Introduction to Volume 47, Issue 1

Welcome to the first issue of 2024 with your new editorial team for the Bilingual Research Journal. This issue of the BRJ attests to the importance of critical theories of language in examining inequities in bilingual education contexts. Authors of these articles draw from raciolinguistic perspectives, AsianCrit, heteroglossia, and Vygotsky’s concept of perezhivanie to examine the perspectives and experiences of pre- and in-service teachers, students in a Two-Way Immersion program, family ideologies about language, and the historical forces at play in the shortage of AAPI teachers in bilingual education. These critical perspectives illustrate the raciolinguistic dynamics at play – or the ways in which language and race are contemporarily and historically co-naturalized – in the experiences of multilingual people of Color across geographical contexts, further contributing to our understanding of bilingual education teaching and learning.

The first article paints a picture of the landscape of bilingual education research published from 2015–2020. The authors, Emily Holtz and Jemimah Young, employ an innovative methodology, quantitative content analysis (QCA), along with a qualitative deductive approach using Ruiz’ framework of language orientations in language planning to analyze research articles across four important bilingual research journals for the time period of 2015–2020. The major trends identified in this body of work include a majority of research being qualitative, conducted in elementary school settings, with dual language programming, in either the Northeast or the West of the United States. The authors point out four main areas that warrant more research attention: (1) the middle school years, (2) longitudinal studies that can capture the process to reclassification (or not), (3) more research in the Southeast, as it has the fastest growing population of emergent bilingual students in the country, and (4) more quantitative studies. The authors note that while qualitative studies can illuminate important processes at the school or classroom level, more quantitative studies should be conducted given that policy tends to be based on quantitative data. Especially in light of the fact that, while the research tends to highlight dual language programs, it does not reflect the reality of most emergent bilinguals in the U.S., who are taught in English-centric educational programs. This article is an important read for the bilingual education research community in order to understand where we are now and where we need to go.

In our second article, Wenyang Sung examines the ideologies of Chinese parents’ family language policies in relation to heritage language maintenance among their children. Using AsianCrit, Sung examines how White supremacy creates the conditions for Asianization where Asian bodies are ascribed as perpetually foreign, a problematic nativist stance. In addition to this ascription, there is the enduring model minority stereotype of the high achieving Asian community, often used as a wedge to pit other groups of color against each other. Sung argues that such constructions are reproduced by White supremacy, instrumentally using Asians to prove that achievement is possible. Given these ascriptions, Sung’s interviews demonstrate that Chinese families often acquiesce to English over Chinese use in varied social contexts as they recognize the capital it presumably offers their children. Further, English is often used as a tool to reinforce their children’s national origin, and to position them more fully within educational contexts who may question their belonging. In the critical discourse analysis, we learn how parents draw from their own experiences of linguistic racism, hoping that an emphasis on English will offer different social positionings for their children. Sung’s work connects linguistic racism within the AAPI community and is timely and significant given the increase of anti-Asian hate in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. Further, Sung represents a growing representation of scholarship and scholars in AAPI bilingual education, a needed area of representation.

Doris Villareal focuses on an in-service teacher who adopts a postura activista stance in her work with immigrant children and families. The activist teacher actively resists district policies which prohibit the distribution of any resources related to immigration advice for families, sending out official documents to teachers telling them the “do’s and don’ts” of engaging with immigrant families. In resistance, the activist teacher distributes guidance materials to families on what to do when an immigration raid may be imminent. The teacher also posts to district websites, asking questions that center the immigrant families, working in opposition to the district’s anti-immigration stance. Villareal demonstrates that the teacher’s political and ideological clarity led to a Freirian conscientization informing a sophisticated praxis of resistance. This in-depth qualitative picture of one individual is important given the experiences bilingual teachers themselves face, as highlighted in the following two articles.

In our fourth article, “Raciolinguistic Chronotopes in Bilingual Teacher Candidates’ Language Portraits: A Call for Centering Race in Bilingual Teacher Education,” Christian Fallas-Escobar and Ryan Pointer examine how race/racism has shaped the linguistic experiences of 17 bilingual Latina teacher candidates in Texas. Analyzing the candidates’ language portraits multimodally through the lens of raciolinguistic chronotopes – or the assemblage of time, space and place in how race and language come to be naturalized – the authors show how bilingual Latinas grappled with “racially hegemonic modes of perception vis-à-vis their own lived experiences.” The analysis shows how the teacher candidates used the semiotic modes of time, space, place and the body to illustrate their raciolinguistic experiences. Fallas-Escobar and Pointer argue that this analysis demonstrates the importance of centering race when using language portraits, and indeed, proposes conceptualizing language portraits as raciolinguistic landscapes (Fallas-Escobar & Deroo, 2023), as this “would require that we situate the body/the individual within historical (time) and sociocultural (place/space) contexts’’ (p. 30). This is an important read, particularly for teacher educators and researchers who employ linguistic portraits as educational and research tools.

