Gendered Identities and Immigrant Language Learning (Critical Language and Literacy Studies, Band 4) - Softcover

Menard-Warwick, Julia

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1847692133 ISBN 13: 9781847692139

Verlag: Multilingual Matters, 2009

Inhaltsangabe

Based on participant observation in a California English as a Second Language family literacy program, this ethnographic study examines how the complexly gendered life histories of immigrant adults shaped their participation in both the English language classroom and the education of their children, within the contemporary sociohistorical context of increasing Latin American immigration to the United States. Through outlining the connections between (gendered) identity work and language learning, this study builds theoretical and empirical justification for teachers to negotiate classroom practice with each community of learners, responding to students' individual goals, histories, and lives outside the classroom.

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Julia Menard-Warwick has taught at University of California Davis since 2004. Her research explores power and identity in language learning and teaching. She began her career teaching English to university students in Nicaragua and adult immigrants in Washington State. More recently she conducted research with English teachers at a Chilean university; researched a study abroad program in Guatemala; and served as a visiting professor in Mexico. Recent articles appear in Applied Linguistics and The Modern Language Journal.

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Gendered Identities and Immigrant Language Learning

By Julia Menard-Warwick

Multilingual Matters

Copyright © 2009 Julia Menard-Warwick
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-84769-213-9

Contents

Acknowledgments, ix, 
Preface, xi, 
1 The Social Context of Immigrant Language Learning, 1, 
2 Second-Language Learning as Gendered Practice, 25, 
3 Gendered Narratives of Immigrant Language Learners, 48, 
4 The Sociohistorical Construction of Parental Involvement in Education, 76, 
5 Gendered Positioning in ESL Classroom Activities, 105, 
6 Changing Gender Ideologies in Local Communities, 135, 
7 (Gendered) Identities and Language Learning: Continuing the Dialogue, 163, 
Notes, 188, 
References, 191, 
Appendix A, 204, 
Appendix B, 205, 
Appendix C, 207, 
Index, 208, 

CHAPTER 1

The Social Context of Immigrant Language Learning1

People learn languages in social, cultural, and political contexts that constrain the linguistic forms they hear and use and also mark the social significance of linguistic and cultural forms in various ways Watson-Gegeo, 2004: 340

In May 2002, I began an ethnographic study at an English as a Second Language (ESL) family literacy program in a multi-ethnic working-class city in the San Francisco Bay area of California. This program, which I will refer to as the Community English Center (CEC), was the institutional context where I met and got to know the Latin American immigrants who participated in my study, seven women and one man. As Hondagneu-Sotelo explains, contemporary research on gender and immigration has gone beyond an earlier focus on families and communities to examine how 'gender is incorporated into a myriad of daily operations and institutional political and economic structures ... (and) organizes a number of immigrant practices, beliefs, and institutions' (Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2003: 9).

In the following interview excerpt, Fabiana, a recent immigrant from Peru, explains the gendered nature of the CEC classes:

My school and my husband's school are different. [...] They don't teach him, for example, about what if a child falls down, what if a child has a wound that swells up. [...] They don't teach him that children need to eat vegetables. They don't teach him those kinds of things. Things that are very interesting that they teach us in my school, because we have children. (Interview, 10/18/02)

Fabiana here indicates how her language learning was connected to her life experiences as the mother of a young child. Both she and her husband were studying English, but she went to morning classes with childcare, while he went to night classes after finishing his day's work in a money-wiring office. In Fabiana's class (but not in her husband's), teachers and students drew upon common discourses of motherhood, shared ways of referring to and evaluating maternal experiences, to 'mark the social significance' of the 'linguistic and cultural forms' taught (Watson-Gegeo, 2004).

If we consider gender as 'a system of social relations and discursive practices' (Piller & Pavlenko, 2001: 17), we can see gendered practices and discourses playing a central role in the immigration experiences of the participants in this research – experiences that to varying degrees included English-language learning. Indeed, language learning itself is perhaps best conceptualized as occurring through participation in speech and literacy events within a (gendered) sociohistorical context – a theoretical perspective that has been referred to as the language socialization paradigm (Bayley & Schecter, 2002; Watson-Gegeo, 2004) and as situated learning (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998). For more discussion of theoretical connections between learning and gendered identities, see Chapter 2.

In this chapter, I explain my study's focus on gender as a structuring factor in immigration and second-language (L2) learning; place participants' language learning in an historical context where 'the globalization of capital ... is largely behind the largest migratory wave in U.S. history' (Suárez-Orozco, 2001: 356); describe my own positionality in the site as a Spanish-speaking Anglo-American former ESL teacher turned graduatestudent researcher; and then outline my research questions and the structure of the book as a whole.

Gender as a Structuring Factor

Throughout this book, I explore gender in terms of both practices, recurrent socially meaningful activities (Scribner, 1997), and ideologies, belief systems 'generated in power relations as a dimension of the exercise of power' (Fairclough, 1992: 67) (see endnote 4). To explore the influence of gendered practices and ideologies on the immigration experiences of participants, I turn again to an interview narrative told by Fabiana, who arrived in California with her year-old son in the fall of 2001 to join her husband, Carlos. This narrative constructs her perspective on the social, cultural and political context in which her English-language learning necessarily unfolded (Watson-Gegeo, 2004).

Both Fabiana and Carlos had studied business at a two-year college in Lima, and then worked for 14 years as employees of the import business owned by Fabiana's father. This family company brought in chemical raw materials, primarily from Asian countries like Taiwan, and then sold them as raw ingredients for the Peruvian pharmaceutical manufacturing industry. When Fabiana began telling the following narrative, she had just explained how this previously successful enterprise had sunk into near bankruptcy in the 1990s, along with many other Peruvian companies. She and her husband found that their upper-middle-class status did not protect them from poverty as the economy worsened. For a long time, they had to live with Fabiana's parents, and according to her, this negatively affected their relationship:

It was difficult for him because ... I would say to him for example, "Hey, help me cook," and he wouldn't help; "Hey, help me wash the dishes," because ... it's like it made him feel a little embarrassed (le daba un poco de vergüenza) ... he didn't feel ... like he didn't feel at home, not really, the only thing he wanted was to be in our room, no? There he felt comfortable because he had his things. And afterwards, no? At night he wanted to be with his friends, something that doesn't happen here. (Interview, 11/20/02)

In her narrative, Fabiana focuses on her husband's emotions, not her own, even though she is in a sense complaining about his lack of engagement with her. She quotes herself asking for help with the housework, but his response is no response at all. She emphasizes his feelings of 'vergüenza (shame or embarrassment)' and his sense of not belonging in the house: Carlos is only comfortable in their room with his possessions or when he is with his friends. Immigration was the solution he found to not having a place of his/their own in Peru, especially after getting laid off from his job at Fabiana's father's company.

However, Carlos faced similar problems of dependency once in the United States:

So then he lived with his sister, so he says it was very difficult for him because he was accustomed in Peru to have his credit cards, to have his driver's license, his salary, and to spend, no? Not exaggeratedly, but at least to give you the little things you like. But to come here and say to someone, "You want a coca cola? You want a soda? OK. I invited you, no? Do you want this?" Or he says, no? that...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Multilingual Matters
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2009
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1847692133
• ISBN 13: 9781847692139
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 226
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland