Language scaling, heteroglossia, and identity work in boys’ peer group play in a bilingual Spanish-English preschool

This paper examines how a friendship group of four boys in a bilingual Spanish-English preschool classroom explore and exploit heterogeneous resources and social voices from community, family, school and media contexts in pretend play. Data are from a video-ethnography conducted at their preschool in California serving Mexican heritage families. Drawing on the frameworks of heteroglossia and language scaling, and multimodal conversation analysis, the analysis demonstrates how the children “scale up” Spanish at their preschool, which, though bilingual, is preparing children for English-only public school education. They do so through enacting powerful male social roles (Compadre, Pápi, Fruit Ninja gamers) while playing with linguistic boundaries through diverse linguistic practices. Through their stylistic performances, the children create peer solidarity, belonging, and hierarchy, as well as socialize heteroglossic practices for the peer group.