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The Routledge Handbook of Discourse Analysis
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Education and bilingualism
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Karen Thompson, Kenji Hakuta
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Education and bilingualism
Karen Thompson and Kenji Hakuta
Introduction
Given the multilingual contexts in which the majority of the world’s population lives, educational
systems have in some cases implemented instructional programs using multiple languages, sometimes
in response to pressure by activists, sometimes as a means for spreading the national language
among language minority groups, and sometimes as part of effort to promote economic competitiveness.
After briefly reviewing the links between bilingual education and larger issues of ideology
and political discourse, we will describe a variety of frameworks that researchers have used to
analyze talk among bilinguals and we will discuss the value that a discourse analysis approach
provides. We will then turn to bilingual classrooms specifically and provide an overview of
empirical studies that have looked at talk in such classrooms, focusing particularly on codeswitching.
Finally, we will sketch some directions for future research in which discourse analysis
could continue to serve as a tool for deepening our understanding of bilingual education and
power relations in multilingual contexts.
Political discourse and macro-sociolinguistics
The multiracial, multicultural, and multilingual peoples of the United States have long engaged in
battles—both literal and metaphorical—about how to balance unity and diversity. Such conflicts
are mirrored in many other contexts around the world. One arena in which these battles have
been waged is that of contests about the appropriate language of instruction for educating
children. In these language wars, individuals have fought over what the balance should be
between learning a common, national language and preserving multiple primary languages.
Bilingual education is one attempt to balance the need for a common language with the benefits
of maintaining individuals’ primary languages.
Although bilingual education in the US and around the world is widely perceived as a recent
phenomenon, its history dates back centuries. In the United States, for example, Ohio was the first
state to officially adopt a bilingual education law. In 1839 the state legislature explicitly authorized
bilingual education in German and English at parents’ request (Sanchez and Sanchez, 2008).
While German was the second most commonly used language of instruction in the nineteenth
century (after English), children were also schooled in French, Dutch, and Spanish among other
languages (U.S. Department of Education, 1991).
Much has been written about different models of bilingual education (see Romaine, 1995;
García, 1997). Despite the sometimes bewildering proliferation of labels for these models, at the
most basic level bilingual education simply refers to the use of two languages for classroom
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instruction. Bilingual programs differ on a variety of dimensions. First, they differ in the composition
of their student population, some programs enrolling only speakers of the minority language,
some enrolling only speakers of the majority language, and others enrolling some combination of
the two. Programs also differ in the amount of time and the purposes for which each language is
used. Some programs devote 50 percent of instructional time to each language throughout all
grade levels, while others devote a decreasing amount of instructional time to the minority
language over time. Programs also differ in their overall goals, some viewing the minority
language as a temporary bridge for learning the majority language while others aim for the full
development of both languages. These different goals for bilingual education programs often
reflect different underlying language ideologies.
In countries with substantial immigrant populations, struggles around bilingual education
closely parallel struggles around immigrant rights. Bilingual education typically becomes more
common during upswings in immigration, but resistance to it also tends to peak during these
upswings. In the United States, the multilingual reality of the nation’s peoples stands in stark
contrast to a political discourse that emphasizes English monolingualism. For example, President
Theodore Roosevelt, during a time of heavy immigration from southern and eastern Europe,
stated: “We have one language here, and that is the English language, and we intend to see that the
[assimilation] crucible turns our people out as Americans, of American nationality, and not as
dwellers of a polyglot boarding house” (Roosevelt, 1919). Thirty states currently have policies
declaring English their official language (U.S. English, 2009), yet federal and state laws mandate
that many government documents, such as voter guides, be printed in multiple languages.
Since 1970, immigration from Latin America and Asia to the United States has increased
dramatically (Terrazas and Batalovo, 2009), with a corresponding increase in attempts to formalize
the dominance of English in the public sphere. Three states with large Spanish-speaking immigrant
populations passed propositions severely restricting bilingual educations programs—California in
1998, Arizona in 2000, and Massachusetts in 2002. The percentage of non-native English speakers
who participate in bilingual programs in California has dropped from approximately 30 percent
prior to the proposition’s passage to less than 5 percent today (authors’ calculations, based on
California Department of Education DataQuest statistics). Yet similar English-only propositions
have failed in two other states—Colorado in 2002 and Oregon in 2008. The tension between the
long-standing emphasis on English monolingualism and the multilingual reality of the nation
continues to play out at the ballot box as voters are asked to decide questions of language policy.
Many other countries around the globe are also engaged in debates to determine the language(s)
in which their linguistically diverse populations should be educated. Consider the case of
Guatemala. In this country of 12.7 million people that has Spanish as its official language,
24 languages are spoken, 21 of which belong to the Mayan linguistic family (López, 2006).
Approximately 40 percent of the population speaks a Mayan language, though only 13.5 percent
of the population is monolingual in one of these languages. The Mayan population has historically
had lower literacy rates, worse health outcomes, and higher rates of poverty than the nonindigenous
population. López (2006) describes these disparities in extreme terms: “The
Guatemalan governmental neglect of indigenous children and adolescents was an outcome of a
hierarchically and racially structured society, which in many cases resembled Apartheid” (p. 240).
