← NJDOE Bilingual/ESL Podcast
NJDOE Bilingual/ESL Podcast
Episode 15 - - Language Education with Nelson Flores
00:23:08
Nelson is an Assistant Professor in the Education…
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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the New Jersey Department of Education's Bureau of Bilingual ESL Education podcast. I'm Ken Bond, the state program coordinator and your host. In this podcast, I have bite sized conversations about English language learner education with leaders in the field. During this episode, I'll be talking with Nelson Flores about language education policy. Nelson is an assistant professor in the Educational Linguistics Division of the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education. Nelson, thanks for guest on today's episode.
- [00:33]
B
Thanks for having me.
- [00:36]
A
In New Jersey, we have a long standing tradition of bilingual education in many of our schools. In your opinion, how can bilingual education benefit schools?
- [00:49]
B
So the first answer that people typically give for thinking about the benefits of bilingual education are looking at the performance of students on test scores based on bilingual education. And what research shows is that students who are in bilingual education programs outperform students who are not in bilingual education programs in standardized test of English when we look at them in the long term. This includes English language learners or students who are coming into the programs not speaking English, and in addition includes students who are native English speakers. And so when we look at test scores over the long term, so students in these programs, regardless of their linguistic backgrounds, outperform students who are in monolingual English settings on standardized test scores in English. Now, to me, that's not necessarily the most important benefit of bilingual education. Certainly we want students to be doing well on standardized tests. However, there are lots of intangible benefits of bilingual education that we really can't necessarily measure on a test. So for example, students who are coming from immigrant homes who are in bilingual education programs are going to be more effectively able to communicate with their parents or their grandparents. A very common phenomenon within immigrant communities is that by the second or third generation, children are not able to speak the native language of their parents or their grandparents. And so you have a dynamic where a child may speak only English and their parents speak only another language and they're really the communication within the family breaks down. So bilingual education is a way of ensuring the integrity of the family, ensuring the strong connectedness of families, which of course is important for a lot of different reasons. And in addition, bilingual education is also just beneficial at raising awareness of different cultures. And so these are things that we can't necessarily assess on a standardized test. So in addition to doing better on standardized tests, children and bilingual education programs also have the benefits of all of these other things that I'm talking about.
- [02:56]
A
That's great. So much of your work is focused on the intersection of race, culture, bilingual education and all of the various aspects of that in schools, in U.S. schools. In what ways are these issues related?
- [03:17]
B
So to answer that question, I think requires historical understanding of the intersections of language and race and the ways that in particular in the U.S. language and race have been co constructed. So if you go back to kind of colonial U.S. society, well before it was the U.S. the language practices of indigenous peoples were oftentimes described as kind of being animalistic or being not fully a language in the ways that European languages were languages, which of course was part of the construction of indigenous people as less human than European colonizers, which of course was then used as part of the justification for genocide against indigenous peoples. When we get to the eugenics, that discourse shifts from an overtly racist discourse towards one that seems more scientific, where people are saying biological inferiority scientifically proves that certain languages are inferior to others because of the biological deficiencies of the people who speak those languages. That falls out of favor by the 1960s, where then the discourse primarily shifts towards cultural deficiencies. Cultural deficiencies of communities of color lead to inferior language practices. Now, while that discourse isn't one that we necessarily overtly use today, many of the ways that the language practices of communities of color are discussed oftentimes are coming from a similar paradigm or perspective. So research that looks at the supposed word gap between white middle class children and communities of color continues that legacy of framing the language practices of community of color as inferior to white middle class communities. And so I think the only way for us to really understand how those ideologies have come to be is really to understand the historical context that has developed these deficit perspectives. When we look at the history, we see overt racism, that sounds an awful lot like the ways that we talk about the language practices of children of color today in ways that we would think were not racist. I think looking at the historical context really raises provocative questions that I think we as educators need to reflect on in whether we're continuing this legacy of racism in the ways that we talk about the language practices of children of color and how we can develop alternative ways of understanding those language practices.
- [06:13]
A
Yeah, that's a great perspective to think through. In your work, you've challenged the assumptions of some bilingual education policies. Could you explain the reasons you think that some models of bilingual education may need to be re examined in terms of the policies and the ideologies that they come from and come out of?
