Carmen M. Martínez-Roldán

Language Ideologies Mediating Literacy and Identity in Bilingual Contexts

This article presents a qualitative case study of a sevenyear-old Mexican American student and his family. Using Critical Discourse Analysis, we examine both the child’s emergent ideas about language, as expressed in bilingual literature discussions, and his parents’ ideological discourses about the use of a minority language in public schools. Vygotsky’s theory of learning oriented this research on language ideologies, focusing on how parents’ ideological discourses shape both literacy development and identity formation in early childhood. Our findings illustrate the importance of looking beyond the classroom and school contexts to identify diverse factors that may affect children’s development of biliteracy in early childhood, such as the role of language ideologies. This study demonstrates the complex relationships between literacy, language ideologies, and issues of identity within the broader contexts of controversies over bilingual education and official English laws in the USA.

Reading through Linguistic Borderlands: Latino Students' Transactions with Narrative Texts.

This study examines the biliteracy development of a group of bilingual Latino third graders in an elementary school in the south-west USA. It focuses on the role of language in children’s reading comprehension of narrative texts in Spanish and English in a school context. The authors frame their analysis within the ‘Continua of Biliteracy’ model (Hornberger, 1989, 2003), highlighting how the youngsters drew on their linguistic resources to negotiate the contexts and contents of biliteracy. Data come from the students’ 24 retellings of story books, alternating between Spanish and English. The data were analyzed using story grammar and sociolinguistic analysis. The findings of the study show how, for young bilingual and bicultural students, their languages themselves exist on a continuum.That is, in developing their biliteracy, these children navigate linguistic borderlands through their use of Spanglish, reflecting their sociolinguistic and sociocultural realities where there are not necessarily strong distinctions between Spanish and English.

Translanguaging Practices as Mobilization of Linguistic Resources in a Spanish/English Bilingual After-School Program: An Analysis of Contradictions

This article discusses the results of an empirical study that examined the translanguaging practices of primary-grade, bilingual Latino students, as mediated by bilingual teacher candidates (TCs), in an after-school program in the southwestern United States. Expansive Learning theory, within the cultural-historical activity tradition, guided the analysis. The author uses the concept of internal contradictions to analyze dilemmas that emerged during the program, as they related to the participants’ language use. Results indicate that participants’ translanguaging practices inadvertently reinforced the hegemony of English, which made English, and concerns regarding testing, the object of the activity for many of the TCs. The author suggests that this tension reflects larger historical contradictions in U.S. schooling for language-minoritized children. Accordingly, she cautions about the use of flexible language policies in bilingual education, which could be used to either stabilize or transgress language hierarchies and inequalities.

Resisting Erasure and Developing Networks of Solidarity: Testimonios of Two Puerto Rican Scholars in the Academy

ABSTRACT In this article, we share findings from a critical qualitative study aimed at better understanding the ways that language, history, and geography mediate our work and identities as educational researchers. As scholars whose particular sociocultural and political histories are often absent in scholarly discussions about language and education, we use the intergenerational sharing of testimonios as both methodology and narrative development to gain a deeper understanding of experiences involving the learning and use of English that influence our academic careers. We theorize our experiences as resisting erasure and contribute to Latina epistemology scholarship and critical educational research about Puerto Ricans in the United States. Moreover, we forward the concept of funds of knowledge as a professional practice. Telling our stories and developing mentoring networks is necessary for our individual and collective functioning and well-being as scholars; it cultivates solidarity as a means of thriving in the academy.

Reading the world, the globe, the cosmos: approaches to teaching literature for the twenty-first century

expectations, a variety of media sources, and changing role models. These too contribute to the lessons children learn about gender. This historic look at the construction of femininity in Singapore does not overlook the role of other institutions and media. What it does do is remind us of the importance of the messages of schooling and the need to assure that school policies remain responsive to social change.