Contextualizing Bilingualism: Emerging From the Classroom to the Community

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Introduction

What potential in human beings—children, teachers, and ourselves—do we want to develop?

A zest for living that comes from taking the world with all five senses alert. Lively intellectual curiosities that turn the world into an exciting laboratory and keep one ever a learner. Flexibility when confronted with change and ability to relinquish patterns that no longer fit the present. The courage to work, unafraid and efficiently, in a world of new needs, new problems, and new ideas. Gentleness combined with justice in passing judgement on other human beings. Sensitivity, not only to the formal rights of the other fellow, but to him as another human being seeking a good life through his own standards. A striving to live democratically, in and out of schools, as the best way to advance our concept of democracy.

--Lucy Sprague Mitchell, This I believe, 1951

Credo of the Bank Street College of Education

New York, NY

Thoughts of a traditional 'foreign' language lab may conjure images of desks with partitions and students donning headphones repeating prescribed, isolated phrases to no one in particular. This may not have been what educational philosopher John Dewey (1957) had in mind when he called the classroom a laboratory, a place for experiential learning and discovery. Curiosity about living and learning, inside and outside of the classroom, is advocated by Sprague Mitchell (1951). Even decades later, it follows that applied learning may be even more keenly poised for fostering discovery if the laboratory is mobile—a classroom outside the classroom.

Taking learning outside of the classroom can be transformational. Cone and Harris (1996) note that “the transformational nature of experiential education” cannot be underestimated (p. 43). Reframing the Spanish class as “a place to develop biliteracy” and the Spanish student as an “emergent bilingual” is a transformation in itself. One such program with transformational potential has been implemented through a community partnership between a university and a local school district's dual language (DL) program. BRILLA (Bilingual Readiness through Interaction, Language, Literacy, and Alliances) seeks to align best practices in applied learning pedagogy with opportunities for all students to increase academic and communicative language skills in Spanish while exploring and celebrating the assets that bilingualism and bilingual education bring to one's life and community. The following research focuses on a single-site, descriptive case study of a traditional lab course to fulfill a modern language (ML) requirement is reimagined. BRILLA's applied learning pedagogy allows students to have interactive experiences in the target language (TL) outside of the classroom with a native speaker during their lab class time.

In Fall 2019, 37 students in two separate sections of third-semester Spanish labs at the university level participated in the BRILLA applied-learning experience in a local dual language school near the college campus. By Fall 2021, more than 300 L2 Spanish students (University lab students: ULS) have participated in BRILLA. An overview of the program follows in Table 1.

Table 1.

Overview of the BRILLA program

Key Terms in this Chapter

Cultural Humility: Characterized by flexibility and self-reflective actions in which culturally humble individuals acknowledge what they know and do not know; those who have developed cultural humility search for and access resources that may enhance immeasurably the interactions and relationships in which they may find themselves engaged (Tervalon & Murray-García, 1998).

Second Language Learning: Conscious language learning that typically takes place in a classroom which is thought to be enhanced by direct instruction in grammar rules and error correction; the conscious grammar from the learner's first language is often used in learning an additional language (Krashen, 1981, pp. 2, 7).

Transformational Pedagogy: An instructional approach “empowers learners to critically examine their prior experiences, assumptions, and beliefs critically and to reconstruct them in ways that enable them to acquire new knowledge, attitudes, and skills in light of reflective experience” (Ukpokodu, 2009, p. 63).

Academic Language: Refers to a type of language (or the constellation of language features) most prevalent in school or academic learning (Kim, Petscher, Uccelli, & Kelcey, 2020; Schleppegrell, 2013; Bailey & Butler, 2002; Snow & Uccelli, 2009; Snow, 1983).

Target Language (TL): The language studied in a modern language course.

Heritage Language Learner/Heritage Speaker (of a Language): Someone raised in a home where a non-English language was spoken and is to some extent bilingual in English and the heritage language (Valdés, 2001).

Applied Learning Pedagogies: Characterized by a design that includes nurturing learning and growth through a reflective, experiential process that takes students out of traditional classroom settings (Ash & Clayton, 2009).

Modern Language: A living or modern-day spoken language as a subject of study, contrasted with classical Latin and Greek.

Communicative Confidence: Associated with both social and cognitive components that are intertwined, including the L2 learner's (emergent bilinguals') perceived L2 proficiency; associated with low anxiety; if the quality and quantity of interaction with the target language community are relatively frequent and pleasant, self-confidence in using the L2 can develop (Wong, 2015, p. 83).

Second Language Acquisition: A natural approach to acquiring an additional language, for example, parallel to how a child acquires their first language (Krashen, 1982).

Language Other Than English: LOTE; term typically used for what was formerly known as “foreign” languages (Clyne, 1991).