In 1979 experiments with bilingual education began in Guatemala: the government established
ten schools in each of the four most commonly spoken Mayan languages (Kiche, Mam,
Kachiquel, and Qeqchi). These schools used students’ primary Mayan language as the medium
of instruction in the earliest grades while gradually increasing the amount of instruction conducted
in Spanish in later grades (Dutcher, 2004). After early evaluation studies showed better educational
outcomes for students in the bilingual schools than in traditional Spanish-language schools, the
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number of bilingual schools expanded, as did the number of languages in which bilingual education
was provided. By 1999, these bilingual schools were “providing instruction in 14 languages
for 230,000 rural children in 1200 schools” (Dutcher, 2004: 5). Meanwhile, Guatemala’s threedecades-long
civil war came to an end in 1996, and a variety of laws, passed during this time
period, increased rights of the country’s indigenous population, including linguistic rights.
The National Language Act of 2003, while declaring Spanish the official language, provided
not only recognition of indigenous languages, but advocated their use in education as well as in
other spheres. The law states, “[t]he national education system, both public and private, must
foster in all processes, modalities, and levels, the respect, promotion, development, and use of the
Mayan, Garifuna, and Xinka languages, conforming to the particulars of each linguistic community”
(El Decreto Número 19–2003, 2003, authors’ translation).
Despite the expansion of bilingual education in Guatemala, a shortage of qualified teachers and
a lack of appropriate curriculum materials have plagued bilingual schools in the country (Dutcher,
2004; López, 2006). Furthermore, leaders within some indigenous communities found fault with
the form that bilingual education took in these government-operated schools. As one indigenous
leader stated: “We are against a model of development that misinterprets our thoughts and
knowledge, a model which only pursues economic accumulation as well as assimilation into the
hegemonic Western way of life” (López, 2006: 254). Thus, in recent years, Mayan communities
have established their own network of bilingual schools that teach not only Mayan languages but
Mayan history, cosmology, and philosophy. By 2005, 56 such schools existed across Guatemala,
striving to develop bilingualism and biculturalism in students rather than using Mayan languages as
a bridge to learning Spanish.
India, in contrast, has seen a decreasing use of minority languages in schools across the country,
but increased instances in which English and an Indian language serve as the medium of instruction.
A 1991 language census identified 216 primary languages with more than 10,000 speakers in
India; an additional 900 languages had fewer than 10,000 speakers. Of these languages, the
national Constitution recognizes 22 as official languages, and 41 are used in educational settings,
down from 81 in 1970 (Mohanty, 2006). As Mohanty states, “[m]ost of the tribal and minority
mother tongues have no place in the educational system of India” (p. 268). In 2009, the Indian
Parliament passed a landmark Right to Education Act providing for free and compulsory education
for all children in India between 6 and 14 years of age, but the Act has come under fire from
some quarters because it makes no explicit provisions for educating students in their primary
languages (Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan Right to Education Committee, 2009).
This is not to suggest that India’s educational system aims to foster monolingualism. In fact,
while instruction in minority languages has been declining in India in recent decades, instruction
in English has been increasing. A 1964 decree, still in force, directs Indian schools to teach three
languages: (1) the regional or mother tongue; (2) either Hindi or English; and (3) an additional
modern Indian language or foreign language. However, as a recent government report found, the
three language formula “has not been uniformly implemented across the country,” and issues such as a
lack of educational materials in particular languages, a shortage of adequately trained teachers, and
the multiplicity of linguistic backgrounds found in many communities have hampered efforts to make
mother tongue education available to India’s students (Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan Right to Education
Committee, 2009: 30). Today, English (not Hindi) has become the most common second language
subject in all states. Furthermore, given the importance of English fluency in the global economic
sphere, members of the elite are increasingly sending their children to expensive private schools in
which English is the medium of instruction from the earliest grades (Mohanty, 2006).
Across these three contexts—the United States, Guatemala, and India—we see that larger
power asymmetries manifest themselves in struggles over linguistic rights and the language(s) in
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which schooling is to be conducted. As we turn to examining talk in bilingual classrooms, we must
remember that talk in such classrooms is a microcosm in which societal struggles about language
and national identity play out.
Key theoretical perspectives that bear on classroom discourse
Before examining discourse in bilingual classrooms specifically, we will describe models that have
been developed for examining discourse in multilingual settings more generally. In 1959, Charles
Ferguson proposed an influential framework for such settings. Ferguson noted that, in communities
in which distinct varieties of a language co-existed, speakers used particular varieties for
particular domains. For example, in Cairo, a professor would likely deliver a university lecture in
classical Arabic but discuss the day’s events with family members in Egyptian Arabic, listen to a
news broadcast in classical Arabic but buy coffee from a local merchant in Egyptian Arabic.
Ferguson used the term diglossia to describe such communities. In these communities, Ferguson
argued, context almost completely determined language variety: “In one set of situations only H
[the high or standard variety] is appropriate and in another only L [the low or vernacular variety],
with the two sets overlapping only very slightly. … The social importance of using the right
variety in the right situation can hardly be overestimated” (2000/1959: 68).
