Reconstructing the Status Quo: Linguistic Interaction in a Dual-Language School

This paper investigates how bilingualism is understood and practiced by adults and students in a dual-language elementary school. In this dual-language program, native English speakers and native Spanish speakers receive language and content instruction in both languages in linguistically integrated settings. I examine the participants’ use of “tactics of intersubjectivity” to understand how children use their two languages to ally themselves with and distance themselves from particular people, groups, and linguistic varieties. I ultimately argue that, while the program model is fundamentally based on the idea of the separation of languages and “parallel monolingualism”, it does offer students opportunities to explore linguistic forms and their attendant social meanings. “Si se aprovechan de nosotros en inglés, van a aprovechar de nosotros también en español.” (If they take advantage of us in English, they will take advantage of us in Spanish as well.) For Maria . . . the Spanish language is a resource that has served . . . as a shared treasure, as a significant part of a threatened heritage, and as a secret language. Many times, Spanish has also served to bring the community together, to delineate borders . . . she worries about giving it away casually to the children of the powerful. (Valdés, 1997, p. 393) This paper examines the ways in which students and adults in one duallanguage fifth grade discursively construct bilingual ideologies and practices through everyday interactions in the school. I seek to connect participants’ bilingual practices to their developing understandings of themselves and their peers as both members and creators of a democratic, yet often unjust society. Dual-language (DL) programs challenge the prevailing paradigm of “language-as-problem” (Ruiz, 1984, p. 15) by conceptualizing native languages