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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 619

Part of Session 165: Language, Place and Identity (Other abstracts in this session)

The City as Small Spaces: Immigrant/Refugee Children's Language and Identity Development in a Community Center Program

Authors: Zuengler, Jane
Submitted by: Zuengler, Jane (University of Wisconsin-Madison, United States of America)

Urban residents experience “the city” as the various spaces that comprise their daily lives.  While some of the lived experiences of urban residents may span the metropolis as a whole (e.g., voting for mayor, serving on the city school board), many daily sites of communication constitute spaces of smaller scope.  For youth, a major site occupying much of their year is the formal school.  Yet, for many immigrant/refugee as well as locally-born youth, daily life also consists of spaces outside of the formal educational system for developing language as well as cultural identity.   These are often constituted as community-based centers or complementary schools (Creese and Blackledge, 2011; Lee and Hawkins, 2008).

 There are several reasons for sociolinguistic research on youth to focus attention  outside of the formal educational system.  Among them is the relative lack of research in such sites.  Firth (2007), pointing out the need for out-of-school research, states that formal classroom settings continue to be the primary focus in a lot of research.  Moreover, out-of-school, community-based sites may offer advantages over the formal classroom, especially for minority language and immigrant/refugee youth. 

The presentation draws on an ethnographic microanalysis (Erickson, 1995) that was conducted of an eight-week summer program on Philosophy.  The program was offered by a community learning center within a low-income housing complex in a US city.  Children attending the program came from Hmong refugee, African immigrant, Latino, and African-American families.  The presentation will focus on one of the program’s activities, which asked the children to capture, through filming or photography, philosophical concepts like “love,” “fear,” and others.  Data from the interactions of children undertaking this activity show how the event enabled both language and identity development, illustrating that “communication processes do not just proceed through ‘a language’ but through specialized and particular pieces of language” (Blommaert, 2010: 102-3), and that the children’s physical space, made available within the city, afforded opportunities for language to emerge within these “contexts of interaction” (Otsuji and Pennycook, 2009: 247).

Blommaert, J. 2010. The sociolinguistics of globalization.  Cambridge.

Creese, A., and A. Blackledge. 2011. Separate and flexible bilingualism in complementary schools: Multiple language practices in interrelationship. Journal of Pragmatics, 43(5): 1196-1208.

Erickson, F. 1995. Ethnographic microanalysis. In S. L. McKay & N. H. Hornberger (Eds.), Sociolinguistics and language teaching, 283-306.  Cambridge.

Firth, A. 2007.  Business talk in a nonnative language: Reconsidering ‘fluency’ in EFL.  Public lecture given at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin, U.S.A. February 12.

Lee, S. J., and M. R. Hawkins.  2008.  “Family is here”: Learning in community-based after-school programs.  Theory into Practice, 47(1): 51-58.

Otsuji, E., & A. Pennycook. 2009. Metrolingualism: Fixity, fluidity and language in flux. International Journal of Multilingualism, 7(3): 240-254.