Marjorie Faulstich Orellana

The construction of moral and social identity in 3 immigrant children’s narratives-in-translation

co-authored with Inmaculada García Sánchez

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Linguistics and Education xxx (2006) xxx–xxx

Inmaculada Garc´a S´ nchez a,∗ , Marjorie Faulstich Orellana b ıa
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1. Introduction

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∗

Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: igarcias@humnet.ucla.edu (I.G. S´ nchez), orellana@gseis.ucla.edu (M.F. Orellana). a

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Please cite this article as: Inmaculada Garc´a S´ nchez, Marjorie Faulstich Orellana, The construction ıa LINEDU 178 1–31 of moral and social identity in immigrant children’s narratives-in-translation, Linguistics and Education (2006), doi:10.1016/j.linged.2006.07.001.

Narrative is one of the most ubiquitous discourse genres in everyday human social interaction (Bruner, 2002; Ochs, 2004), and everyday narrative practices are a primeval tool for the socialization of children into moral values and socio-cultural beliefs. By attending to how caregivers emplot life experiences, emotions, and identities through routine narrative practices, and participating in these narrations themselves, children construct their own identities and their relationships to others and to the world (i.e. Miller, Potts, Fung, Hoogstra, & Mintz, 1990; Ochs & Capps, 1995, 2001). A considerable body of literature exists on children’s story-telling interactions, but most of these studies examine talk by family members at home (i.e. Fung, 1994; Miller, Fung, & Mintz, 1990; Ochs & Taylor, 1992). [Baquedano-L´ pez (2003) and Ek (2004) are important exceptions; o these authors consider identity narratives and language socialization practices within the context of religious education classes.] As a result, we know very little about the narrative practices that children encounter in other important arenas for adults’ socialization efforts, such as in schools. School narration practices may be especially important for understanding the identity construction processes of immigrant and bicultural youths, insofar as schools serve as central sites of socialization into “American” values. In this paper we take advantage of a unique window into children’s exposure to institutional narratives, by examining teachers’ talk about children’s developing competencies and their moral agency in the context of parent–teacher conferences. This window also illuminates children’s take-up of these narrations, and their constructions of their own moral agency, because the young

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Department of Applied Linguistics and TESL, University of California, 3300 Rolfe Hall, P.O. Box 951531, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1531, United States b Department of Education, P.O. Box 951521, LA CA 90024-1521, United States.

The construction of moral and social identity in immigrant children’s narratives-in-translation

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2.1. Immigrant children’s work as cultural brokers

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1 In the literature on children’s translating/interpreting several terminologies have been put forward to capture the different dimensions of the work that children do when translating on behalf of their families, including language brokers, para-phrasers, interlopers, mediators, and family interpreters (see Author et al., 2003, for a fuller discussion of these terminologies).

In the last decade, researchers working within a number of different disciplines have begun documenting the widespread activities of children across a range of immigrant communities as socio-cultural brokers and linguistic mediators between their parents and representatives of social institutions of the host society. Whereas this is still a fairly new research enterprise, a broad range of aspects of this phenomenon has been taken up in this rapidly growing body of literature. Some work has focused on identifying immigrant children’s attitudes towards translating and the relationship between children’s work as translators, academic achievement, and other psychological outcomes, such as self-efﬁcacy (Acoach & Webb, 2004; Buriel, Perez, De Ment, Chavez, Moran, 1998; Chao, 2006; Dorner, Orellana, & Li-Grining, in press; Parke & Buriel, 1995; Tse, 1995, 1996a; Weisskirch & Alba, 2002). Other research has considered the signiﬁcance of children’s contributions for the functioning of immigrant household and processes of settlement (Chu, 1999; Song, 1997; Orellana, 2001; Orellana, Dorner, & Pulido, 2003; Valenzuela, 1999). Educational researchers have examined the literacy demands of children’s translations of written texts (Orellana, Reynolds, Dorner, & Meza, 2003) and implications for the development of academic skills (Malakoff & Hakuta, 1991; Vald´ s, 2002). e Perhaps the most relevant perspective for the purpose of the present study is found in the work of researchers who have examined immigrant children’s contributions to their households as sociocultural practices and important arenas for the construction and renegotiation of social identities and relationships. Song (1997) illustrated how second-generation Chinese immigrant children in England exercised agency in the construction of hybrid cultural identities through differential ways of positioning themselves with respect to expected household contributions, including as language brokers. Researchers have also examined the implications of children’s paradoxical positions in language brokering activities for their developing competencies as social actors (Hall, 2004; Reynolds and Orellana, under review)—as children, speaking to and for adults, and the children of immigrants, interfacing with authority ﬁgures from mainstream institutions. Youths’ bilingual skills allow them to exercise a certain level of power within their families, participating

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We draw on research ﬁndings and theoretical perspectives from three different lines of inquiry to frame our work: (a) studies of immigrant children’s work as socio-cultural brokers and linguistic mediators; (b) linguistic anthropological and psychological approaches to narrative practices; and (c) ethnomethodological perspectives on discourse practices in parent–teacher conferences.

