Opportunities for language exchange among language-minority and language-majority students

This study explores the social, linguistic, and educative nature of interaction between minority-language and majority-language students in a two-way immersion Spanish/English bilingual school. Grounded in sociocultural theory, this study uses an ecological approach to examine the interaction between learners and their environment, the location of learning opportunities, and the pedagogical value of interactional contexts. This study examines how children may serve as 'linguistic informants' for each other. Using ethnographic and discourse analysis, this study uncovers conditions that encourage and/or inhibit opportunities for interaction and language exchange. Data collection for this study involved participant observation with a group of thirty fifth grade students and their teachers as they participated in school activities over an entire school year. Data sources also included audio recordings of student language use throughout the school day, surveys, and interviews with students, teachers and parents. Transcriptions of recorded peer interactions were analyzed to search for language related episodes---moments when students talked about their language use and played with different linguistic possibilities. Fieldnotes were analyzed to understand the changing roles that students played as they provided language models and were positioned to explicitly teach, translate, ask or answer questions about language. This study found that students were languaculture informants often in subtle ways that ranged from modeling discussion in a target language to engaging in explicit discussions or disagreements about language usage. Discursive construction of proficiency---reified through accommodation practices, resistance to participate, and public declarations---was found to constrain opportunities for interaction and language learning. This study offers an important contribution to the field of second language acquisition by combining lenses from discourse studies and sociocultural studies to reveal ways that learners use discursive practices to co-construct conditions of language learning. This study suggests that future research in second language acquisition should attend to the ways that perceptions of interlocutors' proficiency impact the quality of linguistic input available for language learners. By shedding light on classroom practices and environments in dual immersion programs that presented challenges or opportunities for language learning, this study offers recommendations for teachers to create conditions that promote language exchange.