- [06:39]
B
So when we think of bilingual communities, for example, sociolinguistic research since the 1960s and 1970s has shown that in bilingual communities, there isn't a neat separation of languages. And so my research is primarily focused on English Spanish, bilingualism, so I'll just use that as a point of entry. But it's true for really all language groups. When we look at children and their families, there's a fluid use of English and Spanish in these households that isn't marked in any way. It's just the way people communicate. Right. If you're bilingual, you're going to use all of your repertoire to communicate with people in your family. And young children aren't necessarily dividing language in the ways that adults would divide languages. And so we say, oh, that's English and that's Spanish. For young children, that might not be how they see it. That might just be, oh, this is the way I speak to my grandmother, and that's the way I speak to my teacher. One of the challenges of dual language programs is this idea that we should completely separate the languages, and that comes from a good intention. And so previously with bilingual education, where people were trying to figure out kind of how you develop strong programs, one of the practices that teachers adopted that wasn't effective was translating everything. And so if you are thinking of English and Spanish again, if you're saying everything in English and then saying it again in Spanish, there's no incentive for students who are English speakers to learn Spanish or students who are Spanish speakers to learn English because they know that you're going to translate everything from for them. So that was not, and it's still not an effective practice. However, then I think it went too far in the other direction, where now the idea is that an ideal program, you should have a strict separation of languages. The problem there is that children, many of the children in the program are not coming from homes where that strict separation of language is the norm. And so we are inadvertently sending a message that the language practices of their home are somehow illegitimate or somehow not valid in a school setting. And that's not an intentional message. But certainly if you're telling students that they're never allowed to mix languages, what you're telling them is that the language practices that they use in their home are not valid in a school setting. And so I'm not suggesting that dual language programs should not have a sense of when they're using English and when they're using Spanish or another language. I think it's important to have a macro understanding of which is the target language of a particular lesson. But within that, we need two things. One is we need flexibility so that we encourage students to actually use their bilingual repertoires to make sense in the classroom. I mean, in a bilingual program, we want to affirm bilingualism, right? We don't want students to pretend to be monolingual for an English lesson or pretend to be monolingual for a Spanish lesson. We want them to embrace their bilingual identities. But two, we also need strategic ways of bringing the languages together to affirm that bilingualism. And so we can have an English time, we can have a Spanish time, but we can have what I would call a translanguaging time, where the students actually have opportunities to create projects or to engage in tasks that really require them to use their entire bilingual repertoires as ways of affirming that they're coming from bilingual homes and that the goal of the program isn't for them to become English speakers and Spanish speakers in different contexts, but for them to really embrace their bilingualism in all contexts.
- [10:20]
A
That's an excellent point, and I think a huge takeaway for a lot of folks that will be listening. One thing that we've talked about and that I've heard you speak about is your study of racial linguistic ideologies. And I've seen that described as the idea that language and race are. Are co constructed in ways that might marginalize certain communities. And I think you've touched on a little bit of that idea previously in this interview. Could you unpack this concept a little bit for anyone who's listening who might be unfamiliar with that term?
- [10:54]
B
Right. So racial linguistic ideologies are ideologies that co construct language and race in ways that frame the language practices of communities of color as inherently deficient. And so previously, I was giving some of the historical context of how that came to be and the ways that racial linguistic ideologies were connected to the power relations of settler colonialism. Certainly we can think about the ways that racial linguistic ideologies were used to provide justification for the transatlantic slave trade. And so one of the ways that European colonizers were able to produce this dehumanization of communities of color was by calling into question the integrity of the language practices that they were using. And as I alluded to before, most people in polite society in the US Today would reject these overtly racist ways of talking about the language practices of communities of color. However, there continue to be deficit perspectives that are used to describe the language practices of students of color. And as I've said before, one of them is the word gap. Another one that I was talking about was kind of this imposition of the Strict separation of languages that seems to position the language practices of bilingual communities as a barrier to learning rather than a resource in learning. One of the things that I think it's important for educators to really reflect on are the ways that we may have inherited really problematic ways of talking about the language practices of students of color that may make us engage in teaching practices that undermine the explicit goal that many of us have in our classrooms of affirming the language practices of the students that are in front of us. And that, I think, a racial linguistic perspective really challenges all of us to really critically reflect on how we may be complicit in reproducing this problematic history and offers us kind of a point of entry for really reflecting on how we can do things differently in our own classrooms and how we can change the ways we talk about the language practices of our own students.
- [13:27]
A
Are there any other examples that you can think of, especially for folks who are working with English language learners, maybe in an ESL context, that they can think about reframing how they talk about some of the language practices of their students?
- [13:42]
B
So, I mean, I think in general, we can think about the ways that different types of bilingualism are valued in the society. And so I have been in schools where teachers will complain about, oh, those students are kind of in the bilingual class. They're not learning English, where in another context, white middle class students who are learning Spanish are celebrated. And I think we could say something similar in kind of how we even talk about students, whether they're in an ESL or a bilingual context, or thinking about them as English language learners, for example, and how that emphasizes one specific part of their identity, which is that they're learning English, but really doesn't really acknowledge the bilingualism that they also have because they also speak another language, and sometimes actually multilingualism, because they speak more than one other language. So even the categories that we use to describe them can really shape how it is that we interact with our students. Right? And so seeing our students as English language learners kind of frames it in terms of a challenge, right? They're learning English, and our job is to teach them English. Well, I mean, on some level, we're all learning English, right? We're all learning new words on a daily basis, and it's not a challenge to be learning new words. But if we were to call them bilingual or multilingual students, that may change how we interact with the students so that the issue isn't a challenge. It's not that having students in our class who are English language learners is a challenge. We could think of the multilingualism of our students and how that multilingualism can be a resource for engaging in standards based instruction for teachers.