2. Background research

people that we study are the children of immigrants who actively participate in these parent–teacher conferences as translators, language brokers orpara-phrasers1 for their families. These data allow us to analyze both the discourse structures of teachers’ narrative practices, and the ways in which children reﬂect and/or transform these in their renderings of this talk for their parents. We pay particular attention to how the children are positioned as moral agents and social actors in these narratives, and in turn how they position themselves.

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2.2. Narrative practices, identity, and socialization

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2.3. Parent–teacher conferences

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Parent–teacher conferences are considered the cornerstone of parent–teacher communication, and a number of ethnomethodologically-informed studies have studied these in order to establish
Please cite this article as: Inmaculada Garc´a S´ nchez, Marjorie Faulstich Orellana, The construction ıa LINEDU 178 1–31 of moral and social identity in immigrant children’s narratives-in-translation, Linguistics and Education (2006), doi:10.1016/j.linged.2006.07.001.

Narrative has been described as a sense-making activity that people use to imbue lived experience with meaning and coherence (Garro & Mattingly, 2000; Ochs & Capps, 1995, 2001), particularly when their experiences are perceived as contravening community assumptions about events (Bruner, 2002; Ochs, 2004). In this sense, narratives reference normative views of what constitutes moral behavior and local cultural frameworks, even as they work to maintain and create those very frames (i.e. Garro, 2003; Ochs & Capps, 1995). Previous work on the discursive shape of narratives in different social groups and speech communities has shown how the structure of narratives is not only highly group speciﬁc (Goodwin, 1990; Labov, 1972; Miller et al., 1996; Scollon, 1975), but also a primordial tool for establishing the social and collective cultural identities of groups (i.e. Baquedano-L´ pez, 2000; Ochs, Smith, & Taylor, 1989; Rymes, 1995), as well o as for establishing social roles and relationships among its members (i.e. Ochs & Taylor, 1992). Because narrative is such a pervasive discourse practice in human interaction (Ochs & Capps, 2001), everyday narrative practices have also been studied as processes by which children and other novices are apprenticed into socio-cultural worldviews and progressively become competent speakers and members of their communities. Since the discursive shape of narratives varies across communities in that narrative logics are always organized with reference to local cultural frameworks and notions of the moral good, we can distinguish a dual, yet interrelated, dimension of the role of narrative in children’s language socialization: children are socialized into narrative practices and they are socialized through narrative practices. A classic example of the ﬁrst dimension is that of Heath’s (1983) explorations of how working-class Euro-American and African-American children are socialized into family narrative practices that are not congruent with the narrative practices favored in educational settings, the latter being more aligned with the family narrative practices found among white, middle-class families. Similarly, Miller (1982) studied the implications of narrative practices in a white working-class neighborhood for children’s emerging competence to engage in personal story-telling. In terms of how narrative practices socialize children into cultural world-views and moral understandings of the self in relation to personal experience, Miller et al. (1990, 1996) and Fung’s (1994) work have shown how narratives about children’s past behavior told by American and Taiwanese adults in the presence of children cast children in moral roles consistent with cultural values and beliefs, thus providing cultural schemata for children to interpret and narratively construct their own experiences and identities. Also, Ochs and Capps’s (1995) analysis of the socialization into agoraphobia describes how children’s participation in family story-telling contributes to their apprenticeship into theories of events and experiential logics about emotions vis-` -vis life experiences in ways that undermine a their sense of agency and efﬁcacy as social actors.

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in decision-making processes and acting as advocates for themselves and their families; yet their status as immigrants and as children imposes signiﬁcant limits on their power. The paradoxical nature of children’s positions bears exploration across a wider range of sociocultural domains and sociolinguistic contexts than has been achieved to date, however, and the present study is a contribution to that effort.

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3. Methodology 3.1. Data collection

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3.2. Participants

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The parent–teacher conferences involve four of the study participants who live in a suburban community where there are few bilingual resources and thus where children often act as translators between home and school. (The same was not true for the students in a second site, which was
Please cite this article as: Inmaculada Garc´a S´ nchez, Marjorie Faulstich Orellana, The construction ıa LINEDU 178 1–31 of moral and social identity in immigrant children’s narratives-in-translation, Linguistics and Education (2006), doi:10.1016/j.linged.2006.07.001.

This study of teachers’ narratives in parent–teacher conferences, and bilingual youths’ translations of the narratives, draws from data gathered in a program of research with eighteen bilingual students. The larger project examined the range of youths’ translating experiences, documenting these through children’s self-reports (in interviews, focus groups, and journal entries) as well as through observations and audio-taping of live translation episodes. In all, more than eighty translation episodes were recorded on tape, covering a range of situations including the translation of written texts at home, and a variety of interactional encounters outside the home (in doctors’ ofﬁces, stores, and schools). Eleven of these involved parent–teacher conferences done at different points in time over a two-year period. The conferences were recorded on audiotape by the second author, who also wrote ﬁeld notes to describe the encounters. They were transcribed according to the system described in Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson (1974).

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how home and school institutions relate to each other. This research has described how adult participants, mainly parents and teachers, orient to these conferences as occasions for determining whether students’ performance requires remedial intervention and, if so, strategizing the form this remediation will take (Pillet-Shore, 2001, 2003a). Baker and Keogh (1997) have emphasized, in particular, the interactional moral work that characterizes these exchanges between parents and teachers. Because both home and school are potential spaces where the responsibility for the child’s problems and accomplishments can be located, parents and teachers may work together to delineate the boundaries of moral responsibility, while avoiding direct assignation of blame that could be implicative of improper teaching or improper parenting. Analyses of the features of talk in these interactions have also shown how, as parents and teachers offer accounts of the child’s behavior, they also construct moral and institutional identities for themselves as knowledgeable teachers and good parents (Baker & Keogh, 1995; Pillet-Shore, 2003b). This work illuminates crucial issues in the sociology of education, but the role of the child in the context of parent–teacher conferences, and how children are portrayed in the moral universe that parents and teachers co-construct, has received little attention. Researchers of social and communicative practices in parent–teacher conferences usually refer to the child as the overhearing audience or the silent child. Indeed, children are typically silent in these encounters, either because they are not given the right to speak or because they opt for silence as interactional forms of resistance to adults’ complicity and scrutiny (Silverman, Baker, & Keogh, 1998; Pillet-Shore, 2001). However, for immigrant children, who are the primary, and often only intermediaries between parents and teachers (Tse, 1996b), silence is simply not an option. As language brokers, not only are they given the right to speak; they are in fact positioned in a privileged role as strategic actors in the construction of moral identities (their own, their parents’, and their teachers’). Yet, as children and as students in these interactions, they are simultaneously objects of evaluation and socialization into institutional expectations by their caregivers.

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3.3. Analyses

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(a) Discursive and grammatical structuring: How are teachers’ institutional narratives structured as a discourse genre? What discursive and grammatical features do teachers use to cast children
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All names are pseudonyms; the children selected their pseudonyms for themselves.

For this study, all of the parent–teacher conference data were examined in order to identify narrative sequences. We deﬁned narrative according to the following criteria: (a) the child is cast as a protagonist; (b) the narrative often centers around a perceived problem (in the student’s behavior or academic performance) and (c) these events are recounted in temporal order. This resulted in a data corpus of seven narratives told in the context of ﬁve different parent–teacher conferences involving ﬁve teachers. These teacher narratives, and the children’s translations of them, were then analyzed according to the narrative analysis methodological framework developed by Ochs and Capps (1995, 2001). The analyses focused on the following dimensions of teachers’ and children’s narratives, as well as the parents’ responses:

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reasonably well-staffed with bilingual personnel; those young people did not generally serve as translators for their own parent–teacher conferences.) Each of the youths was the eldest in their families, and utilized their bilingual skills to help their families with a wide range of tasks. We provide some general background information here: Nova2 was in seventh grade (age 12–13) when we recorded two parent–teacher conferences, one with his Language Arts/Social Studies teacher (Ms. Johnson), and one with his science instructor (Mr. Miller). Nova had immigrated with his family from the state of Guanajuato, Mexico, when he was in fourth grade. He received bilingual support services in his middle school (in the form of a Social Studies/Language Arts block for second language learners led by Ms. Johnson). Nova took Spanish for his foreign-language option (a course that he found both easy and boring), but was in all-English classrooms for the remaining school subject. Miguel: Miguel was in the sixth grade (age 11–12) at the time that we recorded ﬁve conferences, with his homeroom/Language Arts teacher (Ms. Harrison), math teacher (Ms. Conroy), science teacher (Ms. Miller), and two physical education instructors (Mr. Boyd and Mr. Roper). Miguel had been in a bilingual program through third grade but was in all-English classrooms since then. Miguel’s parents had immigrated to the United States from Guanajuato, Mexico just before Miguel was born. Mar´a, a cousin of Miguel’s, whose family was from the same farming community in Guanajuı ato, had two younger siblings. We recorded three conferences involving Mar´a: two when she was ı in ﬁfth grade (age 10) (with Ms. Salinger), and a joint one with her middle school social studies and science teachers, Ms Barrett and Ms Roth (in sixth grade). The ﬁfth grade was Mar´a’s ﬁrst year ı in an all-English classroom without bilingual supports; she had received “pull-out” instruction in ESL through the fourth grade. The fourth participant, Estela, was the oldest of four girls, and was considered “la mano derecha de la familia” (“the right hand of the family”) by her mother. Estela was in the fourth grade (age 9) in an all-English classroom; she had never been enrolled in a bilingual program except in preschool. Her parents were immigrants from a small town in Guanajuato, Mexico. Estela’s conference involved her teacher, Mr. Vick.

