Rivkin & M. Ryan (Eds.), Literary theory: An anthology (p. 265). Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Rolstad, K., Mahoney, K., & Glass, G. (2005). Weighing the evidence: A metaanalysis of bilingual education in Arizona. Bilingual Research Journal, 29(1), 43–67. Rosier, P., & Farella, M. (1976). Bilingual education at Rock Point: Some early results. TESOL Quarterly, 10(4), 379–388. Rubinstein-Avila, E. (2007). From the Dominican Republic to Drew High: What counts as literacy for Yanira-Lara? Reading Research Quarterly, 42(4), 568–589. Ruecker, T. (2015). Transiciones: Pathways of Latinas and Latinos writing in highschool and college. Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado. Rumbaut, R., & Massey, D. (2013). Immigration and language diversity in the United States. Daedalous, 142(3), 141–154. Shaughnessy, M. (1977). Errors and expectations: A  guide for the teacher of basic writing. New York: Oxford University Press. Shell, M. (1993). Babel in America or the politics of linguistic diversity in the United States. Critical Inquiry, 20(1), 103–127. Shor, I. (2009). What is critical literacy? In A. Darder, M. Baltodano, & R. Torres (Eds.), The critical pedagogy reader (pp. 282–304). New York, NY: Routledge. Skutnabb-Kangas, T., & Phillipson, R. (1995). Linguicide and linguicism. Rolig Papir. Roskilde Universitetcenter. Smitherman, G. (1997). Talking and testifying: The language of Black America. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Street, B. (1994). Literacy in theory and practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tinto, V. (1975). Classrooms as communities: Exploring the educational character of students’ persistence. Journal of Higher Education, 68(6), 599–623. Troike, R. (1978). Research evidence for the effectiveness of bilingual education. NABE Journal, 3(1), 13–24. Tunmer, W.,  & Myhill, M. (1984). Metalinguistic awareness and bilingualism. In W. Tunmer, C. Pratt,  & M. Herriman (Eds.), Metalinguistic awareness in children. Berlin: Springer Verlag. UNESCO. (1953). The use of vernacular languages in education: Monographs on fundamental education VIII. Paris, France: The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. Retrieved July  2, 2018, from unesdoc. unesco.org/images/0000/000028/002897EB.pdf Valenzuela, A. (1999). Subtractive schooling: U.S. Mexican youth and the politics of caring. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Watkins-Goffman, L., & Cummings, V. (1997). Bridging the gap between native language and second language literacy instruction: A naturalistic study. Bilingual Research Journal, 21(4), 334–346. Wiley, T. (2005). Literacy and language diversity in the United States. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, Center for Applied Linguistics. Williams, C. (1996). Secondary education: Teaching in the bilingual situation. In C. Williams, G. Lewis, & C. Baker (Eds.), The Language policy: Taking Stock (pp. 39–78). Llangefni: CAI.

Language Inequality 55 Willig, A. (1985). A meta-analysis of selected studies on the effectiveness of bilingual education. Review of Educational Research, 55(3), 269–317. Yosso, T. (2005). Whose culture has capital? A critical race theory discussion of community cultural wealth. Race, Ethnicity, and Education, 8(1), 69–91. Zentella, A. (2014). TWB (Talking while bilingual): Linguistic profiling of Latinas/os and other linnguistic torquemadas. Latino Studies, 12(4), 620–635.

III Using Spanish as a Resource at Bronx Community College

1.  BCC, CUNY, and Access to Higher Education The country’s greatest engine of socio-economic mobility —CUNY poster advertisement on NYC subway

Hailed as “the United States’ unique contribution to higher education worldwide” and as learning institutions that are “central to solving a wide variety of problems in higher education” (Trainor, 2015), community colleges offer 2-year degrees (associate degrees) that provide students with opportunities to transfer to 4-year colleges and/or to enter the job market with a higher level of professional qualification and the prospect of more lucrative employment. With average tuition fees being at approximately a third of those at 4-year schools (NACC, 2018) and less stringent admission criteria, community colleges are often thought of as a “pathway to [the] middle class for low-income individuals” (Scrivener et al., 2015). A total of 1,103 community colleges operate in the United States (NACC, 2018), serving a population which has been estimated at 5,291,752 students (NSCRC, 2018). A  big part of this population is “non-traditional—adults, parents, people with full-time jobs, people returning to school after years away” (Carey, 2017). Unfortunately, many students are unable to overcome the roadblocks scattered along this pathway: according to a study published by the National Center for Education Statistics in 2012, less than 30% of the students who enroll in a community college manage to earn an associate degree within four years. Like other community colleges across the nation, BCC’s origin and mission can be traced to a demand for access to higher education as a means of socioeconomic mobility. This college was founded in 1957 as the result of the political pressure exerted by local community advocacy groups which demanded the creation of higher learning institutions in the Bronx to meet the growing demand for higher education. In 1961, BCC became part of the City University of New York (CUNY), one the largest urban university systems in the country, which currently

Using Spanish as a Resource at BCC 57 comprises twenty-four campuses: eleven senior colleges, seven community colleges, and six graduate, honor, or professional schools (CUNY website, n.d). In the fall of 2017, a total of 274,099 students were enrolled in one of the campuses (CUNY Office of Institutional Research and Assessment, 2018). CUNY has played a crucial role in making higher education more accessible to minority and working-class students in the United States, and its history is intertwined with the history of open admissions and the birth of basic writing theory and practice within the field of composition studies (Rondinone, 1997; Otte & Mlynarczyk, 2010). As the result of student protests, which culminated in the occupation of CUNY’s City College campus by black and Puerto Rican student activists who were demanding greater access to higher education for minority students, in 1969 the CUNY Board of Trustees implemented a new admission policy that opened the door of free college education to any New York City high school graduate and GED holder, regardless of his or her grades or test scores. CUNY’s open admissions constituted a “seismic shift in university policy” that turned a door to higher education into a floodgate: “Enrollment of first-year students at CUNY nearly doubled in the very first year (1970), jumping from 20,000 to 35,000” (Otte  & Mlynarczyk, 2010, pp. 3–5); the presence of black and Hispanic students grew even more rapidly, with a 300% increase (Fullinwider, 1999). This massive influx of nontraditional students who had been underserved by the public education system created the impetus for rethinking traditional approaches to language and literacy pedagogy among progressive instructors, who found themselves at a loss to meet the learning needs of this new population. While there was no shortage of faculty that looked down on open admission students within the university system (Rondinone, 1997; Otte & Mlynarczyk, 2010, p. 5), iconic composition rhetoric scholar Mina Shaughnessy “consistently shifted the focus of her research on Open Admissions from the students to the teachers, administrators, and society in general” (Mutnick, 2001, p. 185). Her research inspired the creation of innovative programs to increase success rates among students whose academic performance suffered “as the result of social inequities, not personal failings” (Otte & Mlynarczyk, 2010, p. 8) and paved the way for the emergence of basic writing theory and practice, a scholarship strand within composition studies that is based on this radical pedagogical assumption. Sadly, free tuition came to an end within the CUNY system in 1976 as the result of New York City’s fiscal crisis, and open admission was discontinued in the senior colleges in 1999, following the recommendations of a task force appointed by Mayor Giuliani. This report referred to CUNY as an “institution adrift” (Arenson, 1998). While these policies constituted major setbacks for CUNY’s historic educational inclusiveness mission, CUNY’s student body remains one of the most diverse in the

58  Using Spanish as a Resource at BCC country. While prohibitive for some students, tuition fees are well below the national average for higher learning institutions and a significant part of the student population receives financial aid. Also, BCC, like other CUNY community colleges, is still an open-admission college. Its success indicators, however, need to be improved drastically if this institution is to stay true to CUNY’s historic role as the country’s “greatest engine of socioeconomic mobility.”

2.  Programmatic Initiatives at BCC At a time when it seems that most of the impetus for change comes from outside higher education [. . .] it is refreshing to read how this nationally important curricular redesign originated with a small group of two-year college faculty. —Patrick Sullivan and Christie Toth (2017, p. 401)

Many faculty and administrators are very concerned about the need to put academic success within reach of more BCC students. A series of pedagogical and programmatic initiatives have been developed at BCC aimed to improve student retention and graduation, in line with the recommendation of High-Impact Practices theory and research (Kuh & O’Donnel, 2013). One of these initiatives was the introduction of FirstYear Seminars (FYS), or college success courses that integrate “academic content and skill-building with traditional college orientation activities” within the framework of “student-centered and constructivist pedagogies” (Efthimiou, Hizmetli, Ramos, & Ritze, 2015, p. 1). In terms of Yosso’s (2005) conceptual vocabulary, FYS courses seek to capitalize on students’ aspirational and social capital while developing the necessary linguistic and navigational capital they need to complete their associate degree. FYS courses are taught by faculty across the curriculum. Instructors can choose their theme and have lots of freedom in creating content for their course, but before doing so, they have to go through a one-year training. This training puts a lot of emphasis on the need to articulate clear educational outcomes within a student-centered pedagogical design. For example, my FYS syllabus takes as a starting point students’ aspirational capital by inviting them to reflect not only on their goals and dreams but also on the challenges they expect to encounter along the way. As part of this reflection, students also examine their social capital not only as a resource but also as a set of family/community responsibilities that need to be managed effectively if students are going to be successful academically. The wide range of student services offered on campus—which include psychological counseling, childcare, health care, a writing center, and a math lab—are presented

Using Spanish as a Resource at BCC 59 as additional resources students need to learn how to navigate as part of their academic career. In keeping with Mlynarczyk’s recommendations, these discussions of how students can navigate and appropriate available resources welcome students’ “own expressive language” (2006, p. 13), but they also seek to augment students’ linguistic capital by raising their awareness of the “ways of talking, listening (often too reading and writing), acting, interacting” (Gee, 1996, p. 127) that are expected of college students. For example, they might have an informal small discussion using expressive language about what resource they would use to deal with a particular challenge they are likely to face somewhere along their learning process, but they would also develop familiarity with the rhetorical principles of argumentative writing by articulating the rationale for their choice in a paragraph that contains a topic sentence and supporting evidence. A mixed-method study that involved quantitative data analysis and classroom observations, instructor interviews, and participant interviews found that those first-year students who began their career at BCC by enrolling in FYS outperformed the general first-year population (Mechur Karp, Raufman, Efthimiou, & Ritze, 2017). The positive outcomes associated with FYS included “higher grade point averages and earning more credits,” and they suggested that the FYS approach tends to “facilitate student centered, contextualized, and applied learning, thereby helping students apply their FYS related skills into future courses” (Mechur et al., 2017, p. 42). An even more ambitious initiative the CUNY Central Administration has embarked on to improve success indicators across its nine community colleges is the Accelerated Studies in Associate Programs (ASAP). This program was launched in 2007 with the support of the New York City Center for Economic Opportunity to help “eliminate many of the economic and social barriers that hinder progression towards a degree,” especially for “socio-economically disadvantaged students” (Kolenovic, Linderman, & Karp, 2013). The goal of this initiative was quite ambitious: raising three-year cumulative graduation rates at CUNY community colleges from 25% to “at least 50%” through the “provision of comprehensive support services and financial resources that remove barriers to full-time study, build student resiliency, and support timely degree completion” (CUNY, 2017). In terms of financial support, ASAP provides students with “a tuition waiver that covers any gap between financial aid and college tuition fees,” in addition to free public transportation passes and free use of textbooks (Scrivener et  al., 2015, p. ES2). Academic and personal support services include frequent, mandatory meetings with advisors and career services staff and a higher level of access to tutoring. ASAP seeks to remove barriers to academic success also through course scheduling strategies by offering blocks of courses students can take back to back, which can help them juggle multiple

60  Using Spanish as a Resource at BCC responsibilities, and a cohort approach, where students take several classes with the same group of students. The cohort approach, which, as we will see, lies at the heart of “the power of learning communities,” seeks to foster meaningful socio-academic interactions among students by having them take multiple classes together and engage with an active learning process (Mlynarczyk & Babbit, 2002; 3.4). These interactions have been found to be crucial for retention (Tinto, 1986; Parmegiani, 2017; 3.4). The impact ASAP has had on CUNY’s community colleges has been quite astonishing. An external longitudinal study based on random assignment experimental design has found that “the program has substantially increased full-time enrollment, accelerated credit accumulation, and almost doubled the rate of graduating with an associate’s degree. It has also increased the likelihood that students would transfer to a four-year college” (Scrivener et al., 2015, p. ix). ASAP has gained national attention, receiving accolades from President Obama, and in 2015, the CUNY administration announced a massive expansion thanks to $42 million in funding from the City of New York. The expansion includes a “full-scale transformation of Bronx Community College,” where all full-time students will be enrolled in ASAP “with the goal of having a 50% three-year graduation rate” (Jashnick, 2015). At the time of writing this book, a heated debate is taking place in the English Department at BCC on the introduction of new courses modeled after the Accelerated Learning Program (ALP), which was developed at the Community College of Baltimore and adopted by about 200 colleges throughout the United States, “doubling the percentage of basic writers who succeed in their basic writing course and first-year composition” (Adams et al., 2017, p. 401). This type of program is based on the idea that developmental instruction is a “long pipeline students must pass through to succeed” in college, and that “the longer the pipeline, the more likely there will be ‘leakage’ from it—in other words, the more likely students will drop out before passing composition” (Adams et al., 2017, p. 404). ALP seeks to “mainstream” basic writers by giving them the opportunity to take credit-bearing, college-level writing courses that are linked to “companion courses,” where basic writers are given the additional pedagogical support they need to meet the expectations of the college-level writing courses. In a proposal that was submitted to the English Department in the fall of 2017, an experimental ALP section was conceived as serving 10 basic writers who had tested into an upper level developmental course, and 15 students who did not meet developmental work. The college writing course, would be attended by 25 students and meet 4 hours a week (just like any other course at the same level); the companion course would meet 4  hours a week, be taught by the same instructor, and focus on the needs of the 10 developmental students (Scott, 2017).

Using Spanish as a Resource at BCC 61 The introduction of this experimental ALP course was first approved by the English Department and the Curriculum Committee but was then rejected by the Senate due to opposition coming from the ESL and developmental writing instructors within the English Department. The ESL team, of which I am part, explained its opposition in a resolution that expressed concern about placing ESL students in ALP, which would deny them the opportunity to develop sufficient language and literacy skills to be able to engage with college-level writing courses successfully. Some team members were also wary of the political motives behind the central CUNY administration’s push for this type of program and saw it as some kind of Trojan horse that, once accepted as an experiment, would lead to the dismantling of developmental instruction and the end of open admissions. While I  share these concerns, I  also believe that once there are sufficient guarantees that ALP will not supplant stand-alone developmental courses and that students will not be placed into ALP prematurely, this model could potentially be very beneficial for LMSs. Like all developmental students, LMSs can benefit from learning side by side with “students who are stronger writers, perhaps more accomplished students” (Adams et al., 2017, p. 409), as long as they have developed a sufficient command of dominant codes not to be intimidated by their native speakers (see Section 4.5.a). ALP can also help “avoid the sometimes stigmatizing and often demoralizing effects of segregating basic into sections designated just for them” (Adams et  al., 2017, p.  409). Because of its similarities with the learning community model (see Section  3.6), ALP promotes bonding and community building, a factor that has been found to be very important for retention (Tinto, 1986, pp. 55–61). Most important, companion courses can be built around the learning needs of LMSs who share the same mother tongue, allowing them to develop second language and literacy skills in a sheltered environment where they can feel safe enough to take those emotional risks to appropriate a dominant language. At the same time, ALP can provide LMSs with the benefits of mainstreaming. My efforts to use ESL students’ mother tongue as a resource at BCC cannot be compared to the implementation of FYS or the ASAP program, given the huge difference in scale, access to financial and human resources, and the fact that the mother tongue–second language link did not originate from administrative decisions but, rather, from pedagogical expediency involving a collaborative alliance between the English Department where I  teach (which offers ESL courses) and the Department of Modern Languages. Nevertheless, while much smaller, the mother tongue–based pedagogical intervention discussed in this case study was envisioned in the same spirit as the much more ambitious initiatives that have brought CUNY to the national attention: ensuring community colleges such as BCC live up to “transforming lives” slogans.

62  Using Spanish as a Resource at BCC While it has not yet transformed nearly as many lives as FYS or ASAP, the mother tongue–based pedagogical intervention I am proposing in this book has the potential to do so at a very deep level by promoting bidirectional learning and appreciation of linguistic diversity. It is my hope that just like the ALP approach, which started as a small initiative by a small group of community college faculty, rather than with “the impetus for change [that] comes from state legislatures, foundations, and nonprofits,” the mother tongue strategies presented in this book might contribute to a conversation that will bring about a “nationally embraced curricular redesign” ( Sullivan & Toth, 2017, p. 410).

3.  Student Demographics and Academic Success Transforming lives —BCC’s slogan

Most of BCC’s incoming students begin their college career with a strong desire to succeed. According to a survey carried out in 2007, 91% of first-time BCC students indicated that they intended to earn at least a bachelor’s degree. As we will see, however, in most cases, however, a harsh reality gets in the way of students’ intentions. This reality has a lot to do with socioeconomic demographics and linguistic inequality. In the fall of 2013, the number of full-time equivalent for undergraduate students was 8,060. The racial/ethnic background of the student body is as follows: 61% of the students identify as Hispanic, 33% as black, 3% as white, 3% as Asian/Pacific Islander, and 0% as American Indian/ Native American. Given these demographics, BCC can be considered a Hispanic-serving institution (Lamos, 2012). More than half (57%) of the student body is female, and 31% are over 25  years old. In 2012, about 40% of first-time students reported that English was not their first language, and the vast majority of these students were native Spanish speakers. About 20% of all the students enrolled at BCC were born in the Dominican Republic; in addition, a significant number of U.S.-born students are of Dominican descent (BCC Office of Institutional Research, personal communication). One-year retention rates for the entering class of the fall of 2008 was 65%; only 20% of the entering class of the fall of 2003 completed their associate degree within six years (BCC Office of Institutional Research, 2011, p. 1). The socio-economic profile of many of BCC’s students creates challenges to academic success: 56% of the students have a household income of less than $20,000, 23% are supporting children, 45% of them are employed in the formal sector, 48% are first-generation college students, and 85% of first-time freshmen require remedial instruction in one or more of the following areas: writing, reading, and math (BCC Office of

Using Spanish as a Resource at BCC 63 Institutional Research, 2010). Addressing the structural socioeconomic factors that cause these levels of inequality, such as labor laws and the real estate market, is unfortunately beyond the sphere of intervention of teachers and administrators who believe in education as an instrument of social change. Nevertheless, there is a lot committed educators can do to come up with pedagogical strategies that can mitigate the dire impact of such “savage inequalities” (Kozol, 1991) on learning outcomes. BCC has taken seriously the responsibility to put academic success within reach for more and more students. For instance, it embarked on a guided self-study process in collaboration with the John Gardner Foundation to identify the most important obstacles that stand in the way of students’ completion of their degree (BCC Office of Institutional Research, 2011). Four barriers were identified: student disposition, pedagogy and academic supports, curricular organization, and institutional organization. I read the report while I  was conceiving the mother tongue–based pedagogical intervention that evolved into the Spanish–ESL learning community cluster and the ethnographic partnership. I remember feeling that as a language and literacy instructor, I  had the most agency over the first two barriers, because I was convinced that there was a lot I could do to design a pedagogy that could help students develop predispositions that were more conducive to academic success. As I kept thinking about my pedagogical design, I also felt it was important for me to question some of the wording in the reports’ findings about students’ dispositions, which I found problematic. These findings claimed the following: a. Students are not well prepared for college success (they lack basic skills, prior knowledge, and effective study skills). b. Students are unfamiliar with college expectations, what is required to be successful in college, and how to navigate academic affairs, policies, and procedures of the college. Some may have negative views of education and do not trust teachers. c. Students have multiple and competing roles (parent, worker, caregiver and financial responsibilities) (p. 1). I did not find it hard to believe that many of our students juggle multiple responsibilities and that many of them experience a sense of loss as they try to meet college demands and navigate bureaucracy, but as a firm believer in the power of students’ community cultural wealth, I was uncomfortable with the assertion that “students are not well prepared for college success,” due to a categorical “lack of basic skills” and “prior knowledge.” As I argued in Chapter 2, assuming that students’ minds are “empty vessels” is more likely to create subtractive schooling situations rather than putting academic success within reach of more learners who have been underserved by the school system and, hence, may have good

64  Using Spanish as a Resource at BCC reasons to “have negative views of education” and “not trust teachers.” It is true that there is often a mismatch between students’ home language and literacy practices and traditional conceptions of academic discourse and that this mismatch does indeed constitute a barrier to academic success. Nevertheless, a culturally responsive approach that places students at the center of the learning process by building on the skills and knowledge they bring to the classroom is a much more effective starting point for designing pedagogical interventions than the “empty vessel” approach. It is this belief that planted in me the seed for the bidirectional learning approach that characterized the English–Spanish link of the learning community and the ethnographic partnership that informs this case study. There was no way I could have built on the prior skills and knowledge of my students without learning about them from the students themselves. And given that, to a large extent, these skills and knowledge were formed as students interacted in their first language, I realized that I would have much greater access to them if I became more proficient in my students’ mother tongue.