- [15:37]
A
Currently, in the midst of the daily business of lesson planning, teacher evaluation, state assessments, and the day to day, the day to day successes and difficulties of teaching, how would you encourage them to continue to keep issues of equity and identity and an assets based approach on the forefront of what they do in the midst of kind of the day to day grind that a lot of teachers experience?
- [16:10]
B
So I think that when I work with classroom teachers, I think the first thing that I would like teachers to reflect on is kind of what is their locus of control? What are the things that they can control? There are lots of things that are outside of the control of classroom teachers. And I think we don't want to place an unfair burden on teachers and expect them to can resolve broad societal problems that have long histories that were not produced by teachers and can't be resolved by teachers. That said, there are things that teachers can control, right? They can control classroom interactions in their own classrooms. They can control the types of content that they're developing within certain parameters. They can control how they understand the language practices of their students. And so what I think teachers can do in their own classrooms is to really think about the stance that they're taking towards language diversity in their classrooms and really trying to reflect on what would it mean to see language diversity not as a challenge, but that I'm confronting in my classroom, but as a resource for teaching and learning. And how can I then use that stance to inform what I'm doing in my classroom, which can mean how I use that stance to, for example, interpret the Common Core standards. And so the Common Core standards are fairly broad in the types of skills that they want students to be able to engage with and can be interpreted in lots of different ways. Now typically they've been interpreted to be talking about monolingual English speaking tasks, but that's not necessarily how they have to be interpreted. So if we're thinking about author's craft, which is big in the Common Core Standards, author's craft is connected to questions about purpose and audience. Now bilingual children are coming into schools in kindergarten already understanding purpose and audience in many ways. Many of the times they understand when I'm speaking to, for example, my grandmother, I should use Spanish because that's the language that she prefers. There's a purpose, there's an audience. Now it seems that when I speak to my Teacher. My teacher seems to prefer English. Again, there's purpose and there's audience. So how can we build on that knowledge that children are already coming in with? My reading of the Common Core standards is that it's not necessarily talking about language in these rigid, dichotomous ways. It's instead saying we want students to be able to engage appropriately with audience purpose in mind. My argument is that our children can already do that. And so then rather than seeing what they're doing outside of the classroom as somehow separate from or not something that should be incorporated into classrooms, I think what teachers can begin to think about is how we can tap into that knowledge in ways that are aligned to the standards that we're expected to teach in our classrooms.
- [19:37]
A
Yeah, that's a fascinating perspective and one that I think can be easily applied in New Jersey to our New Jersey student learning standards. Terms of really affirming students identities through the standards, their linguistic identities, their language identities, and the way that they use language at home, in school, and in all the other contexts that they have to navigate in their day to day life. Is there anything that I haven't asked you that you think is important to share with those listening around this topic?
- [20:12]
B
Well, what I will say, and I think I already said this, but I want to reiterate the point that my analysis of racial linguistic ideologies is a structural analysis. So I'm looking at kind of, I'm looking at the ways that broad societal discourses that have a long history shape the ways that we talk about the language practices of students of color. So that's not what I'm not saying is that teachers are racist because it's not about individual intent. It's these broader discourses connected to broader histories that shape the ways that we become socialized into talking about the language practices of students of color. Now. So I'm not saying that individual teachers are racist. What I am saying is that individual teachers have agency in challenging those broad racial linguistic ideologies in their own classrooms. And so individual teachers are not culpable for the creation of those ideologies. But individual teachers can find spaces for challenging those ideologies in their own classrooms. And one way that I have worked with teachers in Philadelphia in doing that is through developing PA core aligned unit plans around translingual mentor texts that are primarily written in English but have some Spanish sprinkled in it because the author constructed the text in that way. And so the unit plan is centered around a close reading of that mentor text as a model for the students to reflect on. Wait, I do these things in my life all the time. You mean as an author? As a bilingual author? I actually can do this in my own writing for particular purposes with particular effects. And so it's treating the language practices of the students outside of the classroom as fundamental to the types of writing that they're going to be doing inside of the classroom.
- [22:32]
A
Nelson, this has been so great to be able to discuss this topic with you and I just want to thank you so much for joining me today. It's been great talking with you.
- [22:40]
B
Thank you for having me.
- [22:43]
A
Thank you for listening to this episode. If you would like more information about ESL and bilingual education in New Jersey, please visit our website at www.nj.gov education bilingual. If you this episode you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts or Google Play. Also please leave a review on the Apple Podcasts app. It really helps new listeners find our show.