Hypothesis and Theoretical Frame

The hypothesis of this study was that teachers have an internalized model of what constitutes language competence for the bilingual students in their classrooms and that they use both overt and covert means to convey this to their students through an interactive social process termed “language socialization.” Language socialization is the process through which children are taught the socially appropriate ways to speak and use language in different social contexts, such as at home, with strangers, at school or with respected elders. It is both part of the process through which young children become competent members of a society, as well as a product of socialization (Schieffelin & Ochs, 1986). Socialization is defined as “an interactional display (covert or overt) to a novice of expected ways of thinking, feeling, and acting...and that through their participation in social interactions, children come to internalize and gain performance competence in the sociocultural defined contexts” (Ochs, 1986, p. 2). The purpose of this dissertation research was to identify: 1) the teachers’ expectations for language use in the classroom for their bilingual kindergarten students, and 2) the means through which those expectations were conveyed to their students.
 

Literature Review

This descriptive study was designed to add to our existing knowledge regarding communication patterns in the classroom, without making claims about the comparative effectiveness of any one communicative style over another. There is a significant body of research on language socialization in communities outside of the United States, such as the Pacific Islands (see, for example, Ochs, 1982; Ochs, 1988). However, according to Heath (1993, p. 267) “we still lack within U.S. society detailed examinations...of the acquisition of structures and uses of oral language and patterns of language socialization.” This lack of research is especially apparent for bilingual populations, such as the group which is the focus of this present study.

The results of this study should inform our knowledge of how teachers convey their assumptions about what it means to be a competent communicator in the classroom to their students. The results should also inform our knowledge about what the assumptions are that teachers hold about language competency for young bilingual pupils. This information will be useful for critiquing and constructing language assessments for bilingual students. This is critical because of the serious difficulties experienced by educators in appropriately identifying which students qualify for special education services (Figueroa & Garcia, 1994; Rueda, 1989; Valdés & Figueroa, 1994). Currently, culturally and linguistically diverse students are disproportionately represented in special education programs, partically due to the lack of adequate assessment tools (Harry, 1994; Office for Civil Rights, 1994). According to Heath (1986):
 

Methods

Data was collected in three bilingual kindergarten classrooms in an urban elementary school over the course of an entire school year. The study participants consisted of the three bilingual teachers in the kindergarten “pod” and their native Spanish speaking pupils. The principal data sources were 1) audio- and videotape recordings of everyday classroom routines, 2) audiotaped teacher interviews collected three times during the year, and 3) documents collected during the course of the project. Both qualitative and quantitative analytic methods were employed. The audio and video recordings were focused on normal classroom interactions between the teachers and students, as well as between students. Precautions were being taken to ensure that these recordings were as non-intrusive as possible.
 

Data Analysis

Multiple perspective analysis (Green & Harker, 1988b) was chosen because of the complex nature of the phenomenon under investigation. This approach “involves bringing a number of different theoretical and analytic traditions to bear on a problem” (Green & Harker, 1988a, p. 2), which is important as “each perspective highlights specific dimensions which at times converge and at other times provide unique information not previously identified or examined” (Green & Harker, 1988a, p. 3). Four distinct levels of analysis were used in this study to assist in untangling the complex nature of language socialization in three bilingual kindergarten classrooms.
 
 

A wide variety of documents were collected during the study year. These included: newspaper articles, copies of the standardized tests administered to students, report card forms, the published school district kindergarten curriculum, and information about the kindergarten reading program. This data provided information about the educational context in which teachers and students operated. It also provided information about the language values the school held for bilingual kindergartners.
 
 

Audiotaped teacher interviews were transcribed using utterance-based transcription conventions. The analysis focused primarily on content of talk, rather than linguistic features. The focus of analysis of these interviews was on the judgments for the quality of students’ language use made by the educators and what this implied for their expectations for language use for bilingual kindergartners. During the final set of teacher interviews, the teachers exhibited students’ work as they described why they judged some examples to be particularly good and others less so. These work samples were analyzed along with the transcribed teacher interviews, as they provided concrete exemplars of the teachers’ internal models of “good language use.”
 
 

Level 3: Review and Coding of Classroom Videos

Approximately 70 hours of normal classroom activities were videotaped over a period of nine months. These recordings were distributed evenly between the three bilingual classrooms. This videotape data, divided into episodes, was reviewed for recurrent patterns and entered into a database (FileMaker Pro). The analysis of these videotapes focused on the types of language use that were supported and fostered by teachers and peers during normal classroom interactions.
The initial coding of the data relied on categories discussed in the literature (see, for example Cazden, 1988; Heath, 1986; Philips, 1972). These initial categories included episode name, date recorded, teacher, tape start and end time, academic subject, setting, task, activity, participants, topics of talk, language genres, and recording quality. Additionally, notes written concurrent to the video recording were entered into the data base.