4. Sneaking In the Mother Tongue through a Learning Community To sneak: to go furtively or stealthily —Merriam-Webster dictionary

The more I  thought about what I  could do as an English instructor and critical language and literacy scholar to improve success rates at BCC and contribute to CUNY’s mission, the less it made sense to me that Spanish was not being used as a resource. As we have seen (in Section 3.3), 40% of first-time freshmen at BCC self-identify as nonnative English speakers, and most of them speak Spanish as their first language, so it would not have been that difficult to start mother tongue– based pedagogical interventions that could reach out to a large group of students. Also, it is not uncommon for BCC staff, both faculty and administrators, to have at least some working knowledge of Spanish. Findings based on decades of studies on bilingual education were very clear, as were the recommendations of critical and culturally responsive pedagogy: Academic literacy acquisition and academic success in a second language can be greatly facilitated by building on LMSs’ first language. Also, having been an LMS myself who had gone through the trauma of being submerged in a learning environment where I did not understand the language of instruction, I hadn’t forgotten that when you are trying to make sense of something using a language that makes no sense, you hold on to your mother tongue for dear life. I doubt I would

Using Spanish as a Resource at BCC 65 have been able to pass my first year at the American school of Kuwait with respectable grades if my older brother, who had taken English as a subject in Italy, had not been willing and able to explain my homework to me in Italian. As a sociolinguist, however, I was also aware that resistance against the use of minority language in schools can be very strong, even among progressive educators. I knew there was no way I would be able to convince the BCC administration to implement a formal Spanish–English bilingual program that would involve a significant investment on their part. I certainly did not have the necessary political capital within the institution to mobilize financial and human resources of great magnitude. I was also concerned about the knee-jerk reactions that could have been triggered by associating the mother tongue–based intervention I  envisioned with the “b-word” and seeing doors being shut without even being given the opportunity to walk through and make a case for the program I was trying to start. It is in this sense that I felt that the best chance I had to use my students’ mother tongue as a resource for academic success was by sneaking it through the back door. Rather than pushing for an institutional bilingualization process that to me made perfect sense but that was extremely unlikely to happen, in my efforts to make more space for Spanish in the learning process, I avoided the “b-word” altogether. Rather than justifying these efforts by calling for the need to promote linguistic equality, in the many meetings I had with colleagues and administrators, I  consistently emphasized the potential Spanish had to enhance students’ English acquisition and academic success across the curriculum. While I  did have to overcome significant hurdles to launch the program, especially in terms of navigating the complexities of the student advisement process, no door was ever shut as I went around campus looking for allies. The opportunity to sneak in the mother tongue at BCC came from the learning community program. Learning communities, as defined by Hanson and Heller (2009), can be described as “small groups of students who take clusters of courses together with both the faculty and the students teaching and learning together” (p. 1). These type of programs “emerged in the 1980s and 1990s” (Skipper, 2016) and “vary from minimal arrangements of linked or clustered classes, to team-taught interdisciplinary programs, to more elaborate models with designated residence halls, in-house advising, and the ambience of a small college on a large research campus” (Shapiro & Levine, 1999, p. xi). While learning community models can be very different from each other, to be successful, they require a high level of curricular integration, which can take the form of common themes, learning activities, projects, and assessment criteria that “provide greater coherence, develop a deeper understanding . . . and encourage student-student, student-faculty and faculty-faculty

66  Using Spanish as a Resource at BCC interactions” (Hanson & Heller, 2009, p. 1). According to Shapiro and Levine (1999), fundamental features of these programs include • • • • •

organizing students and faculty into smaller groups helping students establish academic and social support networks providing a setting for students to be socialized to the expectations of college bringing faculty together in more meaningful ways focusing faculty and students on learning outcomes (p. 3)

As Shapiro and Levine (1999, p.  25) point out, “it is a mistake to think that learning communities can be created simply by linking courses through a registration process.” Faculty and administrators involved in this type of program need to develop pedagogical strategies that help students make personal connections with course content across the curriculum, with each other, with the faculty, and with the campus community as a whole. Developing this type of pedagogical strategies does take time and effort; therefore, it is important to provide learning community faculty with course release time to meet with each other on a regular basis to design, assess, and refine their strategies and discuss classroom dynamics in real time. The presence of a paid coordinator can also be very helpful for establishing, managing, and scaling up learning communities by taking care of a wide range of responsibilities, which include “recruiting faculty, organizing faculty development events, working with registration staff to enroll students in the learning communities” (Visher, Schneider, Wathington, & Collado, 2010, p. ES4). Learning communities sounded like an ideal place to create additive learning situations for linguistically diverse students as they tend to mitigate the dire consequences of structural inequality: Studies have shown that “students’ socio-economic status had less effect on their achievement gains in schools with collaborative teacher communities” (McLaughlin  & Talbert, p.  9). In addition, Mlynarczyk and Babbit (2002) have found that creating a learning community program built around LMSs’ needs helped them get through the developmental course sequence and accumulate college credits faster by linking developmental and creditbearing classes, which made it possible to benefit from the skills they honed in classes such as ESL and reading to courses such as history or psychology and vice versa. This accelerated progression through the developmental course sequence and credit accumulation process had a positive impact on “retention and graduation rates of ESL students,” also because it helps LMSs avoid a situation in which “they use up their financial aid before they had completed their non-credit ESL and English courses” (Mlynarczyk  & Babbit, 2002, pp.  72–73). It wasn’t just the positive impact on quantitative academic success indicators, however,

Using Spanish as a Resource at BCC 67 that “intrigued” Mlynarczyk and Babbit about “the power of learning communities,” but “also the special learning atmosphere” that reigned in purposefully linked classes: “there was something about the program itself that created a special classroom chemistry, enabling students to be more efficient learners” (2002, p. 73). This “special classroom chemistry” that emerges in well-designed learning communities has a lot to do with the fact that integrated active learning within linked clusters promotes meaningful interpersonal interactions that are both social and academic (Tinto, 1986; Tinto & Goodsell, 1993). “Students form social bonds while discussing academic course materials and working together to succeed on course assignments and exams” (Mlynarczyk & Babbit, 2002, p. 83). These bonds help students “establish academic and social support networks inside and outside of the classroom,” which make them “more accountable to each other” and “less likely to skip class or arrive unprepared” (Shapiro & Levine, 1999, p. 4). The importance of these socio-academic networks cannot be emphasized enough, especially for LMSs, who often need to overcome a sense of isolation as nonnative English speakers and a sense of loss that comes with a transition to higher education as first-generation college students in a new country. As we will see (in Section  4.5.a), during the interviews several students mentioned that without the kind of support they found in the learning communities, it would have been much harder for them to overcome the numerous challenges they faced. Learning communities had been offered at BCC for several years. Until the fall of 2013, however, there were no clusters linking academic literacy development courses in the mother tongue to ESL classes. This type of link would be very easy to create. Not only did BCC have a substantial cohort of ESL Latin@ students who share the same mother tongue, but the Department of Modern Languages already offered Spanish classes for native speakers. These classes were taught as stand-alone courses, however, which did not help students capitalize on the principle of literacy transfer as effectively as a translingual approach based on curricular integration between first and second language development. Also, most BCC students need to fulfill a foreign language requirement in order to graduate, and given that ESL students are doing the entirety of their course work in a language that is not their mother tongue, it made sense for them to use the foreign language requirement to create an additive learning situation that was likely to promote academic success in their second language. An additional advantage was that ESL students were able to receive college credits for the Spanish class at a point in their career in which their course options were severely limited by prerequisite requirements they did not meet. Last but not least, this link would not cost the college anything, other than the reassigned time that is normally given to instructors who participate in a learning community.

68  Using Spanish as a Resource at BCC

5. The Developmental English Course Sequence and ESL Students Every new student who wants to enroll at BCC or any of the CUNY colleges needs to take the CUNY Assessment Test in Writing (CATW), which is a standardized writing assessment instrument designed to elicit direct writing samples from entering students for purposes of placement into first-year composition courses, ESL, and developmental courses. In addition, the CATW is used to determine exit from developmental writing courses and readiness for college-level writing and discipline content courses. (CUNY Office of Academic Affairs, 2010) This test consists of a multiparagraph essay that students need to write in response to short text that they are given during the exam. These essays are graded by two certified readers who score them according to a rubric that focuses on five categories: “critical response to the text, development of ideas, organization of the response, sentence construction and word choice, and grammar/mechanics.” If students do not pass this test, and if they are deemed second language English speakers by the certified readers, their essays are read again by two members of the ESL team within the English Department who decide their placement in the ESL sequence. The ESL sequence at BCC comprises the following courses: ESL 01, for students who have no or minimal English proficiency, which meets four times a week; ESL 02, for intermediate students, which meets three times a week; and ESL 03, for advanced students, which also meets three days a week. Typically, on completing this sequence, ESL students enroll in the developmental writing sequence, which comprises two levels that are taken by both native and second language English speakers: ENG 01/ENG 09 and ENG 02. ENG 09 is a special section of ENG 01 that is reserved for ESL students. In the past, students had to pass the exit exam for each level in order to move up the remedial sequence. Fortunately, BCC has shifted to a portfolio-based system of multiple measures of assessment in which the passing of the final exam is no longer a prerequisite for passing a developmental course. At the time of writing this book, students still need to have a certain score on the CATW to enroll in credit-bearing composition courses. Before the shift to multiple measures, students placed in the remedial sequence could not take the CATW again until they got to ENG 02 unless they did exceptionally well in ENG 01/09. Now every student enrolled in ENG 01/09 has two opportunities to take the CATW during the semester, and strong students who do not pass the standardized test can still

Using Spanish as a Resource at BCC 69 be recommended for early exit from remediation based on the strength of their writing portfolios. A student who enters the ESL sequence at ESL 01, assuming he or she does not have to repeat any of the levels, is looking at five semesters of developmental ESL and English instruction before being able to enroll in credit-bearing first-year composition courses. In addition, because firstyear composition is a requirement for many courses, ESL students are very limited in the classes they can take, and they often can’t enroll in courses that are part of their major for several semesters. Due to these reasons and to the fact that ESL students often run out of financial aid while trying to meet their developmental requirements, students who place in ESL 01 and ESL 02 are often advised to enroll in the CUNY Language Immersion Program (CLIP) where they can spend one or two semesters working intensely on their English speaking, listening, reading, and writing skills before formally enrolling at BCC. Upon completing this program, students take the CATW again, and it is not unheard of for students who came into the program with minimal language skills to be able to pass the standardized writing test after a semester or two of intensive work in CLIP. The program, which is also offered at eight other CUNY campuses, is very affordable ($180 for 15 weeks of instruction, five times a week, 5 hours a day), and does not use up a student’s financial aid.

6. Linking English and Spanish Academic Literacy Development A Modest Proposal

In order to offer new learning community clusters, BCC faculty need to submit a proposal where they discuss the pedagogical outcomes they hope to achieve through the link and present their curricular integration strategies. I submitted a proposal in the spring of 2012 for linking ESL 03 to Spanish 112. I chose this ESL course because it offered the widest pool of potential students and because there were two concurrent sessions offered from 10 a.m. to noon, the most popular timeslot among BCC students for class registration. Spanish 112 is a course on language and culture of Latin America geared to native Spanish speakers. The Spanish instructor and the chair of the Department of Modern Languages suggested this course because it met the graduation requirements of the largest group of students. Also, I thought that the focus on Latin America was a good starting point for building an additive learning situation for our students, given their demographics. Spanish 112 meets twice a week for 1 hour 15 minutes.

70  Using Spanish as a Resource at BCC My proposal began with a statement of the overarching objectives of the cluster, which I phrased as follows: The overarching objective of the learning community cluster we propose is to increase ESL students’ command of academic literacy in English by using Spanish, their mother tongue, as an additional learning tool. Our proposal is based on a plethora of research indicating that the acquisition of reading and writing skills for academic purposes in a second language is most effective when it is built on the linguistic resources students already possess. Our cluster will therefore integrate the literacy development activities in English that are part of the ESL 03 curriculum with parallel activities in SPN 122. This integration will immediately allow students to engage with reading and writing activities in English of a higher level of complexity, and over time, it will lead to a more solid command of English as a second language. Although I believe there is great value in mother tongue maintenance and development in terms of protecting linguistic diversity and promoting multiculturalism, in my statement I did not mention these outcomes but based my argument on the link in terms of benefits for second language and literacy acquisition. Moreover, although the “plethora of research” I refer to comes mainly from studies that have shown the benefits of bilingual education in Grades K through 12, I stayed clear of the “the b-word” to avoid the sort of resistance that can get triggered by the notion that minority languages should have a legitimate place in schools as media of instruction in their own right. Instead, I highlighted the role Spanish can have as a means to an end, the end being short- and longterm pedagogical outcomes that were much less likely to raise eyebrows: the immediate “ability to engage with reading and writing activities in English of a higher level of complexity” and the eventual “more solid command of English as second language.” It is true that in my statement I passed on the opportunity to take a stance for linguistic diversity and chose instead political expediency, but I  felt this was justified because what mattered the most was to garner support for the link to put academic success within reach of more LMSs. Also, I believed that if I did manage to get that support, and if the new learning community ran, the goals of first language maintenance and development would be met anyway, albeit furtively, and that would do more to promote a culture that embraces linguistic diversity on campus than would a couple of sentences in a proposal that was less likely to be accepted. The course-specific learning outcomes for ESL 03 were articulated generally in terms of increasing “students’ command of the basic principles of college writing in English while continuing to build on students’ reading, listening and speaking skills.” These goals were then broken down

Using Spanish as a Resource at BCC 71 in terms of two broad categories: discursive principles and mechanics/ standard usage.

Mastery of Basic Discursive Principles of College Writing • • • • •

Essay organization Articulation of a thesis statement Paragraph organization Paragraph development Rhetorical modes as elaboration strategies (comparison and contrast, definition, narration, exemplification, summary)

Mastery of Mechanics and Standard Usage • Tense construction, with special emphasis on auxiliary verbs and suffixes • Sentence construction, with special emphasis on avoiding fragments and run-on sentences • Difference between standard and non-standard usage. Although SPN 112 was conceived by the Department of Modern Languages as a course with a focus on literature, our learning objectives placed a lot of emphasis on academic literacy development by listing the following outcomes: “enhancement of students’ ability to read analytically and critically in the mother tongue; development of vocabulary in the mother tongue; enhancing students ability to write effectively for academic purposes in the mother tongue.” Writing effectively for academic purposes in the mother tongue was further articulated as follows: • • • • •

Elaborating ideas Organizing Ideas Incorporating ideas from other sources to develop an argument Developing an awareness of the importance of revision Increasing mastery of standard usage

Our emphasis on ideas (“elaborating,” “organizing,” “incorporating”) and writing as a process was based on the need to use the Spanish class as an opportunity for students to engage with academic literacy practices expected in U.S. colleges that were often not developed, and sometimes even discouraged, in the secondary schools that students attended in their countries of origin. As we will see (in Section 3.9), students reported that writing assignments did not feature prominently in the Spanish courses they took in Dominican high schools and that literacy activities focused on mechanical aspects of writing and reading comprehension. When they did write, students were expected to complete assignments that were

72  Using Spanish as a Resource at BCC based on the “banking model” of education (Freire, 1970) that were used primarily to assess students’ ability to regurgitate information they were supposed to take from a source uncritically. In line with Bartlett and Garcia’s (2011) recommendation, we assumed it would be pedagogically productive to give students an opportunity to develop their ability to meet these new academic literacy expectations in their mother tongue so that they would be better equipped to meet them in the second language. To meet the learning objectives the Spanish instructor and I had set for the cluster, in our proposal we stated that our integrated syllabi would include the following: 50 pages of weekly reading assignments for each course, low-stakes writing assignments to scaffold formal assignments, and revision of these assignments based on peer review and the instructor’s feedback. To help students zoom in on those discursive principles of college writing that are considered fundamental in U.S. colleges, we planned to spend time analyzing sample paragraphs and essays—often taken from students writing—and discuss to what extent they followed those principles. In terms of increasing students’ mastery of mechanics and standard usage, we envisioned mini-grammar lessons, using a contrastive approach whenever possible, and exercises and quizzes to help students apply these lessons to their writing. The integration of the Spanish–English curricula included the exploration of a student-centered theme that revolved around the notion of empowerment, intended as the ability to transform one’s life in accordance with one’s goals, in spite of the hurdles one has to face in life. In ESL 03 students wrote several drafts of a narrative of empowerment in which they reflected on the challenges they had to overcome to be where they are in life and how the lessons learned from these obstacles would propel them toward future goals. The main purpose of this assignment, which students start working on the first day of class by interviewing each other and reading narratives written by former students, is to lay the foundations for the level of trust required by bidirectional learning (see Section 2.4.b) “wresting” from academic discourse “a place for the glorification of the students” (Delpit, 1992, p. 298), a place where difference is not synonymous with deficit but, rather, with resilience, opportunity, and excellence. It is an assignment that is intended as a first step in a pedagogical transition “to enhance the students’ self-esteem and reduce the anxiety level” with “activities which stress self-awareness, respect, and cooperation . . . while developing skills of listening, speaking” (Peterson, 2009, p. 311) and academic writing. While working on this project in ESL 03, in the Spanish class students discussed their reasons for being in college, the challenges they expect to face, and their strategies for facing these challenges, and then wrote personal statements in their mother tongue which fed into the writing process of the stories of empowerment they wrote in English for their ESL 03

Using Spanish as a Resource at BCC 73 class. Similarly, in ESL 03 students read Kaffir Boy by Mark Mathabane (1986), a coming-of-age memoir written by a black South African who managed to surmount extremely difficult obstacles and empower himself through education despite apartheid. In the Spanish class, students would often bring in ideas related to resilience, agency, and the sense of possibility inspired by the book and their personal life trajectories when discussing the reading they had done in their mother tongue with the Spanish instructor. Our proposal was accepted by the learning community coordinator with the support of our respective department chairs, and the first cluster ran in the fall of 2013, with 10 students, 8 of whom were from the Dominican Republic and 2 from Honduras. The initial cluster included an FYS section that I  also taught. This course was a great addition to the cluster, as the theme of student empowerment explored through a bidirectional pedagogical approach intersected very well with a studentcentered college orientation course whose goal was to promote academic success. In addition, it gave me two additional contact hours with the students, which were very useful for building the relationship I needed to form the ethnographic partnership I was seeking to establish. Unfortunately, in the subsequent clusters, we were no longer able to include an FYS because it restricted recruitment to first-year students. Given that in order for the cluster to run we needed at least 10 students, we had to prioritize our need to recruit from the widest possible pool. The Spanish–English learning community ran from the fall of 2013 to the spring of 2016, when I left BCC to go on sabbatical to work on the proposal for this book. During that time, a total of 69 students were enrolled in the program. There were four sections linking ESL 03 to SPN 111 and two sections linking English 09 to SPN 111. Because ENG 09 meets only twice a week, it was not as conducive for creating the conditions for the ethnographic partnership I wanted to establish with the students. We chose to link this class only when it was not possible to link ESL 03 due to scheduling reasons. The fact that Spanish–ESL clusters were able to run continuously for three consecutive academic years was quite an achievement, given that insufficient enrollment led to the cancelation of several learning community clusters that had been proposed during the same period. It took a lot of effort on the part of the ESL team and support from the CUNY Language Immersion Program to recruit enough students for the Spanish– ESL clusters. Recruitment strategies included visits to students enrolled in levels below ESL 03 or English 09 during the advisement period with pamphlets and testimonials from former students, ensuring the presence of an ESL faculty member during registration, and referrals from the CUNY Language Immersion Program, which many ESL students took before starting the ESL sequence.