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4. Teachers’ institutional narratives as a discourse genre

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Narrative practices for ordering lived experience are always framed in relation to speciﬁc socio-cultural frameworks and expectations. Because of this their shape is highly group-speciﬁc and constitutive of the social and moral identities of their members. What then, was the shape of teachers’ institutional narratives that immigrant children encounter in the context of these parent–teacher conferences? Research on narrative practices in other professional contexts has underscored the fact that practitioners often turn to narrative as a mode of reasoning through and framing practical action, particularly when they need to make sense of particular problems that affect how they perform their jobs (Mattingly, 1998). Yet, as Mattingly (1998) has also pointed out, narratives are rhetorical structures told from a particular vantage point, and professionals use them not only for sense-making, but also to persuade other actors to see events in a particular way so that they become active co-participants in a future course of action. Much as in the contexts analyzed by Mattingly (1998), the narrative practices that the teachers in this study engaged in implicate this double value of narrative as a sense-making and persuasive tool. The narratives that were deployed by teachers in the context of these parent–teacher conferences most often dealt with a central problematic event (Ochs & Capps, 1995). This was usually an academic problem or an inappropriate behavior in the classroom, such as poor performance or talking in class, that was perceived as creating disequilibrium in the child’s appropriate academic and civic development. The central problematic events were framed against overall evaluations of the student in relation to his or her past performance or to an institutional criterion of assessment that was sometimes in itself cast as problematic, such as getting a “C,” an “Inconsistent,” or not meeting grade-standard levels of academic performance. Framing the central problematic event in institutional terms allows teachers to couch their evaluations of the students in the language of objectivity, distancing their evaluations from their personal feelings about the students, while at the same time presenting themselves as knowledgeable and responsible professionals. The central problematic event in the narratives we examined was elaborated against a speciﬁc narrative logic, in which teachers offered a theory of events and reasons why the problem had originated in the ﬁrst place. The logics underlying the teachers’ narratives were organized around institutional rationales and teachers’ beliefs about learning and students’ performance. Moreover, the institutional logics put forward by these teachers generally exculpated them of moral responsibility for the child’s problems. Following the presentation of the problem, the teachers in this study invariably strategized possible future courses of action in order to overcome the problems or turn them in a more
Please cite this article as: Inmaculada Garc´a S´ nchez, Marjorie Faulstich Orellana, The construction ıa LINEDU 178 1–31 of moral and social identity in immigrant children’s narratives-in-translation, Linguistics and Education (2006), doi:10.1016/j.linged.2006.07.001.

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as moral agents in these narratives? What moral characteristics are attributed to the children in the teacher’s narratives? What discursive features do teachers use to frame and organize children’s experiences? (b) Discursive and grammatical devices that children use when recasting the teachers’ narratives: What gets translated and how? What is left out? What is foregrounded or mitigated? How do children manage praise and criticism in the narrative translations? (c) Parents’ responses to the teachers’ narratives and to the children’s translations of these narratives: In what ways do parents challenge the teachers’ narratives, if at all? In what ways do they engage with the children’s translations? How do they morally position the child and themselves as the responsible parties for the child.

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This narrative was directed to Miguel, using the ﬁrst person. However, Ms. Harrison added a coda at the end, with the message that she wanted to emphasize to Miguel’s mother - a message of promise that if Miguel works harder he will be able to meet the institutional criteria for success of making the school’s honor roll:
Please cite this article as: Inmaculada Garc´a S´ nchez, Marjorie Faulstich Orellana, The construction ıa LINEDU 178 1–31 of moral and social identity in immigrant children’s narratives-in-translation, Linguistics and Education (2006), doi:10.1016/j.linged.2006.07.001.

that you need to read through the chapter every night, because some of the material you’ll just remember it- will just- uh, you’ll just remember it because you’ve read it so much. The assessments that you’re given at the end of each section should be completed, and you should go over those each night. just you know, to test yourself. See if you know what dynasty is or city-state. uh, you can just make flash cards if you want to and then practice the definitions, and focus on the questions that are there. At the end of the unit you can go and just practice answering those questions without looking at the book and see if you can answer them correctly. That will help prepare you as well as your reading. you can’t read it just once. you have to read the same chapter several times. ok?

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positive direction. Often, this formulation of possible solutions anticipated positive future consequences for the student, such as getting better grades or making the honor roll, if the suggested courses of action were followed. It is in these last two elements of the teachers’ narratives where we most clearly see the value of narrative as a persuasive tool. For a pedagogical intervention to be effective, teachers need to make sure both that the child and his/her parents see the reasons for the child’s academic problems in a way that is congruent with the teacher’s theory of events, but also that they will be willing participants in the proposed course of actions. Teachers attempt to ensure this by depicting optimistic and positive futures for the child. A ﬁnal component of teachers’ narratives present in almost all the segments analyzed was a positive personal evaluation of the student that teachers offer as a conclusion or summary statement. We can see how these narrative elements came together in Ms. Harrison’s introduction to her conference with Miguel’s mother. Ms. Harrison initiated the conference with an overall evaluation of Miguel using the institutional criterion of letter grades: “Ok, ok, now we look at social studies, the area of social studies you got a C.” She elaborated on this problematic by noting Miguel’s trouble with tests: And I think that mainly that is based on test scores from the social studies tests” She then went on to offer her interpretation for this problem- that Miguel is not studying enough - and to suggest a course of action that she believed will guarantee success:

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At this point, Ms. Salinger interrupted her narrative to invite Mar´a to take up the role of transı lator: Can you translate that for me? (. . .) She continued talking to Mar´a, using ı the ﬁrst person, to explain the problem:: Um, this, this “I” inconsistent means that Sometimes on your math tests, you getyou do all your homework and youand you participate in class, and you do everything =you’re supposed to do, but when it comes to taking the test, you don’t- you don’t- get as good of a grade on your= =test as you do in the classroom. Ms. Salinger then directly enlisted Mar´a in her identiﬁcation and interpretation of ı this problem by asking: “Now why do you think that is, Mar´a?” In response, ı Mar´a let out a small giggle and answered that she didn’t know. Ms. Salinger tries ı again:
Please cite this article as: Inmaculada Garc´a S´ nchez, Marjorie Faulstich Orellana, The construction ıa LINEDU 178 1–31 of moral and social identity in immigrant children’s narratives-in-translation, Linguistics and Education (2006), doi:10.1016/j.linged.2006.07.001.