Many linguists contested Ferguson’s claims, arguing that diglossic situations in which two
varieties of the same language were dedicated to specific domains within society were actually
quite rare. For example, Fishman (2000/1967) argued that multilingual communities could take
one of several forms: bilingualism with diglossia, bilingualism without diglossia; diglossia without
bilingualism; or neither diglossia nor bilingualism. Fishman also argued that diglossia represented a
useful concept for understanding language use at a broad, societal level, but other frameworks
were necessary for understanding individuals’ language choices within particular interactions. He
suggested that the concept of language domains guide this latter type of analysis. Domains such as
family, friends, religious institutions, and the government, Fishman explained, “designate the
major clusters of interaction situations that occur in particular multilingual settings” (p. 93; emphasis in the
original), and within particular multilingual communities interactions within particular domains
will tend to be carried out in particular languages. Therefore, using domain analysis, individual
language use within a particular domain can be compared to overall societal trends for language
use within that particular domain, Fishman urged. Despite his emphasis on domains of language
use, Fishman did acknowledge that other factors, particularly role relations and topic, might
influence language choice, and he urged these factors be considered alongside domain.
From social psychology came another approach that has been influential in analyzing discourse
among bilingual speakers. In a series of studies beginning in the 1970s, Howard Giles and his
associates demonstrated that speakers had a tendency to accommodate to one another on a variety
of dimensions, from rate of speech to phonological features. Giles himself and linguists studying
interactions in multilingual communities applied Giles’ accommodation theory, as it was named,
to explain speakers’ language choices in these communities, where speakers tended to converge to
what they perceived to be the preferred language of interlocutors by whom they wanted to be
liked, but diverged from the preferred language of interlocutors they wanted to resist (Giles et al.,
1991). In what could be considered an expansion of the accommodation theory, sociolinguist
Douglas Bell (1984) proposed audience design theory, asserting that speakers formulate their
utterances on the basis of their perceptions of their audience. In some ways, both Giles’ and Bell’s
theories could be viewed as extensions of Grice’s well-known cooperative principle, which, he
argued, underlay speakers’ pragmatic behavior in interactions: “Make your contribution such as it
is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk
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exchange in which you are engaged” (Grice, 1989: 26). Thus we would expect bilingual speakers
to speak in the language that their interlocutor would not only understand but prefer.
Building on the notion of accommodation, Carol Myers-Scotton (1983) proposed yet another
model to analyze discourse in multilingual settings, which she termed the “markedness model.” In
multilingual communities, Myers-Scotton argued, factors such as domain, topic, and role relations
combine to create societal expectations about the language in which a particular interaction will
occur; use of this language is unmarked—in other words, expected. However, individual speakers
may violate these expectations by choosing to use the marked or unexpected language for all or
some portion of a particular interaction. In a revision of Grice’s (1975) cooperative principle,
Myers-Scotton proposed that bilingual speakers observed the following principle in their interactions
with other bilingual speakers: “Choose the form of your conversation contribution such
that it indexes the set of rights and obligations which you wish to be in force between speaker and
addressee for the current exchange” (1983, cited in Myers-Scotton, 2006: 160; emphasis in the
original). If a speaker makes a marked choice, using a language that is unexpected for a particular
interaction (if the professor in Cairo mentioned above delivered a lecture in Egyptian Arabic
rather than in Classical Arabic, for example), this speaker is signaling a particular set of rights and
obligations that he wishes to be in effect for that interaction, Myers-Scotton asserts.
Linguists working within the discourse analysis tradition criticized Ferguson’s framework of
diglossia, Fishman’s framework of language domains, Giles’ accommodation theory, and MyersScotton’s
markedness model as overly deterministic and speculative and argued that it imposed a
reified view of social categories, which is removed from the behavioral realities of discourse.
Under these frameworks, all talk in classrooms might be considered to fall within a single domain,
that of education; researchers might presume a tendency for utterances in bilingual classrooms to
be conducted in a particular language and view utterances in another language as marked.
Empirical evidence does not support these assumptions. Researchers have found that both
Spanish and English are used by teachers and students for a wide variety of purposes in bilingual
classrooms in the United States, for example (cf. Legarreta, 1977; Zentella, 1981; Freeman, 1998).
John Gumperz (1982), Li Wei (1994, 1998), and Peter Auer (1998), among others, have
argued that actual conversations in bilingual communities should be analyzed in detail, so as to
provide information about how bilingual speakers use their linguistic repertoires within particular
interactions to wield power, manage interactions, indicate preferences, index identity, and build
alliances. As Li Wei (1998) explains, rather than speculating about the motivation for speakers’
language choices and linking these choices to broader societal factors, a discourse analysis approach
to analyzing talk in multilingual communities “dispenses with motivational speculation, in favor of
an interpretative approach based on detailed, turn-by-turn analysis of language choices” (p. 169).
From the fine-grained analysis of conversational turns, discourse analysts can describe the ways that
Gee (2005) has termed the “little-d discourses,” or “language-in-use” that operates within
multilingual communities generally and bilingual classrooms specifically. Building from this
analysis of the “little-d discourses,” then, researchers can describe the “Big D Discourses,” the
“ways of acting, interacting, feeling, believing, valuing” (Gee, 2005: 7) operating in these
contexts.
Ana Celia Zentella is one example of a sociolinguist who has used discourse analysis to connect
talk in bilingual communities to larger social structures and ways of being. In her landmark study
Growing Up Bilingual: Puerto Rican Children in New York, Zentella (1997) analyzes language samples
mainly from seven girls growing up on a particular block, over a period of 14 years. Zentella finds
that children in this community do not restrict Spanish and English “to specific settings and/or
purposes …. [Rather] codes are switched by the same speaker in the same setting” (p. 80). While
acknowledging that the underlying reasons motivating code-switches are complex and impossible
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to determine definitively, Zentella finds that speakers’ switches between English and Spanish serve
a variety of conversational functions. She categorizes code-switches by conversational strategy and
finds switches that coincide with a topic shift, mark a quotation, mitigate or aggravate a request,
and clarify or emphasize information, among many other functions. Zentella also analyzes
differences in the code-switching behavior of individual speakers on the basis of their age and
language preferences. From this analysis, Zentella concludes: “In addition to serving as their badge
of membership in el bloque [the block], the girls’ code switching enabled each one to fulfill crucial
communicative functions in ways that joined her to others similar in age or language profile, as
well as to construct and display her unique self” (p. 114).
Empirical studies of language, power, and code-switching in
bilingual education settings
Up to this point we have discussed various frameworks, including discourse analysis, that have
been used to analyze speech in bilingual communities generally. Now we will move to a
discussion of work that analyzes discourse in bilingual classrooms specifically. Basic questions
about the implementation of bilingual education programs in the United States motivated an early
wave of research analyzing talk in bilingual classrooms during the 1970s. With the passage of the
Bilingual Education Act in 1968, which provided federal funds for districts to establish bilingual
programs, such programs began to spring up around the United States in areas with substantial
immigrant populations. Researchers investigated basic questions about the balance of Spanish and
English use by teachers and students in these new bilingual classrooms. For example, Legarreta
(1977) analyzed Spanish and English use in six bilingual kindergarten classrooms in California,
finding that language use varied by type of bilingual program. Although all programs had a goal of
50 percent Spanish and 50 percent English use, in programs using a concurrent translation model,
in which material was presented alternately in each language, teachers used English approximately
70 percent of the time and native Spanish-speaking students seemed to mirror teachers’ language
choices, also using English approximately 70 percent of the time. In these classrooms English
dominated teachers’ language use across a variety of functions, including directing students,
evaluating and elaborating students’ responses, and correcting students. However, in one classroom
using an alternate days model, in which Spanish was used for the entire morning and English
for the entire afternoon one day and English for the morning and Spanish for the afternoon on the
following day, there was greater parity in both teacher and student language use. Nonetheless,
Legarreta concluded that, in most classrooms, “[d]espite a sincere and conscious commitment to
bilingual teaching by the teachers/aides, they seem overwhelmed by the pull of the dominant
language and the dominant culture, with the result that English again becomes the classroom
language” (1977, p. 15).
In another early study of language use in bilingual classrooms, Zentella (1981) analyzed the
language choices of two native Spanish-speaking teachers and their students in a third and sixth
grade bilingual classroom in New York City. Zentella made audio-recordings of classroom
interactions and conducted interviews with the teachers and their students. As Legarreta’s
(1977) work might lead us to predict, Zentella found that teachers’ language choices exerted
considerable influence over students’ language choices. “Despite the often unpredictable changes
in the teachers’ language, children in both grades usually responded in the language in which they
were addressed during formal sessions, particularly the younger ones,” Zentella wrote (p. 119).
Instances in which a student responded in a different language from that used by the teacher
“usually reflected [the student’s] language proficiency and, especially with sixth graders, their
degree of linguistic security and language preference” (p. 120). Despite similarities in patterns of
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language choice across the two classrooms, Zentella noted that the third grade teacher was much
more likely to code-switch, using both English and Spanish within a single conversational turn,
than the sixth grade teacher. However, Zentella concluded, “[s]ince these teachers differ in
language dominance, teaching style, and personality variables, it is difficult to attribute the
differences in their patterns to anything but a complex configuration of variables” (p. 129).
And, although bilingualism is the goal for students in the bilingual program, Zentella noted that
English seemed to “dominate school life” (p. 112).
A separate strand of research has investigated how teachers’ language choices impact students’
content-area learning. For example, Setati and Adler (2000) analyzed teachers’ language use
during mathematics instruction in multilingual classrooms in both urban and rural areas of South
Africa. In these classrooms, English was the principal language of instruction, but Setati and
Adler documented numerous instances in which teachers code-switched into students’ native
languages for a variety of purposes such as to provide translations for certain unfamiliar vocabulary
words, to clarify a concept, or to press students to elaborate their thinking. Nonetheless,
teachers felt conflicted about how much to use students’ native language(s) and how much to use
English:
On the one hand as teachers they needed to switch languages in order to reformulate a
question or instruction, or to reexplain a concept, and they needed to encourage their
learners to use their main [native] language in order to facilitate communication and understanding.
At the same time however, it was their responsibility to induct their learners into
mathematical English and hence it was important to use English in the mathematics classroom
as much as possible.
(Setati and Adler, 2000: 255)
Teachers in rural areas felt particular pressure to use English because, unlike students in urban
areas, their students were unlikely to be exposed to any English outside of school.
