“I Have Magic in My Mouf!”: Embodied languaging enactments of African American multilingual students in a Spanish-English immersion program

Abstract

There is limited research that examines African American students’ language learning experiences in Spanish-English dual-language program settings, which exacerbates the narrative that African American students are not the “ideal” demographic for bilingual programs. To address these concerns, we highlight the experiences of two African American multilingual children to examine how they form their translanguaging repertoires. Specifically, we focus on three types of enactments in which they embodied these repertoires, which revealed how they engaged language learning in dynamic and varied ways. These examples further challenge traditional norms engendered in bilingual programming writ large that exhibit narrow viewpoints of language speakers and language speaking.