In our fifth article, Monica Gonzalez Ybarra, Citlalli Garcia, and Marisol Jimenez focus on Latina teachers and how they enact critical linguistic cariño among their Latinx students. Drawing from historic ethnographic work on care, Ybarra, Garcia and Jimenez extend this work arguing that the sociopolitical context of language is what girds the critical linguistic cariño that teachers foster amongst their students. Framing their work through raciolinguistic perspectives, the researchers engaged with five Latinx teachers participating in pláticas to describe how they fostered the conditions of care among their Latinx students. Latinx teachers shared their stories of linguicism and racism creating reciprocity, trust, and care. The affordances for translanguaging in the classroom expanded and enriched the ways students could engage, enlivening their agency and affirming their identities. Ultimately, this led to deep trust and care informing a pedagogy of critical cariño. Latinx teachers in the study critiqued how they were constructed as racially and linguistically less than, demonstrating how race and language are normalized and naturalized intersectionally, and subtractively. This distinct use of raciolinguistic perspectives sheds light on tools and approaches, like pláticas that we can use in our own work as scholars and educators.

Through the lens of heteroglossia and raciolinguistic perspectives, Lauren Braunstein and Jennifer Barreto explored how the roles, identities, and linguistic practices of African American students in one Two Way Immersion 5th grade classroom were regulated or constrained. One of their findings focused on how two African American students negotiated a writing assignment that asked students to write their autobiografía. The authors illustrate how the assignment itself presumed an “immigrant narrative of self where each individual traces themself back to a place outside of the United States … and each ‘place’ had a corresponding symbol (a flag)” (p. 9). Thus, the two African American students in the classroom had to figure out how to creatively represent their identities and cultures outside of the immigrant trope and find ways of “asserting their lived experiences and linguistic and cultural repertoires” (p. 11). This article adds to the small yet growing literature on African American students in bilingual education, an important area in need of more research and advocacy.

In our seventh article, Sharon Chang employs Vygotsky’s concept of perezhivanie to examine how Asians are stigmatized within educational contexts. “Perezhivanie refers to a person’s ability to move forward by reflecting on life events and utilizing psychological tools to gain new perspectives” (p. 2). Given the increase in anti-Asian hate incidents during the COVID-19 pandemic, Chang asserts that the lack of AAPI teachers in the field of bilingual teaching is reflective of multiple forms of linguistic racism that creates exclusionary conditions for AAPI educators, particularly in bilingual and dual language contexts. In this conceptual article, Chang’s use of perezhivanie describes three refraction strands including (1) xenophobia and linguistic racism; (2) model minoritizing and cultural homogenization; and (3) perpetual foreigner and the bilingual teacher shortage. Through a careful review of primary documents and the testimony of AAPI activists, Chang articulates how these three interrelated strands are historicized and then brought to the present, revealing newer perspectives. Chang’s final strand of AAPIs being ascribed as natives or perpetually foreign has created the conditions for APPI underrepresentation in bilingual teaching. The newer diaspora of AAPIs often relent to English as it holds possible promise for resisting the nativist construction. Overwhelming AAPIs are represented in ESL models versus bilingual ones and thus, this model frames English as the language of power, which reduces the possibility of preparing a future AAPI community for bilingual education. Chang’s historical and conceptual work represents one of the first of its kind to explore the AAPI shortage within bilingual education.

Taken together, the articles in this issue pointedly illustrate the historical and cumulative impact of racism and linguicism on communities of Color at distinct scales. We see how the racism and ideologies experienced by Asian American and Pacific Islander communities not only impact family language policies but also historical shortages in AAPI teachers in bilingual education contexts. Similarly, the linguistic experiences of Latinx teachers and teacher candidates cannot be understood outside of their racial experiences – something that the raciolinguistic perspectives across these research articles make clear. These critical experiences not only inform but also motivate teachers to enact critical linguistic cariño and a postura activista to resist xenophobic anti-immigrant sentiment and policies. Finally, our first article allows us to see that in order to continue advocating for more bilingual education – for both Latinx and non-Latinx communities of Color, research must include more quantitative and mixed-methodologies that can powerfully illustrate the impact of bilingual education for policy makers and legislators. To this observation, we add the need for more research on dual language learners in early childhood settings.

Finally, we have two reviews of important books in our field. The first, Dual Language Education in the US: Rethinking Pedagogy, Curricula, and Teacher Education to Support Dual Language Learning for All, edited by Pablo C. Ramírez and Christian J. Faltis, is written by Syukron Fajriansyah, Yopi Malagola, and Wulan Wulan, and second, Multimodal Literacies in Young Emergent Bilinguals: Beyond Print-Centric Practices edited by Sally Brown and Ling Hao, is written by Chenlu Jin.