Acceso usuarios
Katherine S. Mortimer, Gabriela Dolsa
Conceptualizations of language as translanguaging (Otheguy, García, and Reid 2015) help us to render wholeness out of languages and groups of speakers socially constructed as distinct. Yet in practice teachers are still compelled to identify students by dichotomous institutional labels for discrete proficiencies in named languages: identity labels that are inevitably hierarchical and connected to inequity. This paper examines how youth in a two-way DLBE program on the US-Mexico border conceptualized themselves and their peers quite differently – as non-dichotomous – and their bilingualism as more continuously emergent. Based on interviews in a multiyear ethnography, we argue that youths’ conceptualizations of themselves as lingual (Flores 2013) people, rather than bilingual or monolingual, English learner or English proficient, are particularly important for serving our goals of equity in DLBE at the high school level.
