Hybrid languaging and literacy practices as cross-cultural competence in a Spanish-English Two-Way Immersion Program

Abstract

How do children from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds interact with one another within a bilingual Spanish-medium classroom? That is the question this analysis sought to answer. As part of an ethnographic discourse-analytic study of a new two-way immersion bilingual program within an urban school, I analyze one particular literacy event amongst three young readers from different linguistic and ethno-racial positionings and varying knowledge of Spanish. This literacy event illustrates how students expand their communicative repertoires to include a variety of Englishes and Spanishes as they experiment with different ways of communicating and expressing themselves. In this event, English, Spanish, Spanglish, and African American English were spoken and used by all three participants as they reacted to the text. This analysis illustrates how students show alignment towards each other through their hybrid languaging and literacy practices, and in this way, learn more than simply language from one another, children learn subtle ways of becoming inter-culturally competent through their languaging.