Apropiación de la escritura de los niños ikoots

This investigation paper analyses the writing production of the ikoots children ‘huaves’ who are in the second grade of a bilingual elementary school. They are between seven and eight years old and speak ombeayiüts as their fist language and Spanish as their second language. However they are being literate in the second language. The work is from a quatitative perspective. The results show that the students are in an intermediate level in Spanish literacy and that they have passed the hypothesis of consonant-vowel syllabic composition. Meanwhile in ombeayiüts, they rely on linguistic transfer to represent the phonemes shared with Spanish. They don´t show great difficulties with the phonemes of stable writing but the conflict appears with the phonemes of unstable writing and with the phonemes in ombeayiüts.

Latinx Children’s Push and Pull of Spanish Literacy and Translanguaging

We explored 19 Latinx children’s literacies in Spanish and translanguaging by asking, “What are Latinx children’s experiences and beliefs regarding Spanish and translanguaging reading and writing? How do tutorial staff and teacher candidates (TCs) help the youth to resist hegemonic and bracketing practices of English-only?” This study took place in a South Texas tutorial agency, where children voluntarily attended for after-school homework help. Data sources consisted of questionnaires, interviews, focus groups, hobby essays, and newsletter articles. Most children reported negative school-related language experiences and expressed dislike and unease regarding Spanish and translanguaging reading and writing, although they lived less than 10 miles from the Mexico border. However, two tutorial staff and 15 TCs provided counter narratives and modeled that Spanish and translanguaged (hybrid) reading and writing are neither wrong nor difficult. Schools’ accountability pressures and the U.S. socio-political milieu move language to the center (centripetal forces), while forces that resist normalization are centrifugal. Implications relate to how neighborhood educational centers, TCs, and classroom teachers can help subaltern youth to resist centripetal language forces.

LANGUAGE AS SOCIAL PRACTICE: DECONSTRUCTING BOUNDARIES IN INTERCULTURAL BILINGUAL EDUCATION

ABSTRACT Although Peru’s Intercultural Bilingual Education (IBE) program has been attempting to pursue new directions, it still carries many ideologies and practices that have defined it since it started half a century ago. In this article, I discuss the way some of these ideologies and practices related to language are reproduced in a preservice teacher training program in one of the capital city’s private universities, which implements a national policy of social inclusion for Quechua-speaking youth from vulnerable contexts. On the basis of diverse dichotomies (L1/L2, Spanish use/Quechua use, Spanish literacy practices/Quechua literacy practices, Quechua speaker/Spanish speaker), the program produces two types of hierarchized subjectivities: one related to the subject educated in Quechua and another related to the subject educated in Spanish, both coming from a conception of languages as discrete codes that go together with fixed ethnolinguistic groups and bounded cultural practices (GARCÍA et al., 2017). In the context of new sociocultural dynamics and bilingualisms, young students in the program subvert these divisions and begin to trace new paths for IBE and Quechua in Perú.

Early EFL Instruction and L1 Literacy

This study investigates the relationship between early English as a foreign language (EFL) learning and L1 literacy development in Mexican public schools. Researchers sought confirmatory findings about whether and in which ways early EFL exposure may affect students’ L1 literacy skills via a study evaluating the L1 Spanish literacy of 61 first graders using an adapted literacy assessment. Experimental group participants received EFL instruction during grades K-1, and those in the control group did not. A one-way independent samples comparison of means on the literacy assessment revealed that participants from the experimental group who had received EFL instruction scored significantly higher on all sections of the assessment than those participants in the control group. Results may inform programmatic decision-making about simultaneous or sequential approaches on the impact of early EFL on biliteracy development, with broader implications that examine who has access to early EFL instruction, and whether it will ultimately lead to higher L2 proficiency.

International Migration and the Academic Performance of Mexican Adolescents

We analyze path models of a nationally representative sample of Mexican adolescents in 2008 to explore how migration variables interact with school retention to shape their migration plans, effort in school, and achievement on a standardized measure of Spanish literacy. Among other findings, we discover that more immediate plans are associated with lower performance for students considering migration and that this relationship varies by family socioeconomic status. We also find that parent migration exposure negatively affects achievement for some groups. We interpret findings in terms of structural inequalities in Mexico and conclude with recommendations to enrich academic learning opportunities for children and youth within migrant families and communities.