Emergent Bilinguals: Framing Students as Statistical Data?

Immigrant youth who are designated as English language learners in American schools—whom we refer to as "emergent bilinguals"—are increasingly framed by numerical calculations. Utilizing the notion of assemblage from actor-network theory (ANT), we trace how emergent bilinguals are discursively constructed by officials, administrators, politicians, and the media through the manipulation and publication of school test scores, district data, and state reports. Drawing upon two overlapping, complementary qualitative studies conducted in New York City, we reveal the ways in which this places burdens on emergent bilinguals and their schools and narrows important discussions of bilingual education pedagogies to ones centered on numerical data. Notes 1 CitationGarcía (2011, p. 141) has argued for "the use of the term emergent bilingual in referring to these children as a way to remind all of us that the effective teaching of English will make them bilingual, not merely teach them English." Meanwhile, the federal government still uses the term limited English proficient, which went out of usage in many school systems for its deficit orientation. In this manuscript, we use emergent bilingual in lieu of English language learner or limited English proficient unless discussing official designation or quoting participants. 2Though a few states—including New York—currently permit test translations for math, science, and/or social studies exams, the vast majority of states only test in English; and those that use translations still require that emergent bilinguals pass an English language arts exam (CitationSullivan et al., 2005). For the states permitting translations, research indicates that this accommodation fails to truly level the playing field for emergent bilinguals due to lingering issues of validity and reliability (CitationMenken, 2008; CitationSolórzano, 2008). 3In an effort to reverse this problem, in July 2012 a new chancellor's regulation A-501 revised the promotion policy such that English language proficiency test scores can now be used for emergent bilinguals to determine grade promotion.