74  Using Spanish as a Resource at BCC

7. Forming an Ethnographic Partnership within the Learning Community No matter how emphatic teachers may be of the ordeal that students go through to learn English, nothing can bring it home in quite the same way as going through the process themselves. —Sonia Nieto, 2011, p. 206

Typically, instructors teaching as partners in learning communities meet on a regular basis to discuss their integration strategies and their students’ progress, but they do not attend each other’s classes. There were several reasons why I chose to take the Spanish class as a language learner/participant observer. I will not hide the fact that I enjoy learning new languages, and I was very excited about the possibility of improving my command of Spanish in the learning community. It was mainly a burning ethnographic question, however, a question I  had been thinking about since I started teaching ESL at BCC that prompted my commitment to take the Spanish class linked to my course: “What happens when ESL and English instructors make the effort to learn their students’ first language?” Long before I became acquainted with the philosophical tenets of critical and culturally responsive pedagogy, I intuitively felt that a language teacher taking on a role of language learner with his or her students might create classroom dynamics that could help students break through barriers, especially barriers of an emotional kind. Several years after I made the decision to attend the Spanish class in the learning community, I became aware that a few other teachers/scholars before me had experimented with “role reversal” in language teaching, or a research modality in which “teachers become learners in order to better understand language pedagogy from the learner’s perspective” (Wildsmith-Cromarty, 2003, p. 140; see also Lowe, 1987; Ramani & Ramani, 1997). In retrospect, armed with the lens of my theoretical framework, I can see that my ethnographic question and my pull toward a learning flow that was bidirectional are deeply connected with the issues of language, power, and identity I  discussed in Chapter  2. English instructors— especially in countries where this language is a precondition for access to formal education and professional employment—find themselves in a position of great power with respect to their students. At a community college such as BCC, which serves almost exclusively students of color, this power comes not only from institutional roles but also from socioeconomic and often racial disparities that are reflected in language. Instructors are likely to be from more privileged socioeconomic backgrounds than their students, and this privilege is interconnected with language practices. The instructors’ ownership of the dominant code mirrors their dominant position with respect to their students; the marginalization of students’ primary language and their limited command of the dominant

Using Spanish as a Resource at BCC 75 code mirror their marginal position in society. In this context, the question, “What happens when ESL and English instructors make the effort to learn their students’ first language?” becomes quintessentially a question of power and identity. What happens to power relations in the classroom when instructors, whose power is reflected in their command of the dominant language, make the effort to learn the marginalized language of their students and, by doing so, shift the locus of expertise from themselves to the students? What happens in terms of identity construction as students are put in the position of experts because of their language skills in a situation where they tend to be marginalized because of them? What bearing—if any—do these happenings have on learning outcomes? In addition to my interest in seeing what my attempts to learn Spanish would do to class dynamics, I  was also eager to try to put myself in my students’ shoes by trying to engage with academic discourse in a language in which I had limited proficiency. While I had been in that situation in middle school, after my parents left Italy for Kuwait and I started attending an American school, by the time I had started teaching at BCC, English had become by far my strongest language for academic purposes, so I thought I might not necessarily fully appreciate the struggle my students go through when I assigned certain tasks. Of course, no one’s experience with learning an additional language is the same, and it would not be fair to compare the emotional impact of my attempts to improve my Spanish to the struggle my students face with the appropriation of English and academic literacy. Spanish for me was a hobby, not a gatekeeper. Also, I was not under any real pressure because I was not taking the class for credit, so I did not have to do the work required, unless I chose to, and in any case, my work would not be graded. Nevertheless, the performance anxiety and sense of loss I often experienced in the Spanish class were very useful from both an ethnographic and a pedagogical point of view, for someone who is in a position of such power with respect to his or her students. This sense of loss allowed me to empathize with my students in ways that I  could not have imagined and to develop a much greater appreciation for their intellectual and linguistic sophistication. The moments of silence I experienced in my ESL class when I asked what, to me, were very simple questions expressed in very simple English were met with a lot more compassion on my part, after I experienced the embarrassment of being silenced by the fear of having to say something in Spanish in front of the rest of class. Also, from a pedagogical perspective, given that my ethnolinguistic background was different from my students’, it was inevitable for me to play the role of ethnographer and learn from my students if I wanted to tap into their community cultural wealth to promote academic success. First of all, to create an additive learning situation, instructors have to build on what students already know, and this can only happen if teachers take the time to familiarize themselves with students’ primary discourses.

76  Using Spanish as a Resource at BCC As Mendez-Newman argued with respect to Latin@ students, “instructors who do not aspire to understand students’ worldviews, behaviors, and ethics can easily thwart students’ efforts to succeed academically” (2006, p. 18). I knew that watching my students engage with academic discourse in their mother tongue would provide me with a higher level of access to their discursive universes and language practices than if I had only observed them while they used English in my ESL class. Last but not least, my participation in the Spanish class was immensely helpful in creating translingual pedagogical synergies between first and second language literacy development. The sense of loss I experienced in the Spanish class created the occasion for translingual check-ins, during which I turned to my students as experts to get clarification about words, grammar, and discourses which I  had not fully grasped. This process provided collaborative opportunities for vocabulary building and contrastive grammar reviews which used students’ first language as a frame of reference. Looking at discourses from a contrastive perspective was particularly helpful, as students’ struggle with college-level English writing was related not only to second language acquisition issues but also to divergent discursive practices (Bartlett & Garcia, 2011; Parmegiani & Utakis, 2014; Rubinstein-Avila, 2007). As we will see in the following section, the rhetorical expectations students were expected to meet while engaging with academic discourse in their countries of origin often clash with what U.S. college professors expect, especially around the issue of plagiarism (Parmegiani, 2014a), and this created additional difficulties when students grappled with writing assignments in English.

8. Dominican Students and Challenges to Academic Success Dominicans are one of the Latino group in the U.S. Unfortunately, educational achievement among Dominicans is among the lowest of any Latin group in the country (Utakis  & Pita, 2007). In 2000, only 51% of Dominicans in the United States who were 25 years old or older had earned a high school diploma; only 10.6% graduated from college (Hernandez & Rivera-Batiz, 2003). There are several reasons why Dominican students face particularly strong challenges while pursuing an education in the United States. Reports published by nongovernmental organizations highlight that the educational system in the Dominican Republic is “deeply inequitable, and it reproduces an exclusionary social order” characterized by low levels of academic literacy development among students who are not from a privileged socioeconomic background (UNDP, 2008, p. 177). Expenditure on public education has increased in the last 10 years, but it remains among the lowest in the region, especially for secondary education. According to the 2002 census, 15.7% of learners between the ages of 6 and 13 did not attend school (UNDP, 2008, p.  37); a survey from 2006 indicated

Using Spanish as a Resource at BCC 77 that only 36.8% of boys and 51.9% of girls between 14 and 17 were in school (UNDP, 2008, p. 177). UNESCO found that Dominican third and fourth graders score among the lowest on literacy skills in Latin America. According to Hace de Yunen and Montenegro (1993), overcrowding and the fact that teachers are forced to teach multiple shifts in order to survive on such low salaries are major obstacles to first language literacy development in the Dominican Republic: “schools here meet in three daily 4 hour shifts called tandas.” In one tanda each day a teacher meets “180 students. It’s simply a given that the amount of time to read papers is limited, and it must be divided among students” (Hace de Yunen & Montenegro, 1993, p. 266). Given the realities described in these reports, it would be safe to speculate that in some cases some of the students in our ESL classes who were educated in the Dominican Republic might not have been able to develop strong academic literacy skills in their mother tongue. Having said this, I  would like to emphasize that in no way do I  mean to suggest that Dominican students “do not possess skills” or are illiterate by default. This assumption would run counter to the fundamental principles of culturally responsive pedagogy and my personal experience as an ESL instructor at BCC, where I  had plenty of opportunities to see for myself that language minority students with limited formal schooling “have important background experiences outside of school that need to be acknowledged and abilities that need to be drawn upon” (Freeman & Freeman, 2002, p. xiii). The reason why I feel it is important to take an honest look at educational opportunities in the Dominican Republic for those students who are not from a privileged background is because of the implications for second language and academic literacy development. The last thing I want to do is insinuate that we can make sweeping generalizations about students’ reading and writing competence in their first language based on their nationality. I would like to suggest, however, that students who do not have solid academic literacy foundations in their mother tongue are at a very high risk of dropping out because they face the overwhelming task of having to reach college-level reading and writing competencies in a language that they are still learning and in a very short time. For these students, it is crucial to reap the synergistic benefits of integrating mother tongue and English academic literacy development. It must be also pointed out that in a lot of cases, students who migrate to the United States, at some point in their K–12 school careers, are not provided with adequate educational opportunities as they are often “relegated to under-resourced and underperforming schools, resulting in part from residential segregation” (Bartlett & Garcia, 2011, p. 46). A study by the Pew Research Center has found that English Language Learners (ELL) tend to go to public schools that have low standardized test scores. However, these low levels of assessed proficiency are not solely attributable to poor achievement

78  Using Spanish as a Resource at BCC by ELL students. The same schools report poor achievement by other major student groups as well, and have a set of characteristics generally associated with poor standardized test performance–such as high student-teacher ratios, high student enrollments, and high levels of students living in poverty or near poverty. When ELL are not isolated in these low-achieving schools, their gaps in test scores are considerably narrower. (Fry, 2008, p. 1) In addition, like other Latino groups and immigrants from developing countries, Dominican students often have to deal with challenges related to poverty (Fry & Gonzales, 2015), interrupted education (Fry, 2005), family separation (Bartlett  & Garcia, 2011, p.  157) and the expanded financial, family, and educational responsibilities that come with starting a new life in a new country (Bartlet & Garcia, 2011, pp. 151–188). These challenges are themes that emerge over and over again in the narratives of empowerment students write at the beginning of the term. For instance, their stories often discuss the emotional cost of a step-migration process that tears families apart, preventing loved ones from seeing each other sometimes for decades, putting students in the position of having to make painful choices about where to live and who to live with, or accept choices made by somebody else on their behalf. These long periods of separation sometimes lead to family reconfigurations that are not easy to adapt to, such grandmothers and aunts taking on the role of mothers and students having to adjust to living with siblings, cousins, and/or stepparents they might not even have seen before. Family reconfigurations can bring new sets of rules and expectations for students, especially female students, who sometimes find themselves taking on the role of housekeepers and babysitters while contributing to their living expenses in the United States and sending remittances back home. It also common for students’ stories to reveal an ironic process of downward mobility that comes with their move to the “land of opportunity.” For instance, they will mention that in the Dominican Republic they had their own room, and their only responsibility was to do well in school, whereas in New York, they find themselves having to share their room with siblings and cousins, having to do house chores, having to work to pay the bills, and not having the time or the physical space to do their homework. While I knew that as an ESL instructor, I did not have the power to remove these structural barriers to academic success, I have found it useful to be aware of them in my quest to understand my students’ social realities and the way they can affect their learning process. Being mindful of students’ multiple responsibilities and their demands on students’ time can help me understand whether a student’s difficulty in meeting learning goals comes from a lack of motivation, a lack of time, or a combination of both and what kind of support I should provide. I also believe that

Using Spanish as a Resource at BCC 79 there is a lot of value in being heard when difficulties get in the way of goals. As my student Monica mentioned during one of the interviews I carried out for this book (see Section 4.5.a), feeling like the rest of her life mattered in the learning community helped her stay on track: You keep going to class because you know that there are people there that you can count on. They can’t help you with money problems, but they can help you with a lot of stuff. That will help you get where you want to be. In fact, paying “deliberate attention to the problems in the students’ lives outside of school” (Adams et al., 2017, p. 405) is one of the reasons why the ALP model (see Section 3.2) has been so successful at helping basic writers take ownership of academic literacy. Finally, when trying to understand the challenges many Dominican students face on the road to academic success we should give some thought to the idea that high student failure rates among Dominicans might be their resistance to integration (Gray, 2001): “Most arrive with their belief that their life in the States is temporary; that as soon as they become financially stable, as soon as their children finish school they will return to the island” (Gray, 2001, p. 182). Such a sweeping generalization about Dominican students’ alleged lack of desire to integrate is obviously problematic, but we should keep in mind that many Dominicans in the United States keep strong ties with their country of origin, and this has important implications for schooling, especially in terms of language and literacy. A  study carried out at BCC by Utakis and Pita has confirmed the “transnational” character of this population. In his monograph about Dominican communities in Washington Heights, a neighborhood adjacent to BCC where many of the students who attend this institution reside, Duany (2008) defined the term transnational as describing a lifestyle “characterized by a constant flow of people in both directions, a dual sense of identity, ambivalent attachment to two nations, and a far-flung network of kinship and friendship across state frontiers” (p. 2). These studies imply that in order to be able to function within this “farflung network of kinship and friendship across state frontiers,” Dominican students must not be put in subtractive schooling situations, where academic achievement comes at the cost of a loss of their native language, discourses, and other fundamental aspects of their identity (Valenzuela, 1999; Bartlett & Garcia, 2011). In other words, effective schooling for Dominican students must allow them to retain their proficiency in Spanish and in the “forms of life which integrate words, acts, beliefs, values and social identities” (Gee, 1996, p.  127) that shape linguistic exchanges in their communities. While I did not mention in my proposal that the maintenance and development of Spanish academic literacy was

80  Using Spanish as a Resource at BCC a desirable goal in and of itself, the Spanish–English clusters that ran did contribute to this learning outcome by giving students the opportunity to develop college academic literacy proficiency in both their mother tongue and their additional language.

9.  Academic Literacy in the Dominican Republic Regardless of students’ academic literacy proficiency level in their mother tongue, there is evidence showing that what is considered effective academic literacy in Dominican high schools can differ significantly from expectations around reading and writing at BCC. Understanding how to navigate these differences in a second language often turns out to be an overwhelming task. In Additive Schooling in Subtractive Times (2011), Bartlett and Garcia present a longitudinal study of bilingual language and literacy practice at Gregorio Luperon High School, a dual-medium school that was created as the result of a community initiative to cater to the learning needs of mostly Dominican Spanish-speaking students. Their findings point to the fact that the issues Dominican students face when writing an essay in English go beyond difficulties related to second language acquisition but include a fundamental clash of expectations around academic literacy: What counts as literacy, and which literacy practices are considered varies situationally and relationally. Thus, a student who has gone to school in the Dominican Republic for many years has experienced a way of communicating ‘in and around writing’ (Hornberg, 1990) that is profoundly different from what is expected in the United States [. . .] It is not just that English differs from Spanish [. . .] the language and literacy practices in which students engage vary in the two societies and the two school systems. (Bartlett & Garcia, 2011, p. 120) Similarly, Rubinstein-Avila’s (2007) case study of the challenges faced in a U.S. middle school by a female Dominican student shows that not only did the student in question have to deal with “the pressures of learning and developing academic skills in the new language, but [she] was also expected to gain awareness of the particular kinds of literacy practices and knowledge that were valued in her adoptive society” (p. 585). Bartlett and Garcia (2011) have noticed the following divergences between the way Dominican students were taught to read and write in their home country and the way they were expected to do the same at Gregorio Luperon High School: “A  much greater emphasis in U.S. schools was put on the development and expression of personal opinion” as opposed to a focus on “specific recounting of factual information” in the Dominican Republic. Also, in the United States, “teachers expect

Using Spanish as a Resource at BCC 81 much more independent reading than students normally did in the previous schools” and to consult multiple sources, which students often did not have the opportunity to do in a developing country where access to educational resources is limited (Bartlett  & Garcia, 2011, p.  121). Indeed, the student who was the focus of Rubinstein-Avila’s case study (2007) expressed a sense of loss when asked to use writing to take a position on an issue and to defend it by using supporting evidence. She mentioned that she was not trained for this sort of literacy task in the secondary school she attended in the Dominican Republic: In Santo Domingo, they expected us to learn and remember the information straight from the book or from copying the teacher’s notes, but here I  am not sure what exactly we should be learning. They sometimes say, ‘write about what you think, write about this or that’. They say ‘go get information on the internet,’ or they say, ‘the answers are all in the chapter.’ It’s confusing. What I find [on the internet] is. . . . It’s not always the same of what it says in the book. And also, what I think may not be correct. So, even if I understand the English, I  still sometimes don’t know how to complete it [the assignment]. (p. 584) Watkins-Goffman and Cummings’s (1997) study of a Spanish Composition course at the Universidad Autonoma de Santo Domingo, a leading public university in the Dominican Republic, found that students’ reading based writing assignments focused on “(1) distinguishing between main and supporting ideas, including writing summaries. (2) Categorizing texts into types and levels of discourse. (3) Learning the use of accents, punctuation, capitalization, spelling, vocabulary, and syllabification” (p. 338). According to Kalman and Street (2013), this approach on reading and writing “as neutral, objective skills that are learned through a progression of ordered exercises and then transferable to any situation” has dominated official discourses on literacy in Latin America “for decades if not more” (p.  1). Hace de Yunen and Montenegro (1993) argue that this is because in countries such as the Dominican Republic “Spanish speaking teachers are beholden to . . . the Real Academia de la Lengua Espanola–the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language . . . the Supreme Court of Spanish grammar,” which, sitting in Madrid, decides for Latin America “what is grammatical and what is not, what is spelled correctly and what is boorish.” According to these critics, this vestige of Iberian colonialism “has had the effect of equating culture with grammatical purity and orthographical correctness,” standing in the way of the implementation of more expressive, student-centered, and culturally appropriate approaches to the teaching of writing (Hace de Yunen  & Montenegro, 1993, p. 266).

82  Using Spanish as a Resource at BCC Be that as it may, existing studies show that the way academic literacy is taught in the Dominican Republic is based on practices that vary significantly from what is expected of students in U.S. colleges, where students are expected to write essays that take a position on a certain issue and support it be engaging critically with multiple sources of information. Consequently, Dominican students who attended secondary schools in their countries of origin and who are looking to get a college degree in the United States are facing not only challenges related to second language acquisition but also difficulties related to different sets of sociocultural expectations around reading and writing. Keeping this in mind was very helpful for using my participation in the Spanish class and the ethnographic partnership as a tool for understanding how expectations around reading and writing can clash as students move across sociolinguistic domains and for creating a nurturing pedagogical space where they rely on their mother tongue as an additional resource for understanding this clash. When dealing with the issue of plagiarism, for instance, which was something the Spanish professor and I had to do almost every semester, it was helpful to approach this problem as a clash of expectations around academic literacy rather than a deliberate attempt to cheat. Both the Spanish instructor and I made it really clear that in the United States, plagiarism is considered an academic crime that has serious consequences, but we also acknowledge that this is not necessarily the case in other parts of the world. To illustrate this point, I shared anecdotes from the qualitative data I had collected where students recounted the shock and bafflement they felt when they received a zero on a writing assignment for doing something they had done throughout high school when asked to do a research project: look for information, repeat it more or less verbatim, and frame it within a short introduction and conclusion written in their own words. Lest students were made to feel like there was something wrong with the way they were taught or that the way things are done in the United States is necessarily better, I often mentioned my sense of shock and bafflement I felt when I went back to the Italian school system in college, after having completed my secondary education at an American school, and one of my Italian college professors told me to “copy” an article she had written as part of my thesis. The idea behind these conversations about clashing expectations around academic literacy was not to value certain practices and devalue others but, rather, to alert students to the fact that as they move across sociolinguistic domains, they need to develop what Carter (2008) has termed “rhetorical dexterity,” or the ability to navigate implicit and explicit rules around discourse production that can be very different. As we will see (in Section 4.5.e), the mother tongue can be a powerful tool for helping students develop the sort of rhetorical dexterity they need as transnational citizens whose life trajectories straddle multiple

Using Spanish as a Resource at BCC 83 discursive universes. My student Juana explained very clearly why the Spanish class was so important to help her understand what her professors at BCC wanted to see when they gave her a writing assignment: “When you receive instruction in your language, even if you are going to write in another language, you understand what to do.” It is for this reason, therefore, that in the Spanish class there was a lot of emphasis on illustrating the meaning of rhetorical expectations professors express through abstractions such as “critical thinking,” “analysis,” or “interpretation.” These abstractions are very hard for students to grasp, especially in a language they have not yet fully mastered. They become a lot clearer, however, after students have been given the opportunity to think, analyze, and interpret critically in informal discussions where students carry out these tasks naturally by engaging at a personal level with texts that are meaningful to them without the linguistic restrictions imposed by their second language.