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Um? Mar´a’s report card is really good. ı She-She-she’s really doing a great job in fifth grade. All of her marks are meeting grade level standards. Um, She-she’s done much better on, most of her tests this, this quarter? Social Studies teststhe only thi-reason that I put an inconsistent, is sometimes Mar´a’s math tests aren’tı they don’t show me as much as= =what I know that she knows.

As a variance on this basic narrative structure, two of the teachers in this study (the two elementary school teachers, Ms. Salinger and Mr. Vick) engaged in a second narrative practice that underscores the value of narrative as a sense-making activity (Mattingly, 1998; Ochs & Capps, 2001). In this second narrative form, the teachers enlisted the child in identifying the problems. They also oriented to students’ past performance in the classroom with a more uncertain and tentative stance in terms of the level of responsibility that is ascribed to the child. We see this in Ms. Salinger’s narrative about ﬁfth-grade Mar´a. Ms. Salinger beganby talking about Mar´a, to ı ı Mar´a’s mother, using the third person: ı

Ok I’d also like you to let her know that I feel that you’re very smart. You’re very capable of making the honor roll. That you have to put forth more effort to make sure that your work is complete, to make sure the work comes in on time and that you’re studying for the test.

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Uh, but that would be the only thing. In, in every other way, Mar´a has been, doing, marvelous. ı Table 1 presents another example of this narrative form, from Nova’s conference with Mr. Nolan. 4.1. Teachers’ casting of children as moral agents

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4.2. Grammatical resources in the construction of moral and social identities In order to understand how teachers construct these portraits of the children, it is crucial to look also at the linguistic and grammatical structures teachers draw on, since the narrators’ language creates identities and shapes narrators’ and audiences’ perceptions of events (Ochs & Capps, 1995, 2001). In their efforts to avoid direct assignation of blame and to mitigate children’s moral
Please cite this article as: Inmaculada Garc´a S´ nchez, Marjorie Faulstich Orellana, The construction ıa LINEDU 178 1–31 of moral and social identity in immigrant children’s narratives-in-translation, Linguistics and Education (2006), doi:10.1016/j.linged.2006.07.001.

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Because a central feature in teachers’ institutional narratives was evaluation of students’ problematic actions and behaviors in terms of institutional expectations, we wanted to look at how teachers cast children as moral agents (Taylor, 1996) and at the identities that teachers construct for children through their representations of these problems. As we have already shown, despite the fact that these narratives focused on problematic actions and events, they consistently contained positive evaluations and afﬁrming attributes about the child and his/her present and future potential. Teachers’ efforts to portray students in a positive light is underscored by the sequentiallyprominent position that these positive castings occupy they are found at the beginning or end of the narratives and, often in both places, as the narrative in Table 1 illustrates. The tendency for adults’ narratives about children to acknowledge, yet mitigate children’s problematic behaviors has already been documented as characteristic of Euro-American family narrative practices, and has been analyzed in relation to mainstream American cultural beliefs about the need to protect and enhance the child’s self-esteem (Miller et al., 1996).

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In this case, Mar´a took up her teacher’s framing of the problem, agreeing (“I go kind of ı quickly”), but adding, in her own defense: “But I check it over.” The discursive structure of this second narrative practice is similar to the ﬁrst in that it begins with an overall performance of the student in terms of past performance, and an institutional criterion of assessment that anticipates the central problematic event. Following this, the teachers elaborated the problematic event, but instead of offering reasons for the student’s problem and subsequently strategizing possible courses of action to remediate the problem, teachers engaged the children in ﬁguring out why the problem has originated in the ﬁrst place. As with the ﬁrst structure, Ms. Salinger brought the narrative to close with a positive evaluation of the student offered as a summary statement:

You don’t know? Do you-, When you stu- when you study: um, for your tests, is it that you sometimes forget what- what you’ve studied? um, on your math test? or is it more, that, um, when you’re taking the test, you don’t- (1.5) you go kind of quickly:? or you know, what- what do you think it is?