Contemporary researchers using discourse analysis to analyze interactions in bilingual classrooms
in the United States have also noted the pull that English exerts, despite teachers’ stated
intentions. Freeman (1998) spent two years as a participant–observer at a dual-language elementary
school in the Washington DC area, recording classroom interactions and conducting openended
interviews with a variety of stakeholders. Dual-language programs enroll native speakers of
two different primary languages, in this case Spanish and English, and aim to develop students’
fluency in both. Freeman found that “observations of the students talking informally among
themselves … at lunch or at recess or during Storywriting time in kindergarten, … suggest that the
students attribute more prestige to English than Spanish, despite the ideal that these languages be
distributed and evaluated equally throughout the school” (1998, p. 197). Through a fine-grained
analysis of transcripts from a particular “opening” activity in a kindergarten classroom, Freeman
demonstrates one way in which teachers contribute to messages about the status of Spanish and
English. Although the “opening” activity was carried out in Spanish and English on alternating
days, more sophisticated contributions were required of students on days when the activity was
conducted in English. During the “opening” activity, the teacher always led the students in a song
and then guided them in completing a variety of statements about the date and the number of
students present. Compare the written statements the students were asked to complete when the
activity took place in English and when it took place in Spanish:
English Spanish
Today is ______ Hoy es _____
(today is)
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We have ___ girls las niñas
(the girls)
We have ___ boys los niños
(the boys)
We have ___ students los estudiantes
(the students).
(Freeman, 1998: 197)
Although the format is almost identical in both languages, the English version requires students
to complete full sentences, while the last three items in the Spanish version of the activity
contain phrases rather than full sentences. This pattern of more skills being required of
students in the English version of the activity plays out in other ways, as well. The teachers
ask students to supply spelling information about the day of the week in English but not in
Spanish, for example. Freeman concludes: “The kindergarten analysis … provides concrete
evidence of a more general pattern that I observed throughout the school. Although students
are expected to develop academic skills in both Spanish and English, there are higher standards in
English” (1998: 209).
Palmer (2008) also served as a participant–observer in a dual-immersion classroom and found
evidence of the pull that English exerts, despite teachers’ intentions. Reflecting on her own
experience as a teacher in a dual-immersion classroom, Palmer writes: “in my own classroom
Spanish was not as high status a language as English. Despite my daily efforts to use exclusively
Spanish when expected, to discuss with students the value of knowing the language, and even to
openly reward use of Spanish, I was daily challenged by students refusing to respond to me in
Spanish, even though I knew they were capable” (p. 650). Palmer explicitly chose to collect data
in the classroom of a teacher who seemed “able to strike a more equitable linguistic balance in
her classroom” (p. 651). Through discourse analysis, Palmer provides evidence of ways in which
this teacher explicitly communicates the value she places on the contributions of her native
Spanish-speaking students. When students have gathered in a circle to read essays they each
have written in response to a novel, the teacher interrupts the first reader, a native Spanish
speaker who is reading very softly, saying: “‘Perdón la interrupción pero no escucho’ (pardon the
interruption but I cannot hear you well). This sends a clear message to the entire class: it is not only
important to have the chance to read your own essay, but also to have the chance to hear
your classmates’ essays” (p. 658). When the student still cannot be understood clearly, anothernative
Spanish speaker interrupts him, repeating the teachers’ words. Later in the activity, a native
English speaker interrupts a native Spanish speaker, using a variation of the teacher’s original
phrase.
However, Palmer concludes that the linguistic parity that the teacher seems to have achieved
within her classroom is quite fragile and does not extend to instances in which she herself is not
present. Palmer provides transcripts of two interactions, one when a substitute teacher is instructing
the class and another when the librarian is leading the class in a read-aloud. In both
interactions, native Spanish speakers become disengaged when their questions are not fully
answered by their native English-speaking interlocutors. For example, after the substitute teacher
instructs students to begin playing a subtraction game in small groups, Oswaldo, a native Spanish
speaker, initially expresses his confusion, saying: “I don’t understand.” He continues to try to
clarify his understanding in the following interaction but disengages as his confusion persists:
James: You rolled a one, then take out nine ones.
Nancy: Nine ones?
James: Yea. So it’s [One two three four five six seven eight.
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Roberto: [I take one of these (ten-sticks) and I get one of these (cubes).
James: OK, then you—no you take nine ones.
Oswaldo: Whaa?
Roberto: Nine ones? I didn’t have –
James: You put nine of those in there.
Roberto: I took one of these (ten-sticks) out then I put one of these (cubes).
James: No, you need to put nine of those!
Oswaldo: One. [Two. Three.
(Palmer, 2008: 662)
Shot down by native English-speaking James, Oswaldo resorts to counting cubes rather than
thinking about the subtraction processes the game is designed to highlight and ultimately starts
building with the manipulative materials rather than participating. On the basis of this and other
interactions, Palmer concludes:
One classroom teacher and the lessons and conversations she manages form only a small part
of the discourses/Discourses that youngsters encounter as they undertake the ongoing process
of dialogue involved in developing their identities as learners. It is impossible to limit students’
exposure to dominant discourses. This study demonstrates that, even while attempting to
engage students in a struggle to change their discourse patterns, we will find students slipping
back repeatedly into inequitable patterns drawn from the expectations of the larger society
(2008: 663–664)
In our own work, we have found that, even within interactions in which all participants are native
Spanish speakers, those with greater English fluency may use their English fluency as one of a set of
resources to exert power. We have been recording interactions in a first and third grade bilingual
classroom in an elementary school in Northern California. All students in both classrooms are
native Spanish speakers, with varying degrees of English fluency. Students receive instruction
primarily in Spanish during their first years in this school, with the amount of English increasing
each year. We have recorded interactions during a “free time” period that happens in each
classroom once a week. During free time, students may interact in whichever language they
wish. We have been analyzing the language choices of students during free time over the course of
eight weeks, noting when students use Spanish, English, or a mixture of both languages.