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86  Using Spanish as a Resource at BCC Scott, J. (2017). The accelerated learning program (ALP) at Bronx Community College: A proposal. Proposal submitted to English department. Scrivener, S., Weiss, M., Ratledge, A., Rudd, T., Sommo, C.,  & Fresques, H. (2015). Three-year effects of CUNY’s Accelerated Study in Associate Programs (ASAP) for developmental education students. MDCR. Retrieved June  29, 2018, from www.mdrc.org/publication/doubling-graduation-rates Shapiro, N.,  & Levine, J. (1999). Creating learning communities: A  practical (guide?) to winning support, organizing for change, and implementing programs. San Francisco: Wiley. Skipper, T. (2016). Introduction. In L. C. Scchmidt & J. Graziano (Eds.), Building synergy for high-impact educational initiatives: First-year seminars and learning communities. Columbia, SC: National Resource Center for the First-Year Experience and Students in Transition. Sullivan, P., & Toth, C. (2017). Introduction to the accelerated learning program: Throwing open the gates. In P. Sullivan & C. Toth (Eds.), Teaching composition at the two-year college: Background readings (p. 401). Boston: Bedford St. Martin. Tinto, V. (1986). Leaving college: Understanding the causes and cures of student attrition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Tinto, V.,  & Goodsell, A. (1993). A longitudinal study of freshman interest groups at the University of Washington. University Park, PA: National Center for Secondary Teaching and Assessment. Trainor, S. (2015, October 20). How community colleges changed the whole idea of education in America. Time. UNDP. (2008). Human development report: Dominican Republic 2008. Santo Domingo: UNDP Human Development Office. Utakis, S., & Pita, M. (2007). Un pie adentro y otro afuera: Composition instruction for transnational Dominicans in higher education. In C. Kirklighter, D. Cardenas, & S. W. Murphy (Eds.), Teaching writing with Latino/a students: Lessons learned at Hispanic serving institutions (pp. 119–132). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Valenzuela, A. (1999). Subtractive schooling: U.S. Mexican youth and the politics of caring. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Visher, M., Schneider, E., Wathington, H.,  & Collado, H. (2010). Scaling up learning communities: The experience of six community colleges. New York, NY: Columbia University, National Center for Postsecondary Research. Retrieved July 2, 2018, from https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED509307 Watkins-Goffman, L., & Cummings, V. (1997). Bridging the gap between native language and second language literacy instruction: A naturalistic study. Bilingual Research Journal, 21(4), 334–346. Wildsmith-Cromarty, R. (2003). Mutual apprenticeship in the learning and teaching of an additional language. Language and Education, 17(2), 138–154. Yosso, T. (2005). Whose culture has capital? A critical race theory discussion of community cultural wealth. Race, Ethnicity, and Education, 8(1), 69–91.

IV Impact on Learning Outcomes

1. Case Study: Research Questions and Epistemological Orientation The overarching research question of the longitudinal study that accompanied the program right from its inception was very simple: “What impact is the Spanish–ESL learning community cluster having on student success?” This question, which is ongoing, and inextricably related to my pedagogical design and its implementation, calls for a case-study methodology. Case studies are recommended for questions that are explored not with regard to a large population, but with a focus on “a bounded system,” such as “an innovative teaching program” (Nuan, 1992, p. 76–77). Defining case study methodology can be tricky, as the concept eludes clear-cut definitions and rigid research protocols. Adelman, Jenkins, and Kemmis (1976, as cited by Nuan, 1992, p. 74), argue that “case study is not a term for a standard methodological package,” and according to Nuan, “it is probably easier to say what a case study is not rather than what it is” (1992, p. 74). He compares and contrasts the epistemological foundations and data collection methods that characterize survey research, experimental research, and case study: Unlike the experimenter, who manipulates variables to determine the causal significance, or the surveyor, who asks standardized questions of large representative samples of individuals, the case study researcher typically observes the characteristics of an individual unit–a child, a class, a school, or a community. The purpose of such observations is to probe deeply and to analyze the intensity of the multifarious phenomena that constitute the lifecycle of the unit with a view to establishing generalizations about the wider population to which the unit belongs. (Nuan, 1992, p. 77) Although case studies often rely on ethnographic methods for data collection, they differ from anthropological ethnographies because they

88  Impact on Learning Outcomes tend to have a narrower scope of investigation: Case studies do not seek to provide a thorough description of a given culture, but rather, they focus on specific aspects of the culture in question (Denny, 1978). Also, unlike traditional ethnographies, case studies can involve both quantitative and qualitative methods of data collection (Nuan, 1992, p. 75), as the one presented in this book does. The “bounded system” that delimits the scope of my study is the “innovative teaching system” brought about by the link between ESL and Spanish and its underlying pedagogical approach, which I discussed in Section 2.4. My quantitative methods included a comparative analysis of traditional metrics that learning institutions and policy makers take as indicators of academic success (course pass rates, progress through developmental courses retention rates, credit accumulation, average GPAs). My qualitative methods were based on ethnographic observations and in-depth interviews with some of the students that were enrolled in the program. In no way does my qualitative study attempt to provide a “complete account” of Latin@, Spanish-speaking, or “Dominican” culture. First of all, I don’t believe such account can be given without degenerating into essentializing descriptions that oversimplify the complexity of the human experience and promulgate cultural stereotypes that are anything but empowering (Parmegiani, p.  19–24, 2009). Second, my interactions with my students were limited to classroom dynamics, informal conversations before and after class, and the time we spent together during the interview process. It would be presumptuous of me, especially as a researcher who does not identify as Latin@, to make sweeping generalizations about my students’ culture without having spent a significant amount of time in their home environment interacting with their primary communities. What I thought would be appropriate and pedagogically valuable as a language and literacy instructor proficient in the dominant code, but with limited knowledge of my students’ language and community cultural wealth, was to heed MendezNewman’s call for the need to “aspire to understand my students’ worldviews, behaviors and ethics” (2000, p. 17), especially in terms of their significance for academic success within the context of the learning community. Similarly, the limited scope of my quantitative study does not lend itself to claims of generalizability of the findings. The students who made up the “bound system” were not randomly assigned to the innovative program investigated; hence, it is possible that their metrics were higher because students who chose to enroll in the learning community possessed personal predispositions that made them more likely to succeed academically. Also, the sample of students was too small and its composition not stratified; therefore, it is impossible to claim that if the program were to be replicated among a similar population, it would lead to the same results. Finally, I would argue that even if the study met the criteria

Impact on Learning Outcomes 89 for successful experimental design, claims of generalizability would still have to be taken with a grain of salt, given that no randomized sample selection can be controlled for the infinite number of variables that come into play when a human being engages in a learning process. As Baker and Lewis (2015) have pointed out, “randomized controlled trials are normally pragmatically unachievable and ethically undesirable in education as they entail randomly allocating students to particular instructional approaches” (p. 19). In addition, this approach “only tends to work in a laboratory setting which can be reduced to simple components and controls, whereas schools and classrooms have complex multicausality, ever-dynamic and fluid, evolving and ever-changing, sometimes unpredictable and inconsistent” (Baker & Lewis, 2015, p. 19). For instance, “students, teachers, and instructional staff cannot be reduced to isolated variables and manipulated as if they were seeds in agricultural experiment research” (Baker & Lewis, 2015, p. 119). In terms of my research question (“What impact is the Spanish–ESL learning community cluster having on student success?”), comparing academic success metrics in the learning community to the general BCC population will not provide enough evidence to argue that the BCC learning community model is a magic wand for putting college completion within reach of language minority students across the world or even nationally. Nevertheless, this sort of comparison can be useful to convince administrators that, at the institutional level, this program is making a difference in helping a particular student population succeed academically. At the same time, without making claims of universal validity, if the students in the sample did better, it could still be argued that the differential could be a good reason to try the model in different learning contexts and generate more case studies that, taken together, could potentially point to a more solid statistical trend. Finally, metrics alone cannot give a thorough answer to the overarching research question. Traditional quantitative academic success indicators can tell whether students in the program, on average, did better than the general population in terms of retention, credit accumulation, and average GPA, but they don’t say much about how the program impacted the progress made by individual students, not only in terms of language and academic literacy acquisition but also in terms of the way to see themselves as learners and human beings driven by aspirations of upward socioeconomic mobility. Moreover, metrics cannot describe how specific aspects of the program shaped the learning process and answer fundamental questions for pedagogical design, such as the following: How did taking two classes in the same cohort affect students’ level of engagement with academic discourse? How did the Spanish class affect students’ understanding of academic literacy? How did my role as language learner/participant observer impact class

90  Impact on Learning Outcomes dynamics? What role did Spanish play in the ESL class? How did this role impact students’ second language and academic literacy acquisition? To find answers to these questions and all the others that stem out of the central question, I had to examine the experience of the human beings who were involved in the program. My experience and my perception of my students’ experiences have been documented in a teaching journal where I recorded personal observations and reflections of class dynamics I collected in my ESL class and in the Spanish class. My students’ experiences have been collected through interviews. I  discuss my qualitative data collection method in the following two sections.

2.  My Observations and Reflections In my journal, I kept track of classroom activities, assignments given, and students’ engagement with academic discourse as evidenced by not only their level of participation but also the type of discourses they produced as they carried out academic literacy tasks in their mother tongue and their second language. Because I was a language learner in the Spanish class, my observation included new Spanish words, phrases, idiomatic expressions, grammatical structures, and unfamiliar cultural references and discursive patterns. These notes were the starting point of the translingual check-ins I  did in my ESL class, often at the beginning of the period, to help students transition to their second language by asking them to use it to explain aspects of their mother tongue as experts. For example, I would write on the board a list of new Spanish words I had picked up in the last class; ask my students to check their meaning in English, in case I thought I had been able to figure it out; or ask them to give it to me, in case I had no clue. Sometimes it was a phrase or idiomatic expression that ended up on the board or an idea that I thought was interesting or that I  couldn’t quite follow. Whatever the case, my students’ expertise on their mother tongue helped us transition from their first to their second language by using all their linguistic resources and recognizing the value of their knowledge base. These check-ins were certainly useful and fun for me, but more important, they helped set the tone for the rest of the class by inviting students to carry over that sense of comfort and self-confidence they developed in the Spanish class, which they mentioned over and over again in the interviews (see Sections 4.5.a, 4.5.b, 4.5.c). They also gave students the opportunity to engage in metalinguistic tasks that were actually quite complex in a low-pressure situation. Explaining the workings of a language in another language is not easy, nor is it easy to explain discursive input received in one language using a different language. Last but not least, these translingual check-ins were opportunities for me to model the language-learning behavior, for

Impact on Learning Outcomes 91 example, by reminding students of the importance of writing down new words, checking their meaning, and reviewing them. The notes in my journal also chartered the emotional journey I experienced as an additional language learner trying to participate in a class that, being geared to native speakers, was challenging. Among other things, these notes functioned as a “learning diary” (Lennard, 1982; Lowe, 1987), collecting insights “used to raise awareness of the difficulties learners face learning a new language in a formal classroom setting” (Wildsmith-Cromarty, 2003, p. 141). I recorded the moments of confusion, the sense of inadequacy, and the performance anxiety I felt anytime I was called on by the Spanish instructor to say something in front of the rest of the class. That feeling used to be a big part of my life in middle school, after I left Italy and started attending an American school without knowing English, but it had been so long since that happened that I had forgotten how crippling it could be to be put in a formal situation where I had to express myself in front of other people using a language of which I had a limited command. At the same time, however, there were moments of elation in the Spanish class, as I  found myself being able to make more and more sense of a new language, a language that is so important for social interactions on campus and throughout New York City. Those moments were also recorded in my teaching journal. From my perspective as an English instructor teaching at a HispanicServing Institution, Spanish seemed to be ubiquitous, but it also seemed to occupy a marginal position. Every class I taught at BCC had a strong Spanish-speaking presence, and there would always be times when students would use this language, even in credit-bearing courses, to talk to each other, to help each other with the task I assigned, but they would never use it with me, let alone to say something in a class discussion. Similarly, I  always heard Spanish in the hallways, going from class to class or on the way to my office but never in a formal learning situation. In the Spanish class, I felt like this language was finally put in the center of the stage and that I  had been given a precious opportunity not just to be a spectator but also to have some kind of acting role in this whole new discursive universe that was opening up to me through my language learning endeavors. Many a time I felt the strong urge to say something that really mattered to me amid this discursive universe that I found so fascinating. Sometimes I  did, despite my fears of making a fool out of myself, even though all I was able to say was a simple sentence that oversimplified my thoughts. As limited as this role might have been, it was immensely gratifying. What was most gratifying as I stepped into this new discursive universe was to be able to see my students much more fully in their complexity as human beings, as they engaged with academic discourse without linguistic restrictions. I was able to see them as budding intellectuals, not just students in need of developmental instruction—intellectuals ready to

92  Impact on Learning Outcomes blossom in possession of a much richer cultural capital than I could have possibly imagined, had I only interacted with them as their ESL instructor using exclusively their second language. From within this universe, the pillars of critical and culturally responsive pedagogy felt a lot more palpable than theoretical. As I sat and observed my students engage with academic discourse in their first language, not only passionately bringing their life histories in conversation and with their textual encounters but also moving beyond the personal to venture into higher levels of abstraction and theoretical discourse, it was impossible for me to fathom how their minds could possibly be considered “empty vessels” to be filled. It also became much easier for me to see that the moments of silence I experienced sometimes when I  asked what to me were simple questions in simple English were not necessarily due to a lack of knowledge or a lack of desire to participate but, rather, due to the same sort of emotional barriers I experienced in the Spanish class. Finally, it became clear to me that being allowed to participate in the discursive universe opened up by my students’ mother tongue, even if from a marginal position, created priceless opportunities for establishing meaningful emotional connections that lead to “authentic caring” (Valenzuela, 1999). Again, it would be presumptuous of me to claim that my emotional journey as a language learner in the Spanish class can be taken as a blueprint of my students,’ as there are fundamental differences between my subject position as a tenured English professor, with full command of the dominant language, looking to improve his Spanish for a research project and as a hobby and recently immigrated Latin@ students whose educational and professional aspirations are simply out of reach without a sufficient level of English proficiency. Also, while I did participate in the class, and the Spanish instructor called me from time to time, I was aware that the Spanish class was for my students’ benefit, not mine, and that my learning needs as an additional language speaker with limited proficiency were very different from mother tongue speakers honing their college-level academic literacy skills. Moreover, I did not want to overstep boundaries in a classroom situation where someone else was the instructor and that someone was so kind as to allow me to sit in her class and observe her. As Wildsmith-Cromarty cautions, “teachers are placed in a vulnerable position when their praxis is under observation, even if it is to the mutual advantage of both teachers and learners” (2003, p. 152). Consequently, I did my best to make my presence in the Spanish class as discrete as possible, and I always felt welcomed by the Spanish instructor and the other students. Nevertheless, even if my role and subject position in the class were different from my students, my students were sitting right next to me when I  stumbled and couldn’t find the words to answer what to them were probably very simple questions asked in very simple Spanish or when I asked for quick clarifications when the Spanish professor turned

Impact on Learning Outcomes 93 her back toward the class to scribble something on the blackboard. They were also there at the beginning of the ESL class when I  ran through the Spanish vocabulary I had picked up, asked for the vocabulary I wish I  had had when I  was trying to say something, or checked with them about my grammar usage or my understanding of what they said in class. Although I was not able to know this for sure until the interviews, my students’ body language, the appreciation they showed for me from very early on in the learning process, and the sharp increase in active participation in my class suggested that my attempts to put myself in my students’ shoes did help create the conditions for authentic caring and bidirectional learning that we needed to establish the ethnographic partnership I envisioned.

3.  Students’ Voices While I do believe that a teacher’s observations and reflections can provide valuable information on how teaching programs shape educational outcomes, it would be inappropriate to assess these programs without giving a voice to the protagonists of the learning process, who are the students themselves. From an epistemological perspective, there is no way a participant observer, no matter how well informed, can speak or write about another person’s experience without at least attempting to report that experience from that person’s point of view. Politically, students are the main stakeholders in educational outcomes; therefore, their experiences, expressed in their own voices, are of the utmost importance when trying to assess the efficacy of a program, especially when dealing with an adult population. Pedagogically, there is a lot of value for language and literacy acquisition in giving language minority students the opportunity to use dominant codes to discuss their learning process metacognitively, as experts, in a research setting. Several of the students I  interviewed shared with me that they were thrilled and honored to participate in a research project that could lead to a book and very proud of themselves for having been able to discuss in their second language issues that are of interest to a researcher. My attempts to find an answer to my research question in my students’ voices shaped my ethnographic observations and my teaching practices too, as I often recorded what students had spontaneously shared about their learning process in class and in the little time we were able to spend together before and after class. I also instigated metacognitive moments by asking students questions I was grappling with, such as “How do you feel about the work you are doing in the Spanish class; how do you feel about seeing me in the Spanish class; how do you feel about using Spanish in an ESL class? . . .” Other times my metacognitive questions were more broad, personal, and conducive to storytelling; for example, I would ask students to tell me what kind of experience they had with writing in

94  Impact on Learning Outcomes Spanish in the Dominican Republic, what their teachers expected from them, and what happened the first time they were asked to turn in a writing assignment in the United States. I would also try to find out as much as possible about those aspects of my students’ social realities that affected their learning process, such as the multiple responsibilities they had to juggle, their language practices and attitudes, and the way higher education was viewed in their home and primary communities. Fortunately, students volunteered a lot of personal information while discussing the readings on the syllabus and were very generous in sharing even more in informal, not graded writing assignments I assigned on a regular basis as a starting point for conversations and/or more formal, scaffolded writing activities. In addition to the voices I collected through my teaching journal, which were filtered through my own recollection, I conducted audio-recorded in-depth interviews, which were carried out in two phases after the students had completed the program. The first phase consisted of a focusgroup interview, which was carried out in the fall of 2014, a semester after students enrolled in the first cluster completed the program. All 10 students who were in the cluster were invited to participate; six of them were able to do so. The interview schedule comprised four questions: 1. How would you describe your experience with the learning community? 2. How would you describe your experience with taking Spanish in the learning community? 3. What did you think of the discussions we had about the difference between the way your professors expected you to write essays in your country of origin and the way your professors expect you to write at BCC? 4. How useful was the Spanish class for developing the reading and writing skills your professors expect at BCC? The interview was conducted by a Dominican bilingual research assistant, a BCC graduate who is an ESL speaker himself, and who was therefore in a very good position to facilitate a conversation about students’ experience in college. While he asked the questions I had provided him in English, he instructed students to respond using whichever language they found most comfortable to express their thoughts. To elicit greater levels of elaboration, he came up with his own follow-up questions and often used his own personal experience as a starting point for further discussion. The conversation took place mainly in Spanish, interspersed with English words and phrases. The interview was transcribed by the research assistant. I translated the transcript into English, consulting with the research assistant whenever it was necessary. The second phase of the interview process took place in the fall of 2016, 3 months after the end of the last learning community cluster that

Impact on Learning Outcomes 95 I taught before going on sabbatical. I reached out to all the students that had been enrolled in the learning community from the fall of 2013 to the spring of 2016, but it was very challenging to find participants. Some students had already graduated, and some had dropped out. Many do not check their BCC email address on a regular basis. Most of them juggle multiple responsibilities as students, employees, and family members and therefore do not have much time to spare while they are on campus. After several attempts, and with the help of the same research assistant, who was able to contact some of the students by calling them by phone, I was able to recruit six participants. Five of them had been enrolled in the learning community the previous semester (Spring, 2016); one took it in the fall of 2015. I conducted the spring 2016 interviews myself. Two students chose to be interviewed individually; four chose to be interviewed in pairs. The interview process was less structured and more individualized in the second phase. My overarching question hadn’t changed, and while I  still had the four questions from 2014 in mind when I  met with the students, I wanted our conversations to be more free-flowing, personal, and student-centered. Also, I had specific questions for each of the students who had agreed to participate, questions related to things they had shared with me the previous semester or related to learning dynamics I had observed and recorded in my teaching journal. I asked the questions in English but told students to feel free to use the language they felt most comfortable with in our conversation. Students chose to respond mainly in English, using Spanish only occasionally, when they had trouble expressing certain thoughts. In keeping with the recommendations of grounded theory (Charmaz, 2006), I sought to identify thematic patterns when looking at what my observations and interview transcripts had to say about my research question. After presenting an analysis of metrics, I report and discuss my qualitative findings in accordance with five themes that emerged.