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Table 1 General structure of teachers narratives Narrative components Positive evaluation of the student in relation to his performance Nova’s conference T:

for tha::t. Problematic event (Nova is getting poor grades on his tests) Teacher offers a reason for the student’s academic problem (Nova’s limited English proﬁciency) + possible solution and teacher anticipates future positive consequences (Nova’s performance will improve as his English improves and he will get good grades). T:

standards

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T: were-

English improves= =I think you know he has already shown great improvement over the year (·) cuz last year you last year you were in all ESL classes Uhm so he’s coming around very nice and he’ s very well behaved he’s- he’s a gentleman uhm he’s very much respected and liked by his peers and the other students (·) uhm he seems attentive in class

Positive evaluation of student’s behavior and performance

So: when he gets his (0.6) English skills (·)

Uhm to be more proficient he should be get-getting A’s and B’s in science So he’s- you∼know he’s meeting standards obviously because I am not gonna (·) downgrade him on uhm based upon his (·) English proficiency? uhm so he will do better on the test as his

I mean it-it’s really beautiful things that he can put together and in you∼know in a way part of science is modeling= =what’s going on in nature and I think he has a great deal of appreciation

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Linguistic resources

Data examples

Passive voice to mitigate children’s moral responsibility

Verbs that connote unintentionality to mitigate children’s moral responsibility

Personiﬁcations to mitigate children’s agency

First person plural (“we) used to emphasize teachers’ shared responsibilities with the child

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Mar´a’s conference with Ms. Salinger ı T: when you study: um, for your tests, is it that you sometimes forget what- what you’ve studied?

Nova’s conference with Mr. Nolan T: So: when he gets his (0.6) English skills (·) Uhm to be more proficient Miguel’s conference with Ms. Conroy T: I would say that these test scores need to come up. Miguel’s conference with Mr. Miller T: We need to work on studying for tests Miguel’s conference with Ms. Conroy T: So we need to improve the tests and quizzes.

Nominalizations to mitigate children’s moral responsibility

Miguel’s conference with Ms. Harrison T: ok, and in reading it’s the um, the need to elaborate and the completing of your reports. the need to give as much information as possible. Miguel’s conference with Ms. Harrison T: so the rush to finish so quickly. Miguel’s conference with Ms. Miller T: I see a little bit of a struggle with understanding.

Miguel’s conference with Ms. Conroy T: The assessments that you’re given at the end of each section should be completed Miguel’s conference with Ms. Harrison T: making sure all assignments are turned in on time

Children cast in semantic roles other than agents

Mar´a’s conference with Ms. Salinger (role of possessor) ı T: Mar´a’s math tests aren’t-they ı don’t show me as much as what I know that she knows Mar´a’s conference with Ms. Salinger (role of experiencer/receiver) ı T: you don’t- get as good of a grade on your test as you do in the classroom. Nova’s conference with Ms. Johnson (role of experiencer/receiver) T: So: when he gets his (0.6) skills English(·) Uhm to be more proficient

Table 2 Linguistic resources for avoiding direct assignation of blame and for mitigating children’s misbehaviors and moral responsibility

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313 314 315 316 317 318 319 320 321 322 323 324 325 326 327 328 329 330 331 332 333 334

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335

4.3. Teachers’ institutional narratives and the organization of children’s experiences A ﬁnal aspect of the teachers’ narratives that we will consider is how they arranged children’s experiences along temporal lines of development. An important notion that has been put forward in the literature on child development is that of prolepsis, or representation of the child’s future development in the present (Cole, 2002). Language-mediated routines have been described as crucial to the way prolepsis works in providing an immediate environment for the child’s development in the future. Cole (2002), for example, has pointed out how adults’ talk about children and interpretations of children’s behavior regularly involve recollections of the past that are related to adults’ present views and treatment of the children. This, in turn, is related to culturally-appropriate imagined futures for the children. Many of the teachers’ narratives in these parent–teacher conferences have a proleptic quality in the ways in which they establish relationships between the past, present, and future of the children according to institutional expectations of development. First of all, children’s past performance was generally only invoked in these teachers’ narratives to highlight their academic improvement: Mar´a’s conference with Ms. Salinger ı
T:

336 337 338 339 340 341 342 343 344 345 346 347 348 349 350 351

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Nova’s conference with Ms. Johnson
T: he has already shown great improvement over the year (.) cuz last year you were- last year you were in all ESL classes

352 353

Miguel’s conference with Ms. Conroy
T: Lately since you have been in the after school homework program your homework has been getting a lot better You’ve been a lot more consistent with your homework

354

responsibility teachers utilized a variety of linguistic resources: the use of the passive voice, the ﬁrst person plural pronoun (to include themselves in a shared sense of responsibility with the students), verbs that connote unintententionality, and nominalizations. (See Table 2.) They also intensiﬁed positive attributions by adding intensiﬁers like “really” and “very,” and by using the progressive aspect to depict children’s positive behavior as ongoing, repetitive, and part of a successful developmental trajectory; and they used de-intensifying words to accompany negative attributes (See Table 3). In addition to these grammatical resources, in the course of their narratives, teachers also emphasized certain positive qualities about the children as students. Some examples of the attributes that these teachers singled out are: participating in class, doing all homework, turning in assignments on time, and being well-behaved, gentlemanly, respected and liked by peers, organized, and hard-working. These characterizations contribute to teachers’ constructions of the children as students who are not deﬁned solely by their academic deﬁciencies or problematic behaviors. It has been documented that in family narratives about children, Euro-American adults orient to the principle of “self-maximization,” that is, they describe qualities that they want children to have in the future (Miller et al., 1997). Teachers seem to be doing something similar in that they do not simple formulate children’s identities as students in the present, but they orient to the identities they want the children to have in the future. The speciﬁc attributes that teachers chose to highlight about the children are important because these communicate institutional expectations and ideologies of what constitutes a good student. The named positive attributes, along with the concerns raised by the teachers in the narration of the central problematic events, discursively instantiate the value systems of the teachers and, in turn, of the institution.

