Lessons from the linguistic agencies of immigrant women: a critical ethnography of education at the social integration programs in Madrid and Barcelona
- Autores: Tulay Martinez Fernandez
- Directores de la Tesis: Joan Pujolar Cos (dir. tes.)
- Lectura: En la Universitat Oberta de Catalunya ( España ) en 2016
- Idioma: español
- Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: David Block Allen (presid.), Eva Codó Olsina (secret.), Adriana Patiño Santos (voc.)
- Materias:
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- Resumen
This thesis is a critical sociolinguistic ethnography of education in so-called social integration programs oriented to African immigrant women in Spain. It investigates the localized practices of distribution of the linguistic capital and subject-building in these sites, as well as the specific ways that the learners deployed their linguistic capital in their migration trajectories. Social integration programs in Spain have become one of the key access points in adult immigrant language education since late 1990s and 2000s. This thesis investigates these social integration programs in four cost-free language classrooms located in two different institutions: in an NGO in Madrid and in a Civic Centre of a local Municipality in Barcelona. This ethnography focuses on how linguistic capital is distributed in these sites, how the language teachers represent the learners and also how the learners depict their language investment in their narratives. This study contributes to the body of work on teaching the language(s) of the host society to newcomers (Freire 1970; Heller and Martin-Jones 2001; Moyer and Martin Rojo 2007; Martin-Rojo 2010; Codo and Patino-Santos 2014), linguistic anthropology from a critical perspective (Heller, 2011) and social class and identity in adult immigrant language learning (Block 2009, 2012). The methodological design of this interdisciplinary inquiry combines traditional ethnography in both sites, retaining participant observation and biographical interviews as the core. The analysis draws on conversation analysis of the classroom interaction, critical discourse analysis of the discourses of the language teachers and on the analysis of biographical interviews of the learners. This thesis defends the idea that the localized practices in adult immigrant language education should be understood in a wider world system that takes into account transnational inequalities with regard to access to material and symbolic resources, and this thesis reconciles identity-based inquiry with contemporary sociolinguistics. In particular, it investigates (a) the pedagogical orientation of these so-called social integration programs and how decapitalization (a process of deprivation of symbolic capital ) (Martin Rojo 2010) occurs, (b) how the language teachers represent the learners in their discourses and how they link these representations to the (passive) linguistic agencies of the learners, (c) how the learners construct their linguistic and social agencies in their biographical interviews, and (d) how the learners contest the multi-layered hegemonies and inequalities by means of deploying their linguistic resources strategically.
The findings of the ethnography involve the pedagogical and discursive practices inside the classroom and the linguistic agencies of the learners constructed in their own narratives. The classroom analysis indicated that in these so-called social integration programs decapitalization occurred by means of distributing elementary linguistic resources to these learners and making them adopt passive speaker and learner agencies. The speech exchange system (Seedhouse 2009, 2011) and interactional competence features (Walsh 2011) of these classrooms indicated that the speaker positions that the learners were given in these settings reproduced the disadvantaged position of the learners in relation to power and capital. Second, the critical discourse analysis of the narratives of the language teachers demonstrated that the language teachers mostly represented these learners as deficient, oppressed, and passive subjects and in specific cases the decapitalization occurring in these educational settings was naturalized by means of fore-grounding these asymmetrical representations based on racial, cultural and gender differences. Another important finding with regard to the classroom interaction is, in the Catalonia field the decapitalization process also involved the dominant interposition of the Spanish language in the classroom.
In this thesis, the analysis of the voices of the learners problematizes and contrasts the dominant pedagogical and discursive practices occurring in the classroom. The analysis of the linguistic agencies of the learners indicated that there has been a significant shift in the specific ways that the immigrant women indexicalize the target language in their specific time-space patterns. While the elderly generation showed a resistance toward accumulating and deploying the legitimate forms of language, the young generation immigrant women generally depicted the legitimate language as a convertible capital, as a means of self-achievement or as an emancipation tool. Drawing on the difference between the elderly women and the young generation in terms of their social, economic and professional background constructed in Morocco, their positive attitudes toward the legitimate language are not driven exclusively by personal and social transformations after migration. They are driven by social, economic and educational developments and transformations taking place in Morocco. Taking globalization, mobility, and multilingualism into account, the data indicated that there is an increasing unpredictability in learner profiles and in their motivations to invest in the target language. This unpredictability and complexity is overlooked in these so-called social integration programs, given that in these social settings learners are represented and constructed as generic and oppressed social agents.
Another important finding is that the linguistic agencies of the learners showed an itinerary of resistance. Their resistance strategies demonstrated that the learners deployed their linguistic resources to contest multi-layered forms of domination and hegemonies and to claim better social and economic positions in Spain as well as in the mainland. Finally, foregrounding the third space (Bhabha 1994) and the neglected voices located in the field demonstrated that the hybrid feature of cultures and languages re-configured the authority of language and contested the cliché division between the native speaker and the new speaker, or between the native and the immigrant because none of these social groups is omnipotent, permanent or essentially unitary