4.  Quantitative Findings What counts as evidence to demonstrate that learning communities work? For some the answer is simple: retention data. —Shapiro and Levine (1999, p. 166)

a. Introduction “Evaluations of learning communities involve two closely related agendas: proving and improving” (Mac Gregor, as quoted in Shapiro  & Levine, 1999, p.  152). For the reasons I  have discussed at the beginning of this chapter (see Section 4.1), I believe a qualitative approach is more effective for finding ways to improve an educational program. Nevertheless, a quantitative approach that assesses students’ performance in terms of traditional

96  Impact on Learning Outcomes success metrics is important to prove to administrators and policy makers that a program “works.” This is particularly true of public institutions such as BCC, whose low graduation and retention rates are used as a political weapon to curtail funding and undermine open admissions. Given the politics of assessment, it was clear to me right from the inception that if the mother tongue–based learning community link was to grow beyond a local boutique program, I had to have the numbers to prove that it “worked” and that providing this sort of proof entailed comparing “how participants perform academically compared to non-participants” (Shapiro & Levine, 1999, p. 169) in terms of traditional success indicators. In the following sections, I compare the performance of participants and nonparticipants in the learning community in terms of the following metrics: progress through the developmental English sequence, credit accumulation, average GPA, retention, and current enrollment status. Participants, labeled as “Learning Community” in the tables, were defined as students who took either ESL 03 or ENG 09 in the learning community; nonparticipants, labeled as “Stand-alone Courses,” were defined as students who took either of these classes as a stand-alone course at a time when it was also offered in the learning community. For example, ESL 03 was linked to Spanish in the fall of 2013; the academic performance of the students in this linked course pair was compared to the academic performance of the students who took ESL 03 as a standalone course that semester. The tables present the average performance in all the classes that were offered in the learning community and as standalone courses from the fall of 2013 to the spring of 2016 (the time during which the program ran). A t-test was included to ascertain whether or not performance differentials between the two cohorts were statistically significant. Given the limitations of this quantitative study (see Sections 4.1 and 4.4.f), statistical significance should not be intended to mean that the findings are universally generalizable but, rather, that a value differential between the two cohorts is substantial enough to suggest that a possible correlation between participation in the program and the learning outcome being measured should be further explored. b.  Progress through the English sequence Table 4.1 compares pass rates of the English levels that were offered in the learning community (which will be referred to as “target class”) from Table 4.1  Target Class Pass Rates

All students

Learning Community

Stand-Alone Courses

t-test

82%, n = 73

72%, n = 593

1.85*

* indicates statistical significance of p < .05.

Impact on Learning Outcomes 97 Table 4.2  Percentage of Students Who Enrolled in First-Year Composition

All students

Learning Community

Stand-Alone Courses

t-test

71%, n = 73

57%, n = 591

2.38**

** indicates statistical significance of p < .01.

Table 4.3  Number of Semesters to First-Year Composition

All students

Learning Community

Stand-Alone Courses

t-test

0.87, n = 52

0.82, n = 342

0.38

the fall of 2013 to the spring of 2016. Pass rates were higher in the learning community (83% vs. 72% in stand-alone courses), and this difference is statistically significant. Table 4.2 shows the percentage of students who enrolled in First-Year Composition, the first credit-bearing course in the English sequence. The ability to register for this course is a crucial step in students’ academic careers because it shows that they were able to complete their developmental English requirements; also, First-Year Composition is a co-requisite or prerequisite for many other credit-bearing courses. Students in the learning community were more likely to enroll in First-Year Composition than were nonparticipants (71% vs. 57%), and this difference is statistically significant. Table 4.3 shows the number of semesters it took students to get from the target class to First-Year Composition, which indicates the amount of time they took to complete the developmental English sequence and whether they enrolled in a credit-bearing English course. Both ESL 03 and ENG 09 students took a little less time to complete the sequence in the learning community than in stand-alone classes. This difference is not statistically significant. c.  Credit Accumulation Table 4.4, 4.5, and 4.6 show, respectively, the average credit accumulation during the semester in which students took the learning community (target semester) and for the following two semesters (target + 1 and target + 2). During the target semester, credit accumulation was much higher in the learning community (4.02 vs. 1.92), and this difference was found to be statistically significant. The following two semesters, this difference in credit accumulation became increasingly smaller and statistically insignificant. Participants in the learning community actually accumulated fewer credits than nonparticipants in the target + 2 semester.

98  Impact on Learning Outcomes Table 4.4 Average Credit Accumulation While Enrolled in the Learning Community (target semester)

All students

Learning Community

Stand-Alone Courses

t-test

4.08, n = 73

2.58, n = 593

5.80***

*** indicates statistical significance of p < .001.

Table 4.5  Average Credit Accumulation the Semester after Completing the Learning Community (target + 1)

All students

Learning Community

Stand-Alone Courses

t-test

4.94, n = 65

4.93, n = 496

0.03

Table 4.6 Average Credit Accumulation the Second Semester after Completing the Learning Community (target + 2)

All students

Learning Community

Stand-Alone Courses

t-test

6.64, n = 59

7.05, n = 415

–0.73

d. GPA Table 4.7, 4.8, and 4.9 show, respectively, the average GPAs during the semester in which students took the learning community and for the following two semesters (target + 1 and target + 2). Individual GPAs are calculated by multiplying the numeric grade value a student received for each course he or she took by the number of credits each course was worth and dividing this number by the total number of credits taken. During the target semester, average GPAs were much higher in the learning community (2.94 vs. 1.8), and this difference is statistically significant. This difference became increasingly smaller over the next two semesters, losing its statistical significance.

Average GPA While Enrolled in the Learning Community (target Table 4.7  semester)

All students

Learning Community

Stand-Alone Courses

t-test

2.94, n = 73

1.80, n = 593

7.61***

*** indicates statistical significance of p < .001.

Impact on Learning Outcomes 99 Table 4.8 Average GPA the Semester after Completing the Learning Community (target + 1)

All students

Learning Community

Stand-Alone Courses

t-test

2.16, n = 65

2.05, n = 496

0.69

Average GPA the Second Semester after Completing the Learning Table 4.9  Community (target + 2)

All students

Learning Community

Stand-Alone Courses

t-test

2.18, n = 59

2.13, n = 415

0.32

e.  Retention and Current Enrollment Status Table 4.10 looks at the percentage of students who were retained for two consecutive semesters after being enrolled in the learning community or taking as a stand-alone course the same English course level that was offered in the learning community. Participants in the learning community were more likely to be retained (77% vs. 63%); this difference is statistically significant. Tables 4.11 and 4.12 compare the current enrollment status of all the students who have been enrolled in the learning community from the fall of 2013 to the spring of 2016 to the current enrollment status of students who did not. Participants in the learning community are slightly more likely to have graduated than students who took it as a stand-alone class Table 4.10  One-Year Retention Rates

All students

Learning Community

Stand-Alone Courses

t-test

77%, n = 73

63%, n = 592

2.36**

** indicates statistical significance of p < .01.

Table 4.11  Current Enrollment Status: Graduated

All students

Learning Community

Stand-Alone Courses

t-test

22%, n = 73

19%, n = 593

0.58

Table 4.12  Current Enrollment Status: Still Enrolled

All students

Learning Community

Stand-Alone Courses

t-test

0.32, n = 73

0.24, n = 593

1.41

100  Impact on Learning Outcomes (22% vs. 19%), but this difference is not statistically significant. Participants are also more likely to be still enrolled at BCC (32% vs. 24%), but this difference is not significant. f. Discussion This comparative analysis of quantitative academic success indicators shows that, in general, students who were enrolled in the learning community performed better than did students who took the same developmental English class as a stand-alone course the same semester. Differences were statistically significant in terms of progress through remediation as measured by target class pass rates and percentage of students who were able to enroll in credit-bearing English courses. Simply put, students who were enrolled in the learning community were more likely to pass the linked English course, to complete the developmental English sequence and to enroll in credit-bearing English courses, which is a requisite or corequisite for many other credit-bearing courses. Statistically significant differences were also found in terms of credit accumulation and average GPAs during the semester students were enrolled in the learning community, but they wore off in the consecutive two semesters. The differential in credit accumulation was largely attributable to the impact the Spanish class had on students’ ability to earn three college credits at a point in their careers at which their course options were largely restricted to developmental courses. Similarly, higher GPAs in the learning community were primarily due to the fact that students were able to earn three college credits in a class that students took in their mother tongue, where their academic performance was not hindered by the limitations of their English proficiency. Over the two semesters that followed students’ enrollment in the learning community, the mathematical impact that the Spanish class had on these indicators waned, but during the interviews, several students mentioned that the ability to take a class in their mother tongue had an impact on their self-esteem and their ability to establish a support system among peers that carried into subsequent semesters (see Sections 4.5.a and 4.5.c). This support system combined with a boosted self-esteem could have a lot to do with the higher retention and graduation rates that were found among the students in the learning community. Because students were not randomly assigned to the learning community and to the stand-alone groups, and because no attempt was made to control for the myriad of variables that determine educational outcomes, it is impossible to say that the higher level of performance in the learning community can be attributed exclusively to the pedagogical approach discussed in this book. It could be, for instance, that the students who voluntarily chose to enroll in the learning community did so because they were more motivated, or that they began the program with a stronger command

Impact on Learning Outcomes 101 of English and academic literacy. Similarly, students in the two cohorts were taught by different instructors who could have been more or less effective at meeting their students’ learning needs for reasons that are not related to the pedagogical approach that I discuss in this book. Nevertheless, the substantial differential in academic performance found in this case study is consistent with meta-analyses of larger studies that have shown positive correlations between first language academic literacy development and the ability to succeed in a second language (see Section 2.4.d). This consistency indicates that the quantitative findings of this case study are very promising, as do the qualitative data in the following sections.

5.  Qualitative Findings: Emerging Themes In making sense of the qualitative data collected through my observations and interviews I drew on the recommendations of grounded theory analysis (Charmaz, 2002, 2006; Saldana, 2013). Founded by Glaser and Strauss (1967), grounded theory is defined by Charmaz as “flexible strategies for focusing and expediting qualitative data collection and analysis” by providing “a set of inductive steps that successively lead the researcher from starting concrete realities to rendering a conceptual understanding of them” (2002, p. 675). The strategies include “simultaneous data collection and analysis, pursuing of emergent themes through early data analysis, discovery of basic social processes within the data, inductive construction of abstract categories that explain and synthesize these processes” (Chamaz, 2002, p. 677). These abstract categories are sometimes referred to as codes, or “a word or short phrase that symbolically assigns a summative, salient, capturing, and or evocative attribute for a portion of language-based or visual data” (Saldana, 2013, p. 3). Metaphorically, Charmaz refers to coding as the process that “generates the bones of your analysis” (2006, p. 45). The word coding connotes a mechanical process to my ear, something that can be carried out by a machine through an algorithm, or a hermeneutics that assumes that data collected through interpersonal interaction can be analyzed objectively through the application of the right set of conceptual categories. As I  looked at my data over and over again, I was aware that my subjectivity influenced my collection and interpretation of my data and that therefore whatever meaning I  extrapolated from my notes and the interviews would inevitably be the result of my personal interaction with these texts. For this reason, I  prefer to refer to the conceptual categories that came to me through the recursive process of collecting, reading, thinking, talking, and writing about my data as emerging themes, or theoretically relevant patterns of meanings that come out of my sustained, in-depth personal interaction with the text that was created through my data collection process. These patterns are complex and overlapping rather than clear-cut. For the sake of clarity and readability, I have broken them down into separate sections, but they

102  Impact on Learning Outcomes are better understood as interconnected thematic categories rather than tight, conceptual compartments. The themes I am presenting in the rest of this chapter are the following: a shared mother tongue as a safe space, the mother tongue/translanguaging engagement with academic discourse and self-esteem, translanguaging as a frame of reference, and bidirectional learning. a.  A Shared Mother Tongue as a Safe Space You felt comfortable talking because you knew next to you there was somebody who was of the same level, therefore you knew that you could always ask questions. —Juana

One of the themes that kept emerging in the interviews was the idea that the mother tongue helped the creation of a safe space that made it easier for students to succeed academically. Students often referred to this idea with the concept of “being comfortable.” Part of this comfort came from the fact that all the students had Spanish as their mother tongue, so they felt like they were “all at the same level” because there were no native English speakers in the learning community. Throughout our conversations, several students expressed a sense of inadequacy while engaging with academic discourse with native English speakers, especially when they felt that ESL students were a small minority in the classroom. This sense of inadequacy was rooted in assumptions that might not necessarily be true, such as the idea that first-language English speakers understand everything the professor says and that they are invariably more advanced learners. For example, Monica explained to me that she found it difficult to create a support system outside of the learning community because she felt her English skills were inferior as a second language speaker: I tried to make friends in the other classes, but not everybody is at the same level. Maybe it’s because I don’t speak English as well as they do. Sometimes it’s still difficult for me to communicate in English, because sometimes I  forget some of the words. Sometimes I  listen to the professor and I’m like “oh my God, what is she saying?” But I’m afraid to ask the other students because I’m sure they understand everything and they’d be thinking “oh, why are you such a dummy?” I asked Monica if she could elaborate on the idea of being or not being “at the same level,” because it was a notion that kept coming up over and over again in the interviews and it was something I had trouble understanding. My experience as an educator was that native English speakers are not necessarily “higher level students” and that they don’t automatically understand everything I say by virtue of having English as their first language. Monica,

Impact on Learning Outcomes 103 however, explained to me that according to her, native speakers “are at the same level of the professor, so they understand every word,” whereas, she, as a second language speaker, encounters “words that might be new for [her] and [she] might be struggling to understand what they mean.” Sadly, this sense of linguistic inferiority strips students of their right to speech, wraps them in an invisibility cloak, isolates them from their classmates, and short-circuits their ability to participate in academic discourse. Monica, who, in my class, came across as self-confident and determined, told me that outside of the learning community, she feels scared when she asks questions because she feels like she is “the only one who doesn’t understand, and that’s awkward.” Other students have said to me that they often remain silent when they need clarification and in situations when they have something to contribute. “Sometimes I want to say something,” Isis shared with me, “but I don’t know if I can say it correctly so I don’t say anything.” Rosemond reported a similar experience in her economics class: “All the students in my economics class are native English speakers so I don’t feel free to speak because I think they’re going to laugh. I have a lot of ideas, but I don’t feel comfortable speaking because maybe the professor won’t understand me.” When students first brought to my attention the specter of linguistic shaming at BCC, I  was very surprised and took their accounts with a grain of salt, given that nothing of the sort had ever happened in any of the classes I taught, including the first-year composition courses in which ESL students are often a minority. As more and more similar students shared similar stories and as I developed a deeper connection with my learners, their stories became harder to doubt. Isis mentioned that she was laughed at in the credit-bearing English composition class she took the semester after completing the program: “I was discussing some topics with the professor, and one of my classmates helped me because of my pronunciation wasn’t clear. Another person laughed, and the professor didn’t say anything. This happened to other students too.” For Monica, it is not just overt ridicule, but “it is sometimes the body language” or “the look on their face and the way they reply when you ask for help, like they just say something to get rid of you” that makes her feel sneered at when trying to connect with native English speakers. While none of the students reported being laughed at by their instructors because of their English, they did express a sense of unease about interacting with them due to a fear of not being understood when speaking in their second language and the feeling that outside of the learning communities, professors don’t really care if they understand them or not. For Clare, professors in stand-alone courses expect you to understand them. If you don’t, it’s your problem. In your other classes, such as health or math, your professors don’t understand that you have difficulties with language. The other professors only focus on what you need to learn about the subject.

104  Impact on Learning Outcomes As a result, she doesn’t feel comfortable asking for help. For Rosemond, it’s her professors’ body language that silences her when she would like to participate: “Sometimes the professors have this look on their face that says ‘what on earth are you trying to tell me?’ ” The repercussions of the fear of being linguistically shamed by their classmates and not understood by their professors should not be underestimated, as they have a silencing effect that is most detrimental for not only learning outcomes, in terms of language, literacy, and subjectcontent acquisition but also self-esteem. If students don’t feel safe asking questions that can help them grapple with new knowledge, they can fall behind and be more likely to fail and blame themselves; if they don’t feel safe sharing with the rest of the class the knowledge they possess for fear of ridicule and embarrassment, they will be more likely to feel that their knowledge has no value and that they are not “at the same level” as everybody else. These moments of silence that could have been instances of active participation are not only missed opportunities to develop new language and literacy skills but also negative interpersonal experiences that leave students with a sense of inadequacy. Rosemond put it this way: “Unless we know every word we need to say, people are not going to understand us, so we just keep quiet and feel stupid.” This sense of comfort and safety that came from learning with students who shared the same mother tongue made it easier for students to bond and build a multifaceted support system that helped them deal with the challenges they faced throughout the learning process. One facet of the support system took the form of spontaneous peer mentoring. Students felt comfortable asking each other questions and helping each other whenever they didn’t understand something. Juana described the process with the following vignette: You felt comfortable talking because you knew next to you there was somebody who was of the same level, therefore you knew that you could always ask questions. “Hey this is going to be on the test. Let’s look at it together.” Sometimes I  would say “Pedro, I  understand this,” or he would say to me, “I need information on something.” Then we would message each other, and that made things a lot less stressful, because classes were difficult. We were able to help each other so much because we spoke the same language. The support system also had a practical component that helped students stay on the top of their academic work while juggling multiple responsibilities. Juana recalled that it was very helpful for her to know that if she had to be absent for work or family reasons she felt safe checking in with her classmates to catch up. “I could always go up to somebody and ask these sorts of questions: ‘Did you go to class? What happened? What did they do? What do they talk about?’ That’s because we were always

Impact on Learning Outcomes 105 connected.” In contrast, she felt like outside the learning community students are isolated and have to fend for themselves: In the other courses, students just sit in class, and when class is over they simply pick up their books and leave. This means you have to go to class even if you’re so sick that you feel like you’re dying because no one is going to help you make up the work you missed if you were absent. According to her, part of the isolation she felt was due to her status as an LMS: “Sometimes you try to look for someone to be friends with, but you can tell that they don’t want to have anything to do with you. I think it’s because we can’t communicate with them at the same level, so they try to keep to themselves.” Last but not least, the support system had an emotional component which made students feel like they were not alone in the struggle to achieve academic success in the second language, often while dealing with a multitude of social and economic challenges. For example, at the time she was enrolled in the learning community, Monica was raising a small child as a single mother and facing the threat of eviction. Similar to Juana, she felt that it made a big difference to know that if she couldn’t come to class she could “just get in touch with one of [her] friends and they would tell [her] what was going on.” However, she also believes that having made friends in the learning community was also very important to find the strength not to give up while dealing with so many challenges: “You keep going to class because you know that there are people there that you can count on. They can’t help you with money problems, but they can help you with a lot of stuff. That will help you get where you want to be.” By no means do I wish to suggest that the stories my students shared with me about the discomfort they feel around native English speakers should be taken as a call for the need to keep learners separate from each other on the basis of their first language. In order to be fully integrated and successful in a linguistic market where the dominance of their second language is so deeply entrenched, they will have to find ways to get over the sense of inferiority they feel toward its native speakers. Not only that, but creating a situation of linguistic apartheid where people “stick to their kind” runs counter to a pluralistic vision of society where diversity is shared, celebrated, and capitalized on for social cohesion rather than being used as a reason for keeping people apart. Nevertheless, given the myriad of hurdles recently immigrated LMSs often have to deal with in their first year in college (challenges related to poverty, family reconfigurations, acculturation, language acquisition), I  would argue that there can be great pedagogical value in the safe space that comes with taking a couple of linked courses with students who share the same mother tongue at the very beginning of their college career.

