Jerri Willett

BECOMING FIRST-GRADERS IN AN L2 - AN ETHNOGRAPHIC STUDY OF L2 SOCIALIZATION

This ethnographic report “thickly describes” (Geertz, 1973) the participation of ESL children in the daily classroom events of a mainstream first-grade classroom. Data for this paper come from a yearlong study of one classroom in an international school on a college campus in the U.S. Using a language socialization and micropolitical orientation, the report describes how, through socially significant interfactional routines, the children and other members of the classroom jointly constructed the ESL childrens identities, social relations, and ideologies as well as their communicative competence in that setting. The sociocultural ecology of the community, school, and classroom shaped the kinds of microinteractions that occurred and thus the nature of their language learning over the course of the year.

Interpellations of Family/Community and Classroom Literacy Practices.

Rather than our viewing literacy as a set of cognitive-linguistic skills acquired by an individual, we view literacy as a set of social and cultural practices enacted by a group. Such a view of literacy has a deep research and theoretical base in anthropological and socio cultural studies (Basso, 1974; Baynham, 1995; Cook Gumperz, Gumperz, & Simons, 1981; Heath, 1983; Hymes, 1981; John-Steiner, 1994; Street, 1984, 1993, 1995), social linguistic studies (Barton & Hamilton, 1998; Gee, 1990; Hill & Parry, 1989; Ivanic, 1994; Lemke, 1988), sociologi cal studies (Baker, 1993; Baker & Luke, 1993), sociohistor ical psychological studies (Moll, 1987, 1990; Scribner & Cole, 1981), and educational studies (Bloome, 1987, 1989; Brodkey, 1987; Gadsden, 1992, 1997; Green, 1990; Solsken, 1993). From that point of view, the questions to ask about literacy practices focus on how persons engage in social and cultural activities that involve written language: What are the relationships between one set of literacy prac tices and another? How do a particular set of literacy prac tices affect the social and cultural identities of the partici pants? What are the social relationships among the participants? What are the power dynamics involved in the enactment of a particular set of literacy practices in a spe cific social situation? What social, cultural, and political agendas are being pursued and resisted? With those ques tions in mind, we approached the study of family and com munity literacy practices.2 Among the family and community literacy practices that researchers have studied that involve children are those that

The (Im)possibilities of constructing multicultural language practices in research and pedagogy

This paper examines the possibilities and challenges encountered in developing and researching more democratic language practices in a first/second grade classroom serving a heterogeneous community. Two university researchers and a school-based teacher researcher collaborated in developing strategies for family participation in language arts instruction and conducted ethnographic research on language practices during family visits in the classroom. Drawing on sociolinguistic, critical, and poststructural conceptualizations of language practices, the authors use the notion of hybridity to frame a way of understanding multicultural classroom language practices as creating spaces where new, hybrid practices may be constructed out of dialogue across different practices. Microanalyses based on Bloome and Egan-Robertsons (1993) approach to the social construction of intertextuality allow researchers to make visible the negotiation of multiple practices during classroom interaction. The authors draw on such microanalyses and consultation with cultural insiders to describe the broad patterns of interaction during family visits and to provide a close textual analysis of the visit of one Puerto Rican family. The discussion of this visit explores the negotiation of tensions involving the nature of the event, the social identities of participants, and differences in cultural ideologies. The analysis shows that both participants and researchers struggled to make sensible, respectful readings of each other but were sometimes drawing on contradictory discourses that led to incomprehensibility and misreadings. Although creating spaces for dialogue across difference entails moments of discomfort and vulnerability, the authors argue that examining and reflecting on these moments of incomprehensibilty opens up the potential for constructing a more democratic pedagogy.

Resistance to Taking a Critical Stance

Although empowerment education has had much success in adult literacy programs, its future depends on preparing teachers to work within an empowerment framework. A common challenge in empowerment education, whether in adult literacy programs or teacher education programs, is student resistance to the whole notion of empowerment. In this paper, we explore such resistance in the graduate ESL teacher preparation program at the University of Massachusetts. Using a postmodern critical and feminist framework, we analyze student resistance to the invention and critique of “facilitation,” a role designed to help small groups invent and critique theories and methods of teaching. Both students and professors alike resist taking a critical stance toward their own inventions. Two practices, however, have been helpful in our struggles to deal with our mutual resistance in ways that maintain the empowerment framework: (a) communities of resistance and (b) student writing and research. Our goal in documenting our struggles is to help those who want to work within the empowerment framework deal with resistance in their classrooms.

Language Teacher Educators Collaborative Conversations

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Research as gendered practice

In D. Tannen (Ed.), Gender and conversational interaction (pp. 231-280). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kuhn, E.D. (1992). Playing down authority while getting things done: Women professors get help from the institution. Locating power: In K. Hall, M. Bucholtz, & B. Moonwomon (Eds.), Proceedings of the Second Berkeley Women and Language Conference (Vol. 2), (pp. 318-325). Berkeley, CA: Berkeley Women and Language Group, University of California. Tannen, D. (Ed). (1993). Framing in discourse. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tannen, D. (1994). The sex-class-linked framing of talk at work. In Gender and Discourse (pp. 195-122) (Paperback ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Challenges for Latino Educators Crossing Symbolic, Cultural, and Linguistic Boundaries: Coming to Voice in Teacher Preparation with Competing Voices

This article reports on a teacher education programs preparation of bilingual paraeducators during a period of conflicting educational reform of structured English immersion in Massachusetts. Drawing on nexus analysis of discourses (R. Scollon & S. W. Scollon, 2004), we discuss factors faced by Latino educators. These include competing discourses, historical institutional inequities, and boundaries circumscribing the interactions between university and communities. Through the use of a participants text as a re-semiotized means of representing the new potentials that bilingual paraeducators bring to the field of teacher education, “cultural bumps” emerge and directions for teacher education are presented.