She-she’s done much better on most of her tests this this quarter?

LINEDU 178 1–31 I.G. S´ nchez, M.F. Orellana / Linguistics and Education xxx (2006) xxx–xxx a Table 3 Linguistic resources for emphasizing children’s positive attributes and for highlighting children’s good past behavior Linguistic resources Intensiﬁers accompanying positive assessments Data examples 13

Mar´a’s conference with Ms. Salinger ı T:

Use of absolute adverbs of frequency like “always” and “never” and superlatives to emphasize positive qualities

Miguel’s conference with Ms. Conroy

Deintensiﬁers accompanying negative assessments Ing- progressive aspect to depict children’s positive behavior as ongoing and repetitive. The progressive aspect also indexes speakers’ positive emotional affect toward the action depicted as habitual when it is accompanied by intensifying adverbs and adverbs of frequency.

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T:

EC
T:

your homework has been getting a lot better= =You’ve been a lot more consistent with your homework which is really helping, Estela’s conference with Mr. Vick T: She always does her best and always tries her hardest. . .. You never rush things, you take your time. You always try your hardest.

Mar´a’s conference with Ms. Salinger ı she has to talk a little bit

Mar´a’s conference with Ms. Salinger ı

Miguel’s conference with Mr. Roper T: You have to be a little more responsible. Nova’s conference with Mr. Nolan T: Uhm so he’s coming around very nice Nova’s conference with Ms. Johnson T: he’s meeting standards obviously Mar´a’s conference with Ms. Barrett ı T: Uh Mar´a is doing quite well ı Miguel’s conference with Ms. Harrison T: continue to do well on your homework cuz you are getting a lot better= =with that Estela’s conference with Mr. Vick T: You’re doing wonderfully.

She-She-she’s really doing a great job in fifth grade.

She-She-she’s really doing a great job in fifth grade. Nova’s conference with Mr. Miller T: he’s very well behaved Mar´a’s conference with Ms. Barrett ı T: Uh Mar´a is doing quite well ı Nova’s conference with Ms. Johnson T: he’s very much respected And liked by his peers and the other students

LINEDU 178 1–31 14 Table 3 (Continued ) Linguistic resources Data examples Miguel’s conference with Ms. Miller T: You are getting more of your homework done. Simple Present to depict children’s positive behavior as habitual Mar´a’s conference with Ms. Salinger ı T: I.G. S´ nchez, M.F. Orellana / Linguistics and Education xxx (2006) xxx–xxx a

you do all your homework and you-and you participate in class, and you do everything =you’re supposed to do,

355 356 357 358 359 360

T:
361

362 363 364 365 366 367 368 369

Miguel’s conference with Ms. Harrison
T:

you’re very capable of making the honor roll

Miguel’s conference with Ms. Conroy
T:

Estela’s conference with Mr. Vick
T:

370

If you just, if you stick (with it), you will be a perfect English reader, English writer, English speaker at the rate you’re going.

372 373 374 375 376 377 378 379 380 381 382 383 384

385

5. Children’s narratives-in-translation As we have discussed, immigrant child para-phrasers occupy paradoxical social positions. In the context of parent–teacher conferences, they occupy at least three positions simultaneously: the
Please cite this article as: Inmaculada Garc´a S´ nchez, Marjorie Faulstich Orellana, The construction ıa LINEDU 178 1–31 of moral and social identity in immigrant children’s narratives-in-translation, Linguistics and Education (2006), doi:10.1016/j.linged.2006.07.001.

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Thus, while addressing problematic issues or behaviors by the children (i.e. talking in class, not working hard enough, having limited English proﬁciency), teachers still structured their narratives as vehicles for afﬁrmation of the child. Most of the teachers in this study went to great lengths to highlight the positive; they avoided dwelling on the children’s problems and making direct charges against the child through mitigation of agency and children’s moral responsibility. The exceptions to this patter were the two physical education teachers form whom Miguel translated: they utilized a more direct and unmitigated style, telling Miguel in no uncertain terms that he needed to be more responsible to bring his uniform every day and that he needed to improve his scores on activity tests. Nevertheless, they too ended the conference with an optimistic projection of how Miguel could improve his scores gradually through practice. Furthermore, because teachers’ narratives oriented toward what children could do and toward optimistic views of the child’s performance in the future, children’s present problems and misbehaviors were depicted as something that could be overcome.