106  Impact on Learning Outcomes b. The Mother Tongue, Engagement with Academic Discourse, and Self-Esteem in the Spanish Class The Spanish class was like sitting on the patio of your home: you knew no one was going to make fun of you. —Pedro

During the interviews, students often contrasted the moments of silence and the feeling of inadequacy they experienced when taking stand-alone courses to the safety they felt in the learning community. This helped them build self-esteem as learners through active participation in academic discourse. Marcelo gave quite a moving account of what the learning community meant to him as a first-year LMS dealing with the challenges acculturating to a new country, a new language, and college expectations: Thank God I had the opportunity to do my first semester in college in a learning community. It was so helpful because not only was I going to college for the first time, but I was also going to college in another country where they speak a language I didn’t know well. Knowing that I was with students who were more or less at the same level and the fact that we were taking at least two or three classes together helped me a lot with my self-esteem. It made me feel more secure about my goals and my abilities. Not every student I interviewed was satisfied with the Spanish class: Jamie thought it was a “waste of time” because he “already knew Spanish” and “didn’t learn anything,” other than “a few Spanish words that are hardly ever used.” Isis and Rosemund were less critical but thought they should have been given the opportunity to participate more in class, and they wished the Spanish instructor had made more connections with the work that was being done in the ESL class. Nevertheless, several of the students I interviewed found a lot of value in a class that, by making it possible for them to participate in academic discourse in their mother tongue, fully restored their right to speech as college students in the United States. Marcelo remembered feeling that he could “participate without feeling discriminated” and that he could express himself “in a totally different way, in a free way, without having to think before saying something.” Other students mentioned that taking the Spanish class helped them believe in themselves as learners by giving them the opportunity to fully participate in academic discourse. Pedro compared the academic discourse of the Spanish class to the comfort of a patio conversation: “it was like sitting on the patio of your home, and when you said something, you knew that nobody was going to make fun of you.” Estrella found value in being able to “talk in detail about anything [she]

Impact on Learning Outcomes 107 wanted” and recalled a learning situation where “everybody participated because everybody had the same first language, so everybody felt confident discussing any topic.” Monica began to describe a sense of empowerment she felt in the Spanish class: I knew the language, so I didn’t have to struggle. Because you know Spanish, you understand everything. With English it’s different because sometimes you don’t understand, and even when you understand, you’re scared because you don’t know if you’re right. In the Spanish class I didn’t feel scared because if I had a question, I would just ask. Then she also mentioned becoming more self-confident as a result of being given the chance to participate in academic discourse in her mother tongue, and the fact that this confidence carried over to the courses she took outside learning community: I don’t know if everybody feels the same way I do, but I used to be afraid to speak in public. Taking the Spanish class with friends, who are also Spanish, made me feel more confident and that gave me the confidence to speak in front of others even in the other classes. I feel like in the Spanish class I was able to practice skills that I needed to participate in my other classes. Clare attributed the self-esteem boost she got in the Spanish class by making a connection between her mother tongue and her cultural heritage: “The Spanish class was important for self-esteem and self-confidence because it acknowledges your cultural and national heritage. This gives value to my identity as a Latina, and can help you move forward.” c. Translanguaging, Engagement with Academic Discourse, and Self-Esteem in the ESL Class Sometimes you don’t know how to say something in English and you just have to say something in Spanish to figure it out. —Jaimie

According to the students, being able to use their mother tongue in the ESL class was also important for their ability to participate in academic discourse and their self-confidence. The role Spanish played in the ESL class was quite different, of course, given that English was the default language for the production of academic discourse, but in line with the translingual approach I  discussed in Section  2.4.d., students did have the option to resort to their mother tongue whenever they were unable

108  Impact on Learning Outcomes to express themselves in their second language or if they had trouble understanding something using exclusively this medium. Students never used the word translanguaging in the interviews, but they all brought up the idea that being able to use their mother tongue as a resource was crucial for the success of their second language and literacy acquisition process. Even Jaimie, who thought that the Spanish class “was a waste of time” and that the “learning community would’ve been better without the Spanish class because [he] would’ve learned more English,” found that “it was a good idea” to use his mother tongue in the ESL class as a resource “because sometimes you don’t know something in English and you have to say something in Spanish to figure out how to say it.” Even Monica, who had asked her father not to put her in a bilingual high school after she moved to the United States because she “already knew Spanish” and because she “always liked the challenge of learning through English,” thought “it was very helpful” to use her mother tongue in the ESL class when necessary because “that way I didn’t have to wait until class was finished to Google a word I didn’t understand, and maybe forget the word because I had something else on my mind.” Students never used the phrase “right to speech” either in the interviews, but the common denominator of what they had to say about why they thought that translanguaging helped them was that being allowed to use Spanish when their English just wasn’t enough, allowed them to fully participate in the academic discourse we were creating in the ESL class. Clare thought that being able to use her mother tongue in my class was important because “sometimes when you don’t understand the meaning of the word, you just cannot continue with learning.” Viola illustrated this idea by telling the story of what happened when she took the CATW and she had access only to an English–English dictionary: When I took the CATW, I failed the test because I did not understand some words that are important for making connections between ideas. When I looked up these words in the dictionary, the meaning was explained in English, not Spanish, and that confused me even more, so I got lost when I was writing the essay. If I had been able to find the meaning of those words in my language, maybe I would have had [a] better score. Not knowing a word or two can also prevent students from asking a question or sharing an idea with the rest of the class. Viola explained this to me by comparing the way she feels in the classes she takes outside the learning community to the way she feels in my class: I’m taking both psychology and sociology. They’re both very nice professors, but I’m afraid so I  stop myself from asking questions. With you, however, I can ask anytime in English or Spanish if there

Impact on Learning Outcomes 109 is something I don’t understand. With the other professors I can’t do that, so I don’t have the same confidence. For Clare, even being able to use a word or two in her mother tongue can make the difference between silence and engagement when grappling with academic discourse in a second language: “At a certain moment, in a certain situation, a student could give up for just a word, but with a word or two in Spanish, the student can move on, say what he has to say and not get lost.” Juana spoke very passionately about how being able to use Spanish made her feel seen in her full potential as a gifted student and made it possible for her to tap into her rich cultural capital: The English professor was able to realize that we are able to develop any kind of idea and that the only thing that prevents us from expressing ourselves the way we would like to was language. It wasn’t that we didn’t understand, or that we lacked knowledge. We just didn’t have all the necessary vocabulary to say what we want to say. And that is so frustrating! There are people here that have come from their countries with a huge amount of skills and knowledge. Being able to use our language to express that knowledge was an incredible experience. We were comfortable, we could talk, we had all the words, so the professor could see that we know how to analyze something. Viola described a similar relationship between being allowed to use her mother tongue as a resource, being seen, and being able to participate in academic discourse with her cultural wealth: In the ESL class things were different because everybody spoke Spanish and if we didn’t know how to say something in English we could say it in Spanish and then continue with the conversation in English. Most of the time, however, in the other classes I feel frustrated when we are discussing a topic, such as obesity. I have knowledge about it, but I cannot express it because of the language. . . . Sometimes I’m afraid the professor thinks I’m stupid because he asks simple questions and I’m not able to express my answer. For me that is so frustrating! When Clare had trouble with a writing assignment, “not because [she] didn’t understand what [she] had to write, but because [she] didn’t know how to write it in English,” she went to the writing center and looked for a tutor who spoke Spanish, and that’s why her essay—which she wrote in English—improved. Viola had a similar experience when practicing for the CATW: I looked for a tutor who spoke both languages. This improved my writing. The tutor explained things to me in English, but when

110  Impact on Learning Outcomes something wasn’t clear, he would go to Spanish and then what I didn’t understand became very easy. Students rejected the idea that having the option to use Spanish in the ESL class might have made things a little “too easy” by not forcing them to practice their English enough. For example, when I asked Isis whether she thought that I encouraged students “to be lazy” by giving them permission to use their mother tongue in my class she disagreed “because sometimes you don’t understand something well and if you translate it in your language, then you can understand it in English better because you know exactly what those words mean.” And like Clare, she believes that being able to use her mother tongue when she is unable to express a thought in English allowed her to participate and learn more: In the other classes sometimes I want to say something, but I don’t know if I can say correctly so I don’t say anything. If I can use Spanish, however, then I can say what I want to say and the professor can help me say it in English. Monica felt like she had plenty of opportunities to practice her English in my class, and “in fact, because we used Spanish sometimes, we did understand everything.” She also added that being able to say something in Spanish when necessary created opportunities for English learning: When we didn’t know how to say something in English and we said it in Spanish, we would ask you, and then we would be like “oh, this is how you say it,” and that way we would learn more vocabulary. Clare used a beautiful metaphor to describe comparing her mother tongue to a helping hand that plays a vital role in supporting students like her through their second language acquisition process: When you learn a new language, you are a beginner. It’s like when you start walking. If you don’t have anybody holding your hand you are going to fall on the floor and you’re not going to want to walk anymore. But if somebody holds your hand when you take the first steps you’re going to want to keep on walking. d. Translanguaging as a Frame of Reference for Vocabulary Building and Grammatical Awareness I don’t like to guess: When I write a word I want to know what it means in my language. —Juana

Impact on Learning Outcomes 111 One of the themes that kept emerging in students’ discussion of how translanguaging in the ESL course affected their learning experience was the idea that using Spanish when necessary helped them understand better how English works. The mother tongue provided a frame of reference for students to make sense of new lexical, morphological, and syntactical structures they encountered in their second language. In the previous section, Viola illustrated the idea that sometimes she just needs her mother tongue to understand new vocabulary with the story of what happened when she took the CATW exam and she only had access to an English–English dictionary. She also explained to me that there are times when she feels “more comfortable when the professor gives [her] the meaning of a word in Spanish.” As an example, she mentioned her struggle to understand the meaning of the expression “to take something for granted,” which she just wasn’t able to figure out based on the context: I didn’t know the meaning of ‘take for granted.’ I heard that many times, and songs but didn’t know what it meant. Now I know the meaning of the phrase and I can use it because professor translated from English to Spanish. It’s the best thing a professor can do to improve her English. This meaning became crystal clear to her in the ESL class when we juxtaposed this phrase to the Spanish equivalent dar algo por hecho, which would literally translate as something like “to give something as done.” Rosemond mentioned that using Spanish as a frame of reference was very helpful to help her learn how to use coordinating and subordinating conjunctions, which, if used incorrectly, can make the meaning of a sentence or passage fall apart. Because there is a one-to-one correlation between most English and Spanish conjunctions, I provided students with a bilingual list and asked them to practice their use in English sentences. Rosemond thought that “it was a very good idea to give us the translation of those [conjunctions] because sometimes we don’t use those words because we don’t understand what they mean.” Similarly, Juana declared that when she writes an essay she doesn’t like to take chances with the vocabulary she’s using: “I don’t like to guess; when I write a word I want to know what it means in my language.” This is not to say that new vocabulary should only be learned through direct translation from the mother tongue; on the contrary, unconscious acquisition through exposure to the target language can be a very effective way for learning new lexical structures, and this is why the ESL course was designed to immerse students in a rich English-based academic discursive community where they had plenty of opportunities to acquire new structures by reading, writing, listening, and speaking in their second language. Nevertheless, in certain cases, helping students

112  Impact on Learning Outcomes find direct or similar equivalents between words, phrases, and idiomatic expressions in their second language and in their mother tongue can facilitate the vocabulary building process. In terms of helping students understand grammar, in the case of Spanish and other Romance languages, the mother tongue can provide a frame of reference by helping students see correlations between morphosyntactic features of their first and second language. In the ESL class we often used a contrastive approach while reviewing the rules that govern standard English tense construction. For example, we juxtaposed verb conjugation patterns in Spanish and English. As a result, students were able to see more clearly how roots and stems operate in both languages and to make better sense of the function of verb endings, such as –s at the end of a third-person singular in the simple present or –ed in the simple present and past participle. In some cases, they were able to establish correlations between these endings, such as –ed, in English, and either –ado, – edo, or –ido, in Spanish. These correlations provided students with a simple mnemonic anchored in their mother tongue to figure out whether or not a verb in English takes –ed at the end. Similarly, being aware that the Spanish word que should be translated into English as either which, that, who, whom, or what according to its grammatical function in the sentence helped students avoid simple mechanical errors that can impede comprehension for a monolingual English speaker, such as “the book what I read yesterday was very interesting.” Juana thought it was “marvelous” that her ESL professor “had at least some knowledge of the students’ first language” so that he could help them make these sorts of connections with her mother tongue: The professor was able to see what the problem was when we translate Spanish and therefore he was able to help us. For example, we, as Hispanics, use verbs that tell us what the subject is. This is why when we write in English we often forget the subject. In his class, I was able to understand why we tend to forget to put the subject. After I understood that things are different in English it became easier to remember. e. Translanguaging as a Frame of Reference for Navigating Clashing Rhetorical Expectations The ESL professor said to me ‘your essay is fantastic!’ but that was because I was able to apply what I had learned from the Spanish professor. —Juana

In addition to helping students master mechanical aspects of second language acquisition, the mother tongue can provide a frame of reference to

Impact on Learning Outcomes 113 help them make sense of conflicting rhetorical expectations around academic discourse when they write in a second language. As we have seen, what is considered “effective academic writing” can vary dramatically from culture to culture (see Section 3.9). Not only that: Even within the same culture, students can experience significant discrepancies between home and school literacy practices, especially across class divides. These discrepancies can create a sense of confusion and alienation among nonmainstream students, even without taking language differences into account. In keeping with the recommendations of culturally responsive pedagogy, conflicting rhetorical expectations around discourse should be addressed within an additive learning situation that does not pressure students to abandon the rhetorical resources they possess but, rather, builds on them. In other words, rather than telling students that the way they were taught to speak, read, write, think, and use knowledge persuasively is wrong, they should examine how these ways vary across language, dialects, cultures, and subcultures. Not only is this sort of examination important for students to make sense of academic discourse, but it is also important for validating their community cultural wealth and their primary identities and for preserving their ability to use language effectively across the different sociolinguistic domains they need to navigate as upwardly mobile, multicultural, and often transnational citizens. It is in this sense that rather than supplanting students’ primary rhetorical repertoire with another, they need to be helped to develop “rhetorical dexterity” (Carter, 2008) so that they can navigate diverging and conflicting expectations agentively. In the case of Dominican students, the few available studies point to the fact that in their country of origin, academic writing is used primarily as a tool to assess students’ ability to repeat information that students acquired from an undisputed source of knowledge. Rhetorical expectations, such as the articulation of a thesis statement at the beginning of an essay and the support of a thesis through a selective and critical use of multiple sources, are not only not taught but are actually frowned upon. Keeping this in mind makes it easier to understand the students’ difficulties with writing in a second language are bigger than the difficulties they experience with their second language itself. Several students told stories about how baffled they were the first time they were asked to write an essay at BCC and how this bafflement was due not only to the limited English proficiency but also with the nature of the task at hand. For example, Esmeralda recalled the following: When I first came to the States, I didn’t know English. The first time I came to BCC they told me that I had to do an essay. I didn’t even know what an essay was. Fortunately, the teacher knew Spanish and told me that an essay is an ‘ensayo,’ but I told her that I didn’t even know how to do an ‘ensayo.’

114  Impact on Learning Outcomes In a similar narrative, another student made the point for Dominican students, understanding what is expected from them when they are told to “write an essay” entails much more than translating one word from English to Spanish: In the United States, the professors usually give essays every week. In the Dominican Republic they don’t do that. This reminds me of my first day of class. The professor gave us an essay about discrimination. I was confused because I didn’t know what is an essay. I asked to my teacher, and she told me that an essay is the same as what Spanish people call ‘ensayo.’ However, I still didn’t know how to write an essay because in the Dominican Republic teachers don’t use essays. The idea that “teachers don’t use essays” in the Dominican Republic, of course, needs to be qualified. While many students have shared stories about how much more they are expected to write in the United States, several of them mentioned that occasionally, they did have writing assignments in the Dominican Republic, but they were of a totally different nature: Writing was used primarily as an assessment tool to check students’ ability to repeat information they are expected to study rather than as a way to use information critically to construct an argument. Ruby’s narrative illustrates this point: In the Dominican Republic we didn’t do essays, but we did something similar with a different organization. When teachers gave us a topic, in the introduction we had to explain what we were going to do and what the writing was about. To write the body, we had to find all the information we needed and then make a summary. We could use Google search, copy, and paste. In the conclusion, we described everything we did. It is hardly surprising that Ruby, like many other students, was completely baffled when she was accused of plagiarism at BCC after she did what she had been taught to do to write academically in high school: My first essay was a disaster. I  didn’t know what an essay is, so I copied and pasted the information I found exactly like it was on the internet. When the teacher saw what I did, she gave me a zero. At that moment, I tried to explain to her that I didn’t know how to do an essay. Then she gave the opportunity to do it again. She explained to me how to do it, and told me that to copy information is called plagiarism, and that it is penalized. Fortunately, the teacher in question understood where the student was coming from and gave her the opportunity to redo the assignment after

Impact on Learning Outcomes 115 going over discursive conventions that clashed with what the student had learned while developing academic literacy in her mother tongue. Other students explained that rhetorical elements that are considered fundamental for a college essay in the United States were simply not covered in the Spanish classes they took in high school in the Dominican Republic. Several mentioned that they did not have to use a “thesis statement” and that expressing a personal opinion about a topic at the beginning of an essay was not acceptable. Esmeralda explained: If I was to give an essay like the ones my professors want at the BCC to one of my teachers in the Dominican Republic, they would be very surprised about my work, give me a bad grade and tell me that they don’t care about what I think. Isis made a similar point by stating that “we didn’t have to show our critical thinking when we did research. We just had to put information like we found it.” And again, her narrative, like many others, returns to a discursive clash around the issue of plagiarism. “Sometimes we took little pieces from the sources, and it was not a big problem, like if we did that at BCC.” Juana mentioned that it was extremely helpful for her to discuss rhetorical expectations of a U.S. college essay in her mother tongue in the Spanish class because only then was she fully able to understand what it was that their professors at BCC were looking for in an essay: What is really helpful for Hispanic students is to discuss the expectations of an essay in the Spanish class, to be told in their own language how to elaborate because when you receive instructions in your language, even if you’re going to write in another language, you understand what you need to do. For example, they should explain to us in Spanish what we need to do for the CATW: “what should I focus on? What steps should I follow?” This should explain it to you really well so that when you write your essay in English it’s a lot easier because you know what strategies to follow. Sometimes when they explain these things to you in English, you get lost. To illustrate how useful it was for her to practice U.S. college essays rhetorical expectations in her mother tongue, Juana recalled a time when I praised her for an essay she wrote in English for my class: The ESL professor said to me ‘your essay is fantastic!’ but that was because I  was able to apply what I  had learned from the Spanish professor. She explained to us that each paragraph should develop one idea, and that we should not jump from topic to topic. We didn’t really know what an essay was, but thanks to the Spanish class we

116  Impact on Learning Outcomes were able to see its characteristics, how to give details, how to write ideas that are connected to each other. In particular, she found that the academic literacy development she did in the Spanish class helped her develop rhetorical dexterity by understanding some fundamental differences between the writing she had to do in high school in the Dominican Republic and the writing she had to do at BCC: In the Spanish class I learned how to make a distinction. We know how to do a summary. They taught us that very well in our countries. The problem was that here they told us to do things we had never done before, such as writing about our experience or discussing our opinion. I said to myself “what is this? I have never done this before.” It was very strange, but in the Spanish class we started to understand how it worked and how we have to do things when we write here in college. The Spanish class was very important because it gave us good foundations. f. Bidirectional Learning, Safe Spaces, Self-Esteem, Engagement with Academic Discourse, and Translanguaging When you asked us what something in Spanish meant, after we explained to you, you put it in good English so we learned new words and how to say things correctly. —Rosemund

During the interviews it became clear that the bidirectionality of the learning process played a crucial role in bringing about the learning outcomes of the program. Over and over again, students brought up the idea that I was learning from them as a fundamental reason why they had such a productive experience in the learning community. The sense I  got from these conversations is that bidirectional learning is a theme that cuts across all the other themes that emerged: the fact that I made an effort to put myself in my students’ shoes helped create the safe space they described, promoted engagement with academic discourse and self-esteem, and facilitated the use of a translingual approach. In terms of creating a safe space and promoting self-esteem when using a second language, several students mentioned that witnessing my struggle with Spanish made them feel like it was okay for them to take risks with their English. Jaimie expressed this idea in terms of self-confidence and trust. He mentioned that although he does not trust people easily, he

Impact on Learning Outcomes 117 came to trust me very early on in the learning process because I made the effort to speak his mother tongue: “I feel comfortable with you because you try to speak my language with me.” When I  asked him to elaborate, he made a connection between trustworthiness and the kind of selfconfidence that can be projected when someone is not afraid to make mistakes while using a second language: “You are self-confident, that’s why I think you’re trustworthy. You come across as self-confident because you’re not afraid of making mistakes when you speak my language. You’re not afraid to ask.” It is interesting to see how in the context of this conversation with Jaimie, speaking imperfectly or making mistakes as a second language speaker while interacting with the native speaker is not a sign of stupidity or a lack of knowledge but, rather, a sign of self-confidence and trustworthiness. Of course, my subject position as an English professor making the effort to speak Spanish with my students comes with a lot more social power than the position of recently immigrated Dominican students trying to earn an associate degree while learning English. This power differential probably has a lot to do with whether limited proficiency in a second language is perceived as “self-confidence” or a lack of intelligence. Nevertheless, Jaimie somehow felt inspired and reassured by the fact that their English instructor was willing to make mistakes to improve his knowledge of his mother tongue. I  asked him what he thought when he saw me taking notes in the Spanish class, writing down new words, asking my students what those words meant, and struggling to contribute to class discussions with my limited Spanish. His response was “You showed us how to do things; you showed us how to be confident and to ask questions about words and what things mean. And I thought ‘he’s not going to judge me.’ ” For Clare, watching me go through the process of learning her language helped to build trust and had a positive impact on her self-esteem. Making a connection between language and identity, which other students also made, she explained that seeing her professor make the effort to learn her language feels wonderful because it means he is taking an interest in you. He’s taking interest in something that belongs to you, your language, your culture. That person is saying to you that everything you are is important, therefore you feel confident that that person is going to help you. You don’t have to worry about whether that person understands who you are. In terms of using Spanish as a frame of reference, given my limited knowledge of this language, it was inevitable to do so within the context of a bidirectional approach. Even when I was able to initiate comparisons between English and Spanish mechanical and rhetorical structures, such in the case of tense usage, idiomatic expressions, cognates, false cognates,

118  Impact on Learning Outcomes and diverging expectations around academic discourse, I was never able to do so from the position of an absolute expert but, rather, merely as a teacher/learner seeking to coproduce knowledge with my students. In practical terms, this meant that whatever connection I  made between students’ first and second language, the connection was tentative and subject to my students’ approval. In some cases, especially when the was no consensus, the need to prove or disprove a translingual connection led to mini-research projects, such as looking up words or phrases in the dictionary and online or consulting with the Spanish professor. It was interesting to see how even these mini-research projects took on a collaborative nature that capitalized on our mutual areas of expertise. For instance, students might begin making a translingual connection using English, switch to Spanish, and I, while checking my comprehension, would rearticulate the connection in standard English. When students looked up an English word I wasn’t able to explain to them clearly enough in their second language, they would look it up in a bilingual dictionary, and I  would often help them choose the most appropriate translation. I would then practice using my new Spanish word in a Spanish sentence, which my students would give me feedback on, and then they would go through a similar process in English. If we needed to enlist the Spanish professor’s help in clarifying a doubt we had, I would help them phrase a precise question in English about the doubt we had, and then they would ask the question in the Spanish class, in their mother tongue, sometimes using a word or two in English. While I  obviously believed in the pedagogical value of bidirectional learning and made the point of building my methodology around it, I was always concerned about taking time away from my students’ learning with my attempts to improve my Spanish. Whenever I asked students how to say something in Spanish in the ESL class or asked about clarifications about what had been said in the Spanish class, at the back of my mind was a nagging voice telling me, “You are stealing time from them: you are paid to teach them English, not to learn Spanish from them.” During the interviews, all the students I asked dismissed categorically the idea that they were being shortchanged by the fact I used the ESL class as an opportunity to improve my Spanish. They all pointed out that I was learning Spanish and they were learning English. Isis felt that seeing me struggle with her language was useful mainly because it brought empathy and emotional safety to the learning community: In the Spanish class you looked like us. You didn’t understand some words, but you tried to follow anyway and that’s what happens to us in the English class. It helps us because you felt the same way we do. You looked worried just like we do when we don’t understand something. And that helped us feel more comfortable with you.

