Middle‐Class English Speakers in a Two‐Way Immersion Bilingual Classroom: “Everybody Should Be Listening to Jonathan Right Now …”

Two‐way bilingual immersion education, offered in a fast‐growing number of primary schools in the United States, provides primary language maintenance to minority language speakers while simultaneously offering an enrichment “foreign” language immersion experience to English‐speaking children in the same classroom, generally with the same teacher. This fusion of two different groups of children, two different sets of expectations, is controversial: Is it possible to accomplish both goals at once, or will teacher and program inevitably end up serving the needs of dominant English‐speaking children first? The equation is further complicated when the English speakers in a program come from mainly highly educated middle‐class families, and the Spanish speakers come from mainly working‐class immigrant families, as is the case in many of these programs. Drawing on audio and video data from a year‐long study in a second‐grade two‐way classroom that shares this class gap between language groups, and using a methodology that fuses ethnography and discourse analysis, this article explores the ways English‐speaking children can impact classroom conversational dynamics.