In the following transcript, two first grade girls, Perla and Monica, are playing a game with
marbles, using a large plastic structure, which serves as a racetrack for the marbles.1
The winner is
the person whose marble completes the course first. The first part of the interaction (lines 1–36),
before Perla runs off to look for her missing marble, takes place almost entirely in Spanish, with
two brief exceptions. The teacher uses English to clarify that the bell that is ringing applies only to
older students (lines 5–6), and Perla makes a quick switch to English to ask: “Where’s my ball?”
(line 9). This pattern of language use, long stretches of Spanish punctuated by occasional phrases in
English, is typical of this first grade classroom during free time. Students in this classroom have only
been receiving instruction in English for a little over one year; most of their day is still spent
learning in Spanish, and their teacher typically uses Spanish as the default language for a wide range
of functions, including giving instructions during free time, making informational announcements,
and disciplining students (though she breaks from this pattern and uses English for an announcement
during this interaction). Utterances in English are the exception rather than the rule during
free time in this classroom. However, in this particular interaction, once Perla goes to retrieve her
marble, she speaks predominantly in English for the remainder of the exchange (lines 40–57),
except for a single turn (lines 54–55) when she is again admonishing Monica to give her
marble back to her. In this second portion of the interaction, Monica’s turns consist entirely of
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squeals or laughter, except for her final turn, when, following the admonition Perla gives in
Spanish, she exclaims simply in English, “Yes! I win!” Note the balance of power between the two
girls throughout the interaction.
1 Perla: Aaaaah! ((singing)) Te estoy ganando, te estoy ganando, te estoy ganando, te estoy
2 ganando!
3 Aaaaah! I’m beating you, I’m beating you, I’m beating you, I’m beating you!
4 ((bell rings))
5 Teacher: No, no, it’s for big kids ((in other words, the bell does not mean free time is over
6 for the first graders)). Keep playing.
7 Perla: Whe:[ee!] ((as they let their marbles go))
8 Monica: [Whe:ee!]
9 Perla: Te gané, yo te gané, te voy a ganar. (4.8) ((ball rolls onto the floor)) Where’s my ball?
10 I beat you, I beat you, I’m going to beat you.
11 Monica: Yo no te las tiré.
12 I didn’t throw them to you.
13 Perla: O, ¡cuida:do, Monica!
14 Oh, careful, Monica!
15 (7.0) ((more racing the marbles with no dialogue))
16 Perla: ((in a very high-pitched voice)) Ee:w! (15.2) ((marble racing continues)) ¡Ya:y! ¡Mi
17 pelota está ganando!
18 Ee:w!(15.2) Yay! My ball is winning!
19 Monica: O, ¡yo gané! ((laughs))
20 Oh, I won!
21 Perla: ¡No:! (1.4) ¿Dónde fue mi pelota? (1.5) ¿Dónde fue mi pelota? ((looks for it on the
22 floor))
23 No! Where did my ball go? Where did my ball go?
24 Monica: ((laughs))
25 Perla: ¡Mi pelota, mi pelota, la pelota!
26 My ball, my ball, my ball!
27 Monica: ((laughs))
28 Perla: ¿Dónde está mi pelota? ((deepens her voice)) ¿Dónde está la pelota, Monica? (3.6)
29 (Ay, Monica,) estabas cheatiando, ¿sabías?
30 Where is my ball? Where is the ball, Monica? (Ay, Monica,) you were cheating, you know?
31 Monica: Ay, ¡ew!
32 Ay, ew!
33 Perla: O, da:me la pelota mí:a:. Ya sé me estás cheatiando. (5.6) Yo te gané prime:ro. (17.6)
34 Give me my ball. I know that you’re cheating me. I beat you first.
35 ((marble racing continues))
36 Monica: ¡Ah!
37 Perla: Hey! ((laughs))
38 Monica: ((laughs))
39 ((Perla’s marble rolls off across the room))
40 Perla: Oh no you—((goes to retrieve marble)) Oh no you di:dn’t! (4.5) Thank you (?) for
41 saving my little ball.
42 Monica: ((squeals as marble racing continues))
43 Perla: Yay!
44 Monica: ((squeals again))
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45 Perla: No, baby! No! ((ball goes onto the floor again)) Where’s my little
46 ball?
47 Monica: ((squeals))
48 Perla: (What you did) with my little ball?
49 ((marble races continues without talking for 22.4 seconds))
50 Perla: ((to Monica)) Hey, (1.5) you cheater! (7.9) ((addressing her marble)) Hey, you win!
51 You won, my little ball!
52 Monica: ((squeals))
53 ((more marble racing))
54 Perla: ¡Da:me mi pelo:ta:! ¡Da:me mi pelo:ta:! (4.7)
55 Give me my ball! Give me my ball!
56 Monica: ((in a very high-pitched voice)) Yes! I win!
57 ((Clean up begins.))
Perla clearly dominates this interaction. Not only does she exuberantly proclaim that she
is winning (as in lines 1–3) or has won (line 9), she also taunts Monica, as well, stating that she
is going to beat her (line 9). Furthermore, Perla repeatedly chides Monica, accusing her of cheating
(lines 28–30, lines 33–34, line 50), questioning her about the whereabouts of her missing marble
(lines 21–23), and demanding that she return the marble (lines 54–55). Throughout
this interaction, to the best of our knowledge, we observed no evidence of Monica cheating.
Instead, Perla simply seemed frustrated when her marble rolled away out of sight or did not
complete the course first, and she seemed to blame Monica, somewhat jokingly, for her bad luck.
In contrast, Monica never questions or chides Perla. Also note the differences in the girls’
utterances when their marbles are victorious or about to be victorious. (When a literal translation
would differ from a gloss, we first provide the literal translation from Spanish into English,
followed by the gloss.)
(1) Monica: O, ¡yo gané! (lines 19–20)
Oh, I won!
(2) Monica: I win! (line 56)
(3) Perla: …te estoy ganando. (line 1)
…you I am winning.
… I’m beating you.
(4) Perla: Yo te gané. (line 9)
I you won.
I beat you.
(5) Perla: Yo te gané primero. (line 33)
I you won first.
I beat you first.
Monica never specifies over whom she has been victorious. In contrast, when claiming
victory, Perla specifies that she has beaten Monica by including the pronoun te (you) in her
utterances.
Although Monica is clearly capable of speaking English (see line 56), according to the state’s
testing, Monica’s English skills are at the beginning stage, whereas Perla’s are considered intermediate.
Although we lack sufficient evidence to prove this claim, it may be that Perla’s switch to
English for lines 40–57 has the effect of silencing Monica somewhat if she feels less able to interact
in this language. Perla’s use of English for an extended period of time may serve as one more way
in which she can dominate the interaction.
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From our preliminary data, it appears that it is not just students’ English skills but their abilities
to switch between Spanish and English that facilitate their ability to exercise power in the
interactions we observed. However, students with beginning English skills sometimes use the
English they do command in order to refuse requests made of them. Consider this very brief
exchange between two third grade students, Eduardo and Yesenia. Eduardo is a tall, outgoing boy
born in the US. Though Spanish is his native language, Eduardo has already been formally
redesignated by the school as fluent in English on the basis of high standardized test scores in
second grade. Such redesignation by the beginning of third grade is quite unusual for students in
the bilingual program, who receive the majority of their instruction in Spanish during their first
years of school. Eduardo is almost always at the center of activity in the classroom, establishing the
rules for games, giving out Pokemon cards that other students proceed to trade during free time, or
proposing bets with other students. He is a clear leader and other students seem to want to be his
friends. He almost always speaks in English, but he will use Spanish on occasion. Yesenia, on the
other hand, is a shy, slight girl. Though she was born in the United States, Yesenia’s English skills
lag behind those of many of her peers, and she typically chooses to use Spanish, unlike most other
students in the class. She tends to interact primarily with a girl, Lizbeth, who immigrated from
Mexico at the end of second grade.
During free time one Friday, Yesenia has been sitting at a table in the back of the classroom
with Lizbeth working on her own art project. Eduardo approaches. He has just been speaking in
English to another student, but he switches to Spanish to address Yesenia.
Eduardo: ((to Yesenia)) Agarras otra hoja mismo, trata de colorearlo otros mismo, y luego los
cortas los dos para afuera, y luego lo doblas y lo pegas más.
Get another of the same sheets of paper, try to color the other ones in the same way, and then cut
out two of them, and then fold it, and glue it more.
Yesenia: I don’t wanna do that.
Eduardo made a suggestion in Spanish, his dispreferred language, and Yesenia refused his
suggestion in English, her dispreferred language. Both went against their general language
preferences here. Eduardo seemed to be trying to accommodate to his perception of Yesenia’s
language preference, making his suggestion more appealing by couching it in the language she
preferred. Yet Yesenia responded in English, seemingly marking not just her refusal of his
suggestion but also her refusal of his language choice. This fits with Li Wei’s (1994) finding that
bilingual children may use code-switching to mark dispreferred second turns in conversation, such
as refusing a request. In addition to marking her refusal of Eduardo’s request and her refusal of his
language choice, Yesenia may also be claiming an identity as an English speaker, since, as Legarreta
(1977), Zentella (1981), Freeman (1998), and Palmer (2008) have found, even in bilingual
programs English typically has higher status. Meanwhile, though Eduardo was rebuffed in this
interaction, he found other ways to exercise power in the classroom. After Yesenia rejected his
suggestion, Eduardo simply left and went back to being a ringleader of the Pokemon trading
activity nearby.