Impact on Learning Outcomes 119 Without using the word bidirectional, Rosemond argued that whenever I made the effort to improve my Spanish with my students, the learning process did go both ways: No, you were not wasting our time when you were learning from us. As you were learning, we were learning from you and that was helpful. When you asked us what something in Spanish meant, after we explained to you, you put it in good English so we learned new words and how to say things correctly.

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120  Impact on Learning Outcomes Saldana, J. (2013). The coding manual for qualitative research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Shapiro, N.,  & Levine, J. (1999). Creating learning communities: A  practical (guide?) to winning support, organizing for change, and implementing programs. San Francisco, CA: Wiley. Valenzuela, A. (1999). Subtractive schooling: U.S. Mexican youth and the politics of caring. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Wildsmith-Cromarty, R. (2003). Mutual apprenticeship in the learning and teaching of an additional language. Language and Education, 17(2), 138–154.

V Conclusion

1.  Premises, Questions, and Answers This book began with the promise to offer pedagogical and programmatic strategies for using language minority students’ mother tongue as a resource to promote academic literacy acquisition and academic success through a dominant language which they did not grow up speaking at home. It promised to do so at a time when linguistic diversity is increasing very rapidly in a political climate where xenophobic rhetoric, policy, and interpersonal behavior are social forces that need to be reckoned with by those who believe in education as an instrument of social justice. It planned to deliver on this promise with a case study of a program that sneaked in the mother tongue of Spanish-speaking students at a community college where English is the only medium of instruction, despite the fact that so many language students speak the same “other language” at home and in their primary communities. The overarching question of the case study was very simple: What impact did this program have on student success? In other words, did the strategies discussed help students master English language and academic literacy, and succeed in college? In terms of the metrics that are used by policy makers and administrators to assess the efficacy of educational programs, the answer is a resounding but qualified yes. It is resounding because during the time that the program was offered, the students who took an ESL course level linked to Spanish did much better than those who took the same level as a stand-alone course. Learning community students were much more likely to pass that course level, to complete the developmental English course sequence, and to register in a credit-bearing English class. These differentials indicate that the students who were given the opportunity to use their mother tongue as a resource were more likely to pass the departmental exam for each developmental English level they took since the time they started the learning community, which suggests that they were more likely to acquire sufficient English language and literacy skills to progress with their studies to the point where they could enroll in credit-bearing courses. In terms of college success beyond

122  Conclusion English learning and acquisition, students in the learning community were more likely to be retained, and impact on retention is paramount in college in program assessment (Shapiro & Levine, 1999, p. 166). Learning community students also did better in terms of credit accumulation and average GPA while enrolled in the learning community. This better performance was largely attributable to the Spanish class, which gave them the opportunity to earn three college credits and perform without the limitations of a second language. The impact the Spanish class had on average GPA and credit accumulation waned over time, but according to the students, the impact that it had on their self-esteem and the ability to form a support system did not. These factors might explain the higher levels of retention in the learning community. The reason why these findings need to be qualified is because the case study did not follow the fundamental requirements of experimental research design: students were not randomly assigned to the learning community and stand-alone courses, nor was there any attempt to control for variables. This means that while the numbers show that students performed better in the learning in terms of traditional academic success metrics, it is theoretically possible that these performance differentials were due to reasons that were not related to the pedagogical approach discussed, such as the possibility that students who chose to enroll in the learning community were more motivated or better academically prepared. Consequently, it cannot be claimed that the adoption of this model would automatically produce the same results in other learning contexts, among native speakers of other languages, with different instructors, etc. Nevertheless, these findings do confirm two fundamental facts that have emerged from decades of research on bilingual education: First and second language academic literacy development are complementary, not mutually exclusive; giving LMSs the opportunity to develop their mother tongue in schools helps them succeed through the medium of another language. These facts, as counterintuitive as they may sound, were also confirmed by the students I interviewed who argued quite compellingly, in their own voice, that the English–Spanish link made a big difference in their college trajectories. These voices were not necessarily representative of all the students who have been enrolled in the program, but they were authentic, and they did offer convincing answers to the following questions: How did the program work for these particular students? What themes emerged from these individual experiences? What messages do these themes send teachers of dominant languages, dialects, and literacies committed to social justice? Perhaps the most important message that can be heard in my students’ voices is that the learning community provided students with a safe space where they could engage with academic discourse in their second language without the fear, shame, and sense of inadequacy they often felt as LMSs in the stand-alone classes they took with native English speakers.

Conclusion 123 Students’ mother tongue played a crucial role in the creation of this safe space for several reasons. Because it is a first language that is shared by all the students in the cluster, it made them feel like they “are all at the same level,” which relieved them of a sense of insecurity that often has a silencing effect. Because it was welcomed in the ESL classroom as a complementary resource for self-expression, the mother tongue curbed the silencing effect that comes with being an LMS by allowing students to understand and say things that would be beyond their grasp if they were restricted to their second language. This restoration of the right to speech allows for greater participation and greater intellectual complexity, as students engage with academic discourse in a second language. This greater engagement provided richer opportunities for learning vocabulary, mastering grammatical structures, and building overall fluency. Another message is that the mother tongue is an essential frame of reference for second language and literacy acquisition. As such, the mother tongue not only helped students resolve the sense of confusion around mechanical aspects of their second language, such as false cognates, idiomatic expressions, and suffixes, but it also helped them untangle contradicting expectations around academic discourse. This is very important to keep in mind when giving college writing assignments, especially when dealing with the issue of plagiarism. Last but not least, students’ testimonies confirm that the mother tongue is a primary marker of identity. Welcoming it into the learning process can go very far in making LMSs feel welcome in the classroom and laying the foundations for authentic caring and additive schooling. The message about bidirectional learning is that it played a crucial role in the success of the learning process by further enhancing emotional safety within the learning community, creating additional translingual opportunities for using the mother tongue as a frame of reference, and helping build self-confidence among LMSs. To answer my “burning ethnographic question” that I posed in Section 3.7 (“What happens when a teacher of a dominant code makes the effort to learn his or her students’ first language?”), what happened among the students in my study was that they felt safer taking risks with their second language while engaging with academic discourse because they saw their English professor going through a similar process with their mother tongue. It also happened that as the professor took on the role of a student, his students became experts on their own language and discursive practices. In this capacity, they were put in the position of having to engage with translingual tasks of great complexity: explaining the workings of the mother tongue in their second language. Not only did these tasks create more opportunities for second language and literacy acquisition, but they also blended the boundaries of the teacher/learner binary by leading to pedagogical situations where knowledge was co-constructed. Most important, what happened was that students developed a much more positive identity as

124  Conclusion members of a linguistic minority having to achieve academic success in a second language. The fact that the second language in question is a dominant code institutionally, nationally, and globally made this increased self-esteem all the more important for fostering a sense of possibility in terms of their educational, professional, and personal goals.

2.  Theoretical Implications In terms of language and literacy acquisition, the case study has provided more evidence of the fact that mother tongue and second language development are not mutually exclusive but rather complementary. Put more simply, giving students the opportunity to develop academic literacy skills in their mother tongue in school makes them more likely to learn English and succeed through English. The evidence presented might not be generalizable, but it does confirm decades of research based on larger studies and meta-studies of bilingual education at the grade school level. Because all students enrolled in the program are adults attending college, the case study suggests that using the mother tongue as a resource has a lot of potential for putting academic success within reach of an older student population too. More studies are needed to ascertain whether this potential can lead to statistical correlations between mother tongue– based pedagogical interventions such as the one described in this book and higher retention rates among college students. These studies should be done. These interventions are easy to design, implement, monitor, and very inexpensive. The difference they can make in terms of putting academic success within reach of LMSs is very big. Given how rapidly linguistic diversity is growing in college classrooms, looking for ways to make this difference is a priority. Students’ voices confirmed that what made the mother tongue such a powerful resource for English acquisition and college success was not just using first language, but using it as part and parcel of a pedagogical approach that valued students’ identities and knowledge bases. The tenets of critical, culturally responsive pedagogy have been extremely useful in finding this approach. Interestingly enough, these tenets are also rooted in studies that have focused on grade school students, but the case study suggests that they are fundamental for college students too. Even at the university level, adults need to be immersed in an additive learning situation where their primary languages, discourses, and identities are valued, and their community cultural wealth provides the foundation for the co-construction of a socially meaningful academic discourse. Even among grown-ups, establishing the conditions for authentic caring can determine whether students succeed or fail academically. As with younger learners, there is no easy formula that works in any given context for establishing these conditions. The complexity of human beings and the way they learn does not lend itself to one-size-fits-all pedagogical

Conclusion 125 protocols. The case study does suggest, however, that taking a genuine interest in who students are, their languages, their discourses, and asking with humility to be invited into their cultural universe can go very far in making students feel authentically cared for and in creating a learning climate where they can thrive. Cultivating ethnographic curiosity and openness to learning from the students creates this climate. In terms of translanguaging, the case study has shown ways in which a body of theories that finds expression through a discourse that is quite complex and abstract can be turned into pedagogical strategies that are quite simple and concrete. These strategies were presented as vignettes and thematic patterns that painted a very clear picture of how the students and the instructor used the first and second language in conjunction to facilitate the appropriation of the dominant code and how this appropriation process helped students build self-esteem, resilience, and stay in school. The fact that this picture foregrounded the value of translanguaging as a scaffolding strategy for the appropriation of English, standard English, and academic literacy, rather than the value of translanguaging as a language practice in itself, is no coincidence. Students need to appropriate the dominant code, which is based on a system of signs that might be dynamic, flexible, and bound by borders that are becoming more and more porous, but it does not find expression through the use of more than one language. Students are expected to keep their languages separate when they take exams, write resumes, go for job interviews, and seek to move up socioeconomic ladders. This is not going to change, no matter how many more papers we publish claiming that “translanguaging is the norm.” What can change is the misconception that marginalized codes need to be eradicated in order for students to be to master the dominant code. Fighting this misconception with accessible, practical theories and empirical evidence showing that for LMSs, first and second language academic literacy development complement each other will do more to promote linguistic diversity in education than seeking to disrupt “the ideology of normative monolingualism” (Fuller, 2003, p. 10).

3. Programmatic Implications and Suggestions for Implementation Perhaps the most important take away from the case study is that formal bilingual education programs are not the only way the mother tongue can be used as a resource for second language and literacy acquisition and academic success. Well-designed bilingual education is ideal, even more so when it creates bidirectional learning processes among LMSs and language majority students, such as the case of two-way dual-language immersion programs. These types of program are increasing both in numbers and popularity in the United States, and this is a phenomenon that needs to be supported by language rights activists, especially in an

126  Conclusion age when open hostility toward diversity is becoming more and more politically acceptable. At the same, because the creating these programs is not always feasible, due to a lack of resources, political will, skepticism, or outright hostility toward languages other than English, progressive educators need to be prepared to sneak in the mother tongue through the backdoor with low-budget, community-driven pedagogical initiative. If enough of these initiatives show signs that mother tongue development leads to better English, progress through remediation, and retention, perhaps it will be easier to create the political will to question the idea that English is the only language that is needed to learn through English. a. Sneaking In the Mother Tongue at Hispanic Learning Institutions The linked courses model that was implemented successfully at BCC is not difficult to replicate, especially in institutions that already have a learning community program and departments of modern languages that offer courses in the mother tongues spoken by large segments of the LMS population. This is often the case with Spanish-speaking students. If these resources are already in place, it makes sense to tap into the translingual pedagogical synergies that can be activated when first and second language academic literacy development courses are integrated, as opposed to being offered as stand-alone classes. Each college has different procedures for creating new learning community clusters, but most likely these procedures will involve the writing of a proposal articulating the pedagogical rationale for the new link that is being suggested. Without necessarily referring to “the b-word,” which might raise red flags among colleagues and administrators, it might be worth mentioning the abundance of research-based evidence showing that creating a link between LMSs’ second language and their mother tongue promotes English language and literacy acquisition and academic success across the curriculum. This sort of link can also be created in colleges that do not have a learning community program. The cost for the college is minimal (3 hours of reassigned time per instructor per academic year in the case of BCC), but the return in terms of student success can be high. In case a college is interested in piloting this type of program but not willing or able to provide funds, the funding could come from a successful grant application. In fact, the first linked course at BCC predated the learning community program and was funded by a grant. Once a link has been created, it is important to ensure that enough students register so that the cluster(s) can run. The following strategies can be helpful with recruiting: • Linking courses that can be chosen by the widest possible pool of students • Scheduling courses back-to-back in the most popular timeslots for the students

Conclusion 127 • Ensuring advisors are made aware of the clusters and of their pedagogical benefits. To help them with this process, they can be provided with flyers in both English and the students’ mother tongue. • Creating promotional materials such as posters, web pages, and infomercials on college newspapers • Using former students’ testimonials in promotional materials • Visiting classrooms attended by potential students before registration begins, especially if accompanied by former students The links that were investigated by this case study involved the pairing of ESL and Spanish composition courses, but mother tongue– second language pedagogical alliances need not be limited to this type of course pairing. For example, as I am writing the concluding chapter of this book, at BCC we are developing a new link between a creditbearing English composition course and an intermediate Spanish course that can be taken by both native and heritage speakers. BCC, like most colleges in the United States, requires first-year composition; therefore, this course has a very wide pool of potential students. Having heritage and native speakers taking classes together not only increases the pool of students who can enroll in the Spanish class, but it also has the potential to amplify the benefits of bidirectional learning that emerged from the case study. The sense of safety that came from feeling like “everybody is at the same level” could be more easily achieved in a class where native and nonnative English speakers learn side by side, in a situation where native/nonnative roles switch back and forth with a translingual academic discourse. Opportunities for putting students in the position of experts and co-constructing knowledge multiply when everybody in the class has an incentive to learn another students’ language, as in the case of two-way dual-language immersion programs. Finally, links with mother tongue academic literacy development courses need not be limited to English and ESL. For example, many Spanish-speaking ESL students at BCC struggle with math, in part because of the language barrier. It would be very helpful for them to take a Spanish course where as part of their academic literacy development they could explore fundamental aspects of U.S. mathematical discourse using their mother tongue as a frame of reference, for example, by learning how to translate words for logical operators that can make a difference between being able or unable to solve a word problem or by comparing how arithmetical operations are carried out in different learning contexts. Similarly, a link between social sciences such as sociology and psychology and Spanish composition could go far in helping students master concepts characterized by high levels of abstraction, if these could be explored by using the mother tongue, when a second language just isn’t enough. And just like in an ESL or a credit-bearing English class, there is a lot a mother tongue–friendly approach can do to promote authentic caring and self-esteem across the curriculum.