So: when he gets his (0.6) English skills (.) Uhm to be more proficient he should be get-getting A’s and B’s in science (. . .) so he will do better on the test as his English improves=

I know you can do better than that

These commentaries framed children’s present problems and linked their resolution with optimistic imagined futures for the children. The projected futures were often expressed with a high degree of certainty, which shaped the children’s current experiences and provided an immediate context for the children’s development: Nova’s conference with Mr. Miller

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388 389 390 391 392 393 394 395 396 397 398 399 400 401 402 403 404 405

Table 4 Non-translated teachers praise Data examples

Mar´a’s conference with Ms. Salinger ı T: you do all your homework and you- and you participate in class, and you do everything you’re supposed to do Nova’s conference with Mr. Nolan T: it’s really beautiful things that he can put together and in you∼know in a way part of science is modeling= =what’s going on in nature and I think he has a great deal of appreciation for tha::t. Miguel’s conference with Ms. Harrison T: I’d also like you to let her know= =that I feel that you’re very smart Miguel’s conference with Ms. Conroy T: your homework has been getting a lot better= =You’ve been a lot more consistent with your homework which is really helping, Miguel’s conference with Ms. Harrison T: language arts you had a B, that’s in my class, which means that in language arts you are doing well, Mar´a’s conference with Ms. Salinger ı T: she reads, she reads a lot= =she’s a very good student. Estela’s conference with Mr. Vick T: You are doing wonderfully. You’re doing wonderfully. Estela’s conference with Mr. Vick T: Your daughter’s a very bright girl. She can do all of the work, and do it well. She does all of the work well. Everything that I give her. Everything that she’s asked to do.

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privileged role of translator, which accords them some power over how the teachers’ narratives are conveyed; that of present interlocutor being talked about, with the presumed right to challenge the teacher’s representation of events and actions; and the position of co-narrator-in-translation, with the opportunity to recast his or her own identity as well as that of others. Conceivably, translators could recast these identities in a manner that renders themselves morally superior to the initial narrator, following the ”looking good principle.“(See Ochs et al., 1989) At the same time, children’s actions are delimited by their social status as novices, subject to the surveillance of caregivers and the object of their evaluations. They are also constrained by implicit ethical responsibilities as translators to ensure that messages are delivered faithfully. How do children manage these paradoxical positionalities interactionally? What identities do they construct for themselves as they recast their teachers’ narratives in translation? How do they present themselves as moral agents and as social actors? Nowhere is the exploration of children’s ethical dilemmas more fruitful than in the children’s handling of praise and criticism in the teachers’ narratives, not only because praise and criticism are fairly delicate activities in everyday human interaction, but also because how teachers organize praise and criticism within their narratives is inextricably linked to the moral and ethical identities they construct about the children. Thus, we turn now to a close examination of how the children handled praise and criticism in their translations of teachers’ narratives.

LINEDU 178 1–31 16
406

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5.1. Translations of praise Analyses of the children’s translations show that the vast majority of teachers’ positive assessments were either not translated or signiﬁcantly downgraded. Given their relatively powerful role as para-phrasers, it is particularly signiﬁcant that what all three children mitigate and/or choose not to translate in these encounters was precisely their teachers’ positive descriptions of their academic skills and good behaviors and attitudes as students. Table 4 contains examples of teachers’ praise that were not translated by the children. The children drew on grammatical resources to downgrade their teachers’ positive evaluations in a number of similar ways. They did this by reducing praise to the general gloss “voy bien” (“I’m doing well”), downgrading superlatives, eliminating intensiﬁers like “really” and “very,” and substituting neutral verbs for affect-laden ones. This is illustrated in Table 5. 5.2. Recasting moral and social identities in children’s translations

407 408 409 410 411 412 413 414 415 416

417

418 419 420 421 422

423

5.3. Hesitations, false starts, self-repairs Nova’s conference with Mr. Nolan
T:

424

425

426

(He says that- that- in my- my- this- tests that I am doing like this-I am low because in my language of- because-because I don’t have the- the- the level of- of the language)
427

Miguel’s conference with Ms. Harrison
T:

428

M:
429

the area of social studies you got a c and I think that mainly that is based on test scores from the social studies tests, that you need to read through the chapter every night, because some of the material you’ll just remember it-will just- uh, you’ll just remember it because you’ve read it so much. dice que- as´- como- en social studies me dio ese grado que- porque- esteı las tests y eso- que- este- tengo que leer el cap´tulo dos o tres veces ı (she says that- this way- like- in social studies she gave me that grade that- because- this- the tests and that- that- this- I have to read the chapter two or three times)

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So: when he gets his (0.6) English skills (.) Uhm to be more proficient he should be get-getting A’s and B’s in science So he’s- you∼know he’s meeting standards obviously because I am not gonna (.) downgrade him on standards uhm based upon his (.) English proficiency? uhm so he will do better on the test as his English improves= Dice que- que- en mis- mis- este- tests que voy as´como- estoy bajo ı porque en mi lenguaje de- porque- porqueno tengo la- el- el nivel del- del lenguaje

Children’s management of criticism reveals perhaps more clearly their stances toward their paradoxical positions than does their handling of praise. The ethical dilemma that they faced is evidenced at the discourse level by the large number of false starts, hesitations, self-repairs, cut-offs, and embarrassed giggles that accompanied children’s translations of central problematic events as compared to when they translated other parts of the teachers’ narratives:

LINEDU 178 1–31 I.G. S´ nchez, M.F. Orellana / Linguistics and Education xxx (2006) xxx–