Following repeated viewing of the data and discussion with colleagues, four additional coding categories were added, along with notes taken during video review. These new categories included: 1) language of teacher talk, 2) whether singing occurred during the excerpt, 3) whether any instances of sustained student-teacher conversation were observed, and 4) whether students appeared to attempt to initiate conversation with the teacher. This last category was instrumental in identifying brief segments for microanalysis.
 
 

This last stage of analysis follows in the tradition of language socialization studies which, according to Jacoby and Ochs (1995, p. 175) “closely examine the moment-by-moment conversational unfolding of situated interactions and relate the conversational work of participants to the construction of sociocultural competence across the lifespan.” The episode was transcribed using a partiture format, which is derived from music notation and attempts to represent iconically the frequently overlapping flow of conversation between participants and their concurrent use of paralinguistic devices, such as head movements, facial and hand gestures and eye gaze. To facilitate analysis, two multimedia computer programs were used: Adobe Premiere 4.2 and Macromedia Sound Forge 4.0. These programs assisted in the analysis of the temporal relationship between communicative modes by providing the following:
 

Summary of Conclusions

Analysis of the research findings suggested the following:
 

In terms of the first research question regarding the teachers’ expectations of appropriate language use in the bilingual kindergarten classroom, two more specific conclusions can be highlighted:
 

Regarding the second research question, how these expectations are conveyed to students, it was observed that the teachers employed a variety of verbal, vocal, and nonverbal conversational means to curtail students’ efforts at initiating conversation -- one aspect of socialization to classroom discourse patterns examined in this study. The results additionally suggest that the specific means of enacting language socialization -- the overt and covert valuation of particular forms of communicative interactions -- are accomplished on a moment-to-moment basis via interaction strategies that occur so quickly that the interactants may not even be aware of their behavior. Participants provide overt and covert cues to others about how they are and will be participating in face-to-face interactions. They demonstrate their cooperation with conversational mores, such as turn taking, and provide cues of upcoming possibilities, such as transition relevant points. These cues also can be used to signal to conversational novices the interactional conventions of particular social contexts, such as the elementary school classroom. Another suggestion of the findings is that it is only within the local context of the interaction that these cues take on meaning. For example, gestures have no meaning by themselves; a head turn must be understood in relation to the other participants in a face-to-face interaction. It is in relation to others that we use spatial orientation terms such as “toward,” and “away from.”
 

Implications of Results

What then do the results of this dissertation have to say about instructional practices? Clearly, this analysis cannot tell us, for example, what language arts program works best for students. However, it can illuminate some of the difficulties in implementation experienced by proponents of various educational reforms.

At issue is the role and responsibility of the school in fostering a wide range of sociolinguistic competencies in students. For children who come from dominant culture homes, this issue may not be of particular concern. Through their interactions at home and in the community, they will be socialized to the forms of discourse associated with power and prestige. According to Fowler (1985) “language is a reality-creating social practice” and “it is an indisputable fact that some varieties and items are associated with situations of prestige, success, and authority, and some with situations of powerlessness and deprivation” (p. 62). He argues the need for “seeing language as a practice that contributes to inequality, rather than as an innocent medium that simply reflects inequality” (p. 62).

Accordingly, there have been recommendations for increased attention to the role of language in instruction. For example, instructional conversation (Goldenberg, 1991; Tharp & Gallimore, 1991), cooperative learning (Durán & Szymanski, 1995; Kagan, 1986), and stimulation of abstract language via book reading (Heath, 1982; van Kleeck, Gillam, Hamilton & McGrath, 1997) have all been recommended instructional practices, especially for students coming from non-mainstream homes. These instructional strategies have been recommended for a variety of reasons. Tharp and Gallimore (1991) recommend what they term “instructional conversation” as a means of developing critical thinking skills and for contextualizing instruction for culturally diverse students. One rationale underlying the suggestion of cooperative learning groups with CLD is that this setting fosters scaffolded language input and opportunities to develop language competence. Joint book rook reading has been suggested as one of the ways that middle class parents socialize their children to the production of decontextualized language, which has been linked to literacy development. Therefore, for those students at risk for academic difficulties, the socialization of this language genre has been recommended.

The findings of this dissertation are of importance to this discussion of instructional innovations; the results may shed light on the difficulties inherent in implementing instructional reforms, such as those mentioned above. They suggest that it is important to examine the barriers to implementation, as well as making recommendations. As suggested in the first level of analysis, the educational context may have a significant influence on the instructional decisions of individual teachers. While teachers may value a particular best practice, such as instructional dialog, the curricular choices they make may create barriers to its use.

Therefore, a conclusion that could be drawn from this dissertation is that school reform efforts need to take into account the local context, including district procedures and policies, the specific instructional settings that are most often used in the classroom and those which might have a greater opportunity for fostering student-teacher conversations, and the language norms of the classroom that discourage this type of interaction. It is not just a matter of adding to existing classroom genres, but of understanding as well how language socialization in the classroom works against implementation of particular patterns of language use.
 

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