128  Conclusion If linking courses is just not possible, it would be worth exploring creating special sections of courses in which all the students enrolled share the same mother tongue. This is not to suggest that colleges should promote linguistic segregation or that there is no value in putting ESL students in situations in which they have to interact with native English speakers, but there can be a lot of value in giving language minorities the opportunity to learn by using the first language as a resource in a situation where they feel like they are “at the same level.” Allowing students to take a class or two where they perceive the playing field as being even can help them get over the sense of inferiority they feel as second language speakers and the silencing effect it engenders. This is especially important for first-year college students, who face a multitude of academic and personal challenges and whose performance in their first two semesters has a strong correlation with their likelihood to be retained (Westrick et al., 2015). A bilingual instructor fluent in his or her students’ mother tongue would be in a position to do a lot of what the Spanish instructor and I were able to do jointly, but even someone with limited proficiency, such as myself, can do a lot to tap into the power of the mother tongue by working with the students as partners in the co-construction of knowledge, especially if aided by a bilingual tutor who has a more solid knowledge of the mother tongue in question. This type of approach could work particularly well in an Accelerated Learning Program (see Section 3.2), in which students who share the same mother tongue and need additional instruction could be placed in the same companion course where their first language can be used as a resource. b.  Sneaking In the Mother Tongue in Multilingual Settings Finding ways to use ESL students’ first language as a resource can be more straightforward when this language is the same for the whole class, but mother tongue–friendly pedagogies can be developed in multilingual settings too. Sometimes the number of native languages spoken in the class is limited. Typically, an ESL class at BCC will be made up mostly of Spanish speakers with a few Bangla, Arabic, and French speakers from West Africa or Haiti. In this case, an instructor might be able to join forces with tutors from the writing center and/or writing fellows to arrange classroom visits to help students with specific academic literacy tasks and to develop multilingual course materials. For example, I have found it helpful to work with tutors to create handouts that translate and exemplify the use of coordinating conjunctions in some of the other native languages that are spoken by the students. I have also worked with tutors to design workshops to help ESL students familiarize themselves with U.S. academic literacy conventions that might diverge or clash with the literacy practices students were expected to follow in their mother tongue. For example, we have offered workshops during which small groups of students were able to practice for the CATW with bilingual

Conclusion 129 tutors using texts in Spanish, French, and Twi. In the future, we are planning to offer mother tongue–enriched workshops on topics such as verb mechanics, false cognates, sentence construction (especially avoiding run-on sentences and fragments), paragraph unity, close reading, creating thesis statements, citing sources, and avoiding plagiarism. Writing centers are great allies for sneaking the mother tongue through the back door, as tutors are often students or former students who speak the native languages represented on campus, and they often use these languages as resources spontaneously when discussing a writing assignment in progress. For example, multiple languages are spoken at the BCC writing center, and the center takes great pride in its linguistic diversity and its identity as a safe space. I  often encourage my students to look for tutors who have some knowledge of their first language, and I invite those tutors not only to visit my class to help students with specific tasks but also to celebrate what these tutors have been able to achieve linguistically, especially if English is not their first language. Given the sense of inferiority LMSs struggle with when trying to achieve academic success in a second language (see Section 4.5.a), it is important for them to have access to role models who have succeeded to the point of becoming English language and literacy consultants. Even when an instructor is all alone, there is a lot he or she can do to welcome the mother tongue into the learning process. First of all, while students should always be encouraged to express themselves in English, they should never be reprimanded or embarrassed for using their first language. Going back to my student Clare’s beautiful metaphor for describing what it’s like to take steps into another language, this sort of reprimand would be like slapping a child who is about to fall for trying to reach for a helping hand. Over the years I have taught, I have witnessed situations where colleagues have imposed fines for violating English-only rules, accused students of causing harm to each other for having a conversation in a shared mother tongue, and even reprimanded them for thinking in their own language while writing an essay in English. I like to believe that these actions are well meant and that they do come from a place of caring, even if they are the result of frustration, misinformation, and in some cases, perhaps, a certain degree of native Anglo-centricity that comes from having no idea what it is like to be an LMS. Nevertheless, these actions are harmful and unnecessary. Students are much more likely to be willing to take further steps into English proficiency with a kind invitation, such as “I bet what you said in your first language was very interesting. Why we don’t we try to say it in English together so that everybody can understand it, and you and I can both learn new words?” Rather than trying to suppress it, students’ reach for a helping hand should be encouraged and guided. This can be done even in situations in which the instructor does not know a single word of students’ first language. For example, the use of bilingual dictionaries can be recommended,

130  Conclusion as can the grouping of students that share the same mother tongue when working collaboratively. Again, this is not something that should be done every time group work is assigned, but there is value in giving students the opportunity to use all the linguistic resources at their disposal when grappling with complex, often unfamiliar academic literacy tasks, such as the close reading of text, the articulation of a thesis statement, or the use of sources to support an opinion. In case a student is struggling to understand something and the second language just isn’t enough, another student who speaks the same mother tongue can provide that helping hand and restore effective communication with the teacher and the rest of the class. While it is not realistic to expect every instructor in a multilingual classroom to have proficiency in all his or her students’ languages, I  agree with Ruecker that “knowledge of multiple languages, especially those common to students at the institution, should be considered in hiring and promotion decisions” and that “in hiring full-time faculty, priority should be given to people with experience and interest in working with L2 writers, and other underrepresented student populations” (2015, p. 164), although I  will add that these recommendations should be followed across the curriculum. There is no reason why math, science, and social science instructors should not be sensitized to the learning needs of LMSs. I will also add that regardless of hiring and promotion policies, educators who want to make a difference in their students’ lives need to approach teaching in a multilingual classroom as an ethnographic partnership and implement some principles of bidirectional learning. This does not necessarily require committing to taking a course in the students’ first language or embarking in the kind of study that led to the writing of this book, although such studies would be useful from a theoretical, pedagogical, and political perspective. Taking a genuine interest in who students are and the cultural wealth they bring to the class can take the form of a simple question about their past, their present, and their hopes for the future. These questions can be great starting points for generating a meaningful academic discourse in addition to providing instructors with useful clues on how to meet the students’ needs. Similarly, making the effort to learn how to say simple words or phrases such as “good morning,” “thank you,” “homework,” or “please turn off your cell phone,” especially in languages that are not commonly spoken on campus, can be extremely effective in setting the tone for authentic caring by sending the following message: “There are things you know much better than me. The person you are and the knowledge you bring are valued here. You belong.”

4.  Final Question: What’s in It for the Teacher? Sneaking the mother tongue through the back door and shifting to a bidirectional learning process takes work. This is something that was pointed

Conclusion 131 out to me on several occasions after I spoke at conferences and seminars about the program and the research that led to this book. Although I had not given much thought to the amount of work that went into this project, I cannot deny that an immense amount of time and energy went into creating the link between English and Spanish, learning from my students, monitoring learning outcomes, thinking, and rethinking my pedagogical approach. I cannot quantify the number of hours that went into all the conversations I had with colleagues and administrators, developing recruitment strategies, developing curriculum, attending the Spanish class, observing, reflecting, annotating, interviewing students. The fact that I had not given much thought to the time I invested in the program says a lot about the nature of the work and the return on the investment. Mostly, the work was fun, exciting, and gratifying. As a scholar, it allowed me to play with theories I  had been grappling with since the days of graduate school, giving me the opportunities to turn abstract ideas into concrete practices that had an impact on the way my students learned. Through this process, I was not only able to find value but also to problematize assumptions about what happens when LMSs encounter dominant codes in school and what educators can do to turn this encounter into an empowering experience. The fact that students played a central role in my questioning of what I had learned from scholarly books and articles made the process all the more gratifying. It felt authentic; it felt socially responsible. It felt like it placed students at the center of theoretical inquiries that should be about them and for them. As a teacher, I  can say in all honesty that the pedagogical approach described in this book saves at least as much work as it takes. As Mlynarczyk and Babbit point out, the power of “learning communities” can lead to a “special learning atmosphere” (2002, p. 73). Combined with the power of the mother tongue and bidirectional learning, this atmosphere made teaching so much easier and enjoyable. I often couldn’t believe my eyes when I  saw what happened in the learning community. Students would arrive to class before me and sit with a book in their hands, either reading silently or discussing what they had read with each other, going over words, passages, and possible interpretations. Sometimes I  would catch them sitting together around a table somewhere on campus doing schoolwork together, as I hurried from one class to the next. If a student was absent (which happened a lot less rarely than in my other classes), more often than not, he or she would get in touch with another student and come back to class fully caught up with the work we did. To say this was unusual for an urban community college where most students were fully employed and swamped with all sorts of family responsibilities would be a big understatement. It would also be a big understatement to say that the time I spent sitting with my students in the Spanish class, asking them about their language, their literacy, and worldviews was a lot more pleasant and productive than the time I had spent, over the years,

132  Conclusion getting upset with students for not doing their reading, not handing in their writing assignments, or disrupting the learning process. As an assistant professor on a tenure track, the work that went into creating and developing the link with Spanish made it very easy for me to meet teaching, service, and scholarly expectations of my institution. My teaching evaluations were good, which was not surprising, given that my students were happy and I was happy. My work clearly served the mission of the department and of the college: I was developing a teaching model that helped LMSs learn English better and stay in school. My efforts to monitor and improve the program lead to several presentations, article publications, and the acceptance of a proposal for this book. The program did take a lot of work, but the synergies that came from being able to align teaching, service, and research endeavors saved lot work. Last but not least, as a human being I can say this kind of experience can be immensely rewarding in terms of personal growth. There was something transformative about the ability to get so close to my students, in spite of fundamental differences in social identities markers that have a tendency to divide and antagonize humanity. It would be naïve to claim that differences in race, ethnicity, class, gender, language, and institutional roles ceased to be relevant in my interactions with my students because I made room for their mother tongue in my English class and because I made the effort to learn from them. Nevertheless, in the midst of those differences, the learning process brought me to a place of closeness with my students where the common denominator we share as human beings was palpable. I have never found a better place to appreciate diversity.

References Fuller, J. (2013). Spanish speakers in the U.S. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Mlynarczyk, R., & Babbit, M. (2002). The power of academic learning communities. Journal of Basic Writing, 21(2), 71–89. Reucker, T. (2015). Transiciones: Pathways of Latinas and Latinos writing in high school and college. Boulder, CO: Utah State University Press. Shapiro, N.,  & Levine, J. (1999). Creating learning communities: A  practical (guide?) to winning support, organizing for change, and implementing programs. San Francisco: Wiley. Westrick, P., Le, H., Robbins, S., Rudunzel, J., & Schmidt, F. (2015). College performance and retention: A meta-analysis of the predictive validities of ACT® scores, high school grades, and SES. Educational Assessment, 20(1), 24–45.

Index

Note: Page numbers in bold indicate a table on the corresponding page. academic discourse xiv – xvi, 122 – 125; bidirectional learning and 36 – 37, 72, 116 – 118, 123, 127; in the ESL class 107 – 110; language inequality and 26 – 32, 35, 39 – 42; and learning outcomes 89 – 92, 102 – 103; in the Spanish class 106 – 107, 109; and using Spanish as a resource 75 – 76 academic literacy xii – xiv, xv, 121 – 122, 124 – 128; in the Dominican Republic 80 – 83; language inequality and 24 – 27, 31 – 35, 37 – 38; and learning outcomes 89 – 90, 100 – 101, 115 – 116; linguistic diversity and 9; linking English and Spanish in 69 – 73; mother tongue as resource for acquisition of 42 – 44; and using Spanish as a resource 75 – 77 academic success xiv – xv, 36 – 38, 58 – 59, 88 – 89, 121 – 122, 124 – 126; of Dominican students 76 – 80; and the mother tongue 64 – 67; structural barriers to xv, 15 – 16, 63 – 64, 78 – 79; student demographics and 62 – 64; see also under Dominican students Accelerated Learning Program (ALP) 60 – 62, 79 Accelerated Studies in Associate Programs (ASAP) 59 – 62 achievement gap 21, 25, 27; linguistic diversity and 13 – 17 additive learning xiv, 66, 69, 75, 113 African American Vernacular English (AAVE) 24 Americanization 6 – 7 Anglicization 7

appropriation: of academic discourse 28, 30 – 31, 36, 50, 75; of English 27 – 28, 30 – 31, 50, 75, 125 assessment 49, 65, 96, 114, 122; see also CUNY Assessment Test in Writing (CATW); National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) Au, K. 33 authentic caring xiv, 92 – 93, 123 – 124, 127, 130 Babbit, M. see under Mlynarczyk, R. Baker, C. 44; and Lewis, L. 89 barriers: to academic success xv, 15 – 16, 63 – 64, 78 – 79 Bartlett, L.: and Garcia, O. xiv, 47, 72, 80 – 81 Bartolome, L. 37 bidirectional learning 36 – 39, 130 – 131; and engagement with academic discourse 36, 72, 116, 118, 123, 127; and a safe space 116, 123; and self-esteem 72, 116, 125, 127; and teachers’ vulnerability 39 – 42 bilingual education xv – xvi, 7 – 9, 11, 42 – 43, 122, 124 – 125 birthright paradigm 27 black people 4, 13 – 14, 28, 57, 62 Bourdieu, P. xv, 21 – 23, 25 Bronx Community College (BCC): academic literacy development at 69 – 73; and academic literacy in the Dominican Republic 80 – 83; and access to higher education 56 – 58; Dominican students and academic success at 76 – 80; ESL sequence at

134 Index 68 – 69; ethnographic partnership at 74 – 76; mother tongue and learning community at 64 – 67; programmatic initiatives at 58 – 62; student demographics and academic success at 62 – 64 Bush administration 8 – 9 “b-word” xiii, 9, 13, 65, 70, 126 Canagarajah, S. 44 Carter, S. 82 case studies 80 – 81, 87 – 89, 121 – 122, 124 – 125, 127; see also Bronx Community College (BCC) Celic, C.: and Seltzer, K. 48 Charmaz, K. 101 City University of New York (CUNY) see Bronx Community College (BCC); CUNY Assessment Test in Writing (CATW) classroom see power relations codemeshing 44 codes see dominant codes; marginalized codes Cohen 36 Cold War 7 Common Core State Standards 9 community colleges 56; see also Bronx Community College (BCC) community cultural wealth 124; language inequality and 25, 34, 36, 41; and learning outcomes 88, 113; and using Spanish as a resource 63, 75 Coral Way Elementary School 7 Corson, D. 15, 32 Crawford, J. xiii; see also “b-word” credit accumulation 88 – 89, 97 – 100, 98 – 99, 122 culturally responsive pedagogy 34, 74, 77, 92, 113, 124 Cummins, J. 16, 23, 43 CUNY Assessment Test in Writing (CATW) 68 – 69, 108 – 109, 111, 115, 128 – 129 Delpit, Lisa 27 – 30, 36 discourse 22 – 26, 81 – 82; see also academic discourse; see also under bidirectional learning dominant codes xv – xvi, 34 – 37, 61, 93, 131; taking ownership of 27 – 31; translanguaging and the appropriation of 44 – 50

Dominican Republic 30, 62, 73, 114 – 116; academic discourse in 26; academic literacy in 80 – 83; education in 76 – 78, 81 – 82, 94; see also Dominican students Dominican students xv – xvi, 26, 29 – 30, 113 – 114, 117; and challenges to academic success 76 – 80, 82 Duany, J. 79 Ebonics debate 14 – 15, 24 employment xii – xiii, 3, 22 – 23, 56, 74 English: link between Spanish and xiii – xv, 64 – 67, 69 – 76, 121 – 122, 126 – 128, 131 – 132; see also dominant codes; English as a Second Language (ESL); “Englishonly”; standard English English as a Second Language (ESL) xii – xiv, 71 – 72, 74 – 78, 87 – 90, 92 – 94, 96 – 97, 106 – 112; ESL students 66 – 70, 73, 102 – 103, 127 – 128; progress through the ESL sequence 68 – 69, 73 English Language Learner (ELL) 14 – 15, 77 – 78 “English-only” xiii, 7 – 8, 10 – 11, 129 ethnographic observations and reflections xvi, 35 – 36, 40 – 41, 87 – 88, 93, 125 ethnographic partnership xv, 53, 63 – 64, 73 – 76, 82, 130 Every Student Succeeds Act 9 – 10 First Nations 4 – 5 First-Year Seminars (FYS) 58 – 59, 61 – 62, 73 Fry, R. 77 – 78 Garcia, O; and Kleifgen, J. 8 – 10; and Sylvan, C. 48; and Wei, L. 42, 45, 48; see also under Bartlett, L. Gee, James Paul 25 – 27, 29, 36 Giroux, H. 32 Glaser: and Strauss 101 grade point averages (GPAs) 88 – 89, 98 – 100, 99, 122 grounded theory 95, 101 Hanson, D.: and Heller, J. 65 Heller, J. see under Hanson, D. Hispanic Learning Institutions 126 – 128

Index  135 Hispanics 7, 14, 57, 62, 112, 115 Hispanic Serving Institution 91 hooks, b. 33 identity 16, 25 – 27, 29 – 33, 74 – 75, 79, 123 – 124 immigration xii, 1 – 3, 6 – 8, 10, 78 Internet 4, 81, 114 interviews ix, 47 – 49, 59, 88, 93 – 95, 100 – 102, 106 Kleifgen, J. see under Garcia, O. language attitudes 4 – 10 language inequality xv – xvi, 62; and bidirectional learning 36 – 42; discourse and power 25 – 27; dominant codes and 27 – 33; language and power 21 – 25; and the mother tongue as resource 42 – 44; and students’ social realities 33 – 36; and translanguaging 44 – 50 language minority student (LMS) 11, 64, 105 – 106, 123, 126, 129 language ownership 27 – 31, 39 – 40, 45, 47, 74, 79 language rights 9, 12, 125 – 126 languages other than English (LOTE) xiii – xiv, 2 – 3, 5 – 6, 9 – 11, 24 – 25 Latin@ xv, 13 – 14, 23, 39 – 40, 67, 76, 92 learning community 121 – 123, 131; forming an ethnographic partnership within 74 – 76; and learning outcomes 87 – 89, 94 – 100, 97 – 99, 102 – 103, 105 – 108; and using Spanish as a resource 60 – 61, 63 – 70, 73 – 74 learning outcomes 87 – 95, 131; bidirectional learning and 116 – 119; in the ESL class 107 – 110; qualitative findings concerning 101 – 102; quantitative findings concerning 95 – 101, 96 – 99; shared mother tongue and 102 – 105; in the Spanish class 106 – 107; translanguaging and 110 – 116 legitimacy 22, 24, 28, 46, 70 Lewis, L. see under Baker, C. limited English proficiency (LEP) 3, 14, 17 linguicism 30 linguistic diversity 23 – 24, 45, 70, 124 – 125, 129; and the achievement gap 13 – 17; and language attitudes

4 – 10; public opinion on 10 – 13; in the United States 1 – 4 linguistic inequality see language inequality linguistic markets 22 – 25, 33, 105 Macias, R. 7 Makoni, S.: and Pennycook, A. 45 marginalized codes 26, 36 Massey, D. see under Rumbaut, R. McLaren, Peter 31 – 32 Mendez-Newman, B. 76, 88 migration see immigration Mlynarczyk, R. 35, 59; and Babbit, M. 39, 66 – 67 monolingualism 1 – 7, 13 – 14, 45 – 46, 48 – 49, 112, 125 mother tongue 45 – 47, 70 – 73, 76 – 77, 100, 110 – 112, 117 – 118, 131 – 132; and engagement with academic discourse xiv – xvi, 106 – 109, 122 – 124; as a resource x – xvi, 8 – 9, 42 – 44, 61 – 65, 108 – 109, 121 – 125; as a safe space xvi, 101 – 105, 122 – 123, 129; see also mother-tongue based pedagogical intervention; sneaking the mother tongue mother tongue–based pedagogical intervention xiii, xv, 61 – 65, 124 narratives see narratives of empowerment; personal narratives narratives of empowerment 38 – 41, 72 National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) 14 National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) xii, 14 Nieto, Sonia 34, 37, 41, 74 No Child Left Behind (NCLB) 8 – 9 Obama administration 9 – 10 Parmegiani, A. 12, 27–28, 35, 37–38, 47, 60, 76, 88 Pennycook, A. see under Makoni, S. personal narratives 29, 35 – 36, 39 Peterson, R. 38 political, the xii – xiii, 3 – 8, 12 – 13, 44 – 45, 93, 126 poverty 15 – 16, 78, 105 power 4 – 5, 74 – 75, 117, 128, 131; discourse and 25 – 27; and dominant codes 27 – 31, 50; language and 21 – 25; see also power relations

136 Index power relations xiv – xvi, 21 – 23, 30 – 31, 44, 48 – 49, 75; coercive xvi, 36 – 37, 39; collaborative xvi, 36, 40 qualitative findings xvi, 95, 101 – 102; bidirectional learning and 116 – 119; in the ESL class 107 – 110; qualitative findings concerning 101 – 102; shared mother tongue and 102 – 105; in the Spanish class 106 – 107; translanguaging and 110 – 116 quantitative findings 95 – 101, 96 – 99 resistance: to bilingual education xiii, xvi, 65, 70 retention 60 – 62, 88 – 89, 95 – 96, 122, 124, 126; and current enrollment status 98 – 99, 99 right to speech 123; language inequality and 22 – 25, 31, 37, 49; learning outcomes and 103, 106, 108 Rubinstein-Avila, E. 80 – 81 Ruecker, T. 37, 130 Rumbaut, R.: and Massey, D. 3, 24 safe space xvi, 101 – 105, 116 – 119, 122 – 123, 129 Seltzer, K. see under Celic, C. Shor, I. 32 sneaking the mother tongue 64 – 67, at Hispanic Learning Institutions 126 – 128; in multilingual settings 128 – 130 social realities see under students Spanish 1 – 3, 23 – 24, 87 – 96, 121 – 122, 126 – 129, 131 – 132; at BCC 62 – 65, 79 – 83; and bidirectional learning 116 – 119; in the ESL class 107 – 110; link between English and xiii – xv, 64 – 67, 69 – 76, 121 – 122, 126 – 128, 131 – 132; the Spanish class 106 – 107; and translanguaging 111 – 116

standard English 22 – 24, 27 – 28, 112, 118, 125 Stavanas, I. 10 Strauss see under Glaser students 9 – 10, 14; social realities of xv, 32 – 33, 35, 37, 78, 94; see also Dominican students; language minority student (LMS); Latin@; see also under English as a Second Language (ESL) success see academic success Sylvan, C. see under Garcia, O. teaching journal 90 – 91, 94 – 95 translanguaging 44 – 49; as a frame of reference for grammatical awareness 110 – 112; as a frame of reference for navigating clashing rhetorical expectations 46 – 47, 112 – 116; as a frame of reference for vocabulary building 47, 110 – 12; and self-esteem 102, 107 – 110, 116 – 119, 125 translingual practices xiv, xv, 36, 45 – 49, 67, 76 transnational 79, 82, 113 Trump administration 10 two-way dual language immersion programs 11, 13, 80, 125, 127 Valenzuela, A. xiv, 33 – 34 vulnerability: of students xii; of teachers 39 – 42, 92 Wei, L. see under Garcia, O. whiteness 4 – 5, 24 white people 11 – 14, 62 white supremacy 8 Wildsmith-Cromarty, R. 92 xenophobia xiii, 7, 12, 121 Yosso, T. 25, 34 – 35, 58