Looking to the future
Despite the insights into bilingual education settings that discourse analysis has provided, as we
hope to have illustrated in this chapter, its use as a research method has dwindled in recent
decades, particularly within the United States. The major funding mechanism for research related
to bilingual education in the US was Title VII, the Bilingual Education Act, which was enacted
in 1968 to support the education of language minority students and reauthorized at regular
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intervals through to 2002. Title VII accepted and enabled basic research on classroom language
use, especially through the mid-1980s (Moran and Hakuta, 1995). However, the 1980s ushered
in the standards movement, an effort to raise student achievement by defining a set of rigorous
academic standards, to which all students would be held accountable, and then testing students’
proficiency in these standards. This movement created an overwhelming emphasis on academic
achievement, and in this climate educational research focusing on student outcomes and program
evaluation has increasingly overshadowed research such as discourse analysis, which focuses on
the processes through which education occurs. Meanwhile, the focus on academic achievement
has been accompanied by a focus on measuring the effects of specific interventions on student
achievement, and research designs that constitute or approximate randomized field trials are now
considered the gold standard, in spite of recommendations by authorities such as the National
Research Council to look more broadly at the scientific basis of educational research (Shavelson
and Towne, 2002). In a recent report to Congress describing the research agenda of the Institute
of Education Sciences, the branch of the federal government that provides the bulk of education
research funding, the word “discourse” appears only once, in a project unrelated to discourse
analysis (Institute of Education Sciences, 2008).
Discourse analysis does not lend itself easily to the current education research paradigm. Yet
understanding the nested relationship between how language is used in the classroom and how
bilinguals use languages in different ways is basic to understanding how language mediates
academic learning. Although many academics and practitioners readily recognize the importance
of academic language and academic vocabulary, little attention is currently paid to the discourse
within which this language occurs. While the current research paradigm offers limited possibilities
for research using discourse analysis, we see several lines of research that might prove fruitful,
all of which are currently being explored by small numbers of researchers but could be expanded.
First, building on work conducted by Schleppegrell (2003, 2004), researchers could use discourse
analysis to explore the differing demands of discourses across academic disciplines, with an
ultimate goal of developing methods to support students in becoming successful users of the
unique discourses of science, mathematics, social studies, and so on. Second, more research on
ways in which peers support one another’s academic learning through language brokering could
be explored as well. One example of such work is Bayley et al.’s (2005) study of the ways in
which bilingual students served as language brokers for recent immigrants in an English-medium
middle school science class. Given the increasing geographic spread of the language minority
population, an increasing percentage of teachers are responsible for educating students not yet
fluent in English, and often such teachers do not speak the primary languages of these students.
By better understanding the kinds of language brokering in which students within linguistically
diverse classrooms engage, educators could potentially develop methods for encouraging such
brokering when necessary. Finally, numerous researchers have expressed concerns about the
achievement of language minority students within dual-immersion classrooms (cf. Valdés, 1997).
In such classrooms equal numbers of majority and minority language speakers are educated
together, with the goal of building students’ fluency in both the majority and the minority
language; yet the language minority students often lag behind the language majority students in
academic achievement. Given the increasing popularity of dual-immersion classrooms, research
such as Palmer’s (2008) and Freeman’s (1998) could be expanded by using discourse analysis to
explore the relative status of the majority and minority languages and their speakers in such
classrooms and to identify ways in which the academic identities of the language minority
students within such classrooms could be supported. We remain hopeful that the powerful
tools within discourse analysis can serve as a valuable resource for improving educational
outcomes for language minority students.
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Transcription conventions
(()) Information between double parentheses represents contextual, extra-linguistic
information, such as who is being addressed or actions that are occurring.
(guess) Words between parentheses represents the transcriber’s best guess for a stretch of talk that
was difficult to hear.
[ A square bracket marks where overlap by another speakers begins.
? An initial question mark indicates a conversational turn by a speaker whose identity
cannot be determined.
(0.5) Numbers between parentheses represent the duration of pauses, given in seconds and
tenths of seconds.
ti:me A colon after a vowel indicates that the duration of the vowel lengthened.
italics Italics are used for English translations of Spanish utterances.
bold Bold is used to indicate words that were given particular emphasis by the speaker.
Further reading
For those interested in learning more about the application of discourse analysis to understanding bilingualism
and bilingual education settings, there are numerous possibilities for further reading.
Zentella, A. C. (1997) Growing up Bilingual: Puerto Rican Children in New York. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
At a micro-level, Zentella’s classic uses discourse analysis to provide a fascinating, in-depth portrait of how
seven Puerto Rican girls growing up in New York City use English and Spanish across multiple dimensions
of their lives, including schooling.
Dutcher, N. (2004). Expanding educational opportunity in linguistically diverse societies. Washington DC:
Center for Applied Linguistics. Available online at: http://www.cal.org/resources/pubs/ford
report_040501.pdf (accessed 14 November 2009).
At a macro-level, this report by Dutcher, on behalf of the Center for Applied Linguistics (2004), describes
distinctive multilingual education programs in 13 different counties, providing insight into the variety of
forms that multilingual education can take depending on the linguistic context and the resources necessary for
programs to succeed.
Myers-Scotton, C. (2006) Multiple Voices: An Introduction to Bilingualism. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Finally, for those particularly interested in theory, Myers-Scotton offers a broad introduction to key topics in
bilingualism, including an overview of competing theoretical perspectives on language use in multilingual
settings. It is our hope that coming years will see a resurgence of work that applies discourse analysis to
multilingual educational environments.
Note
1 All names are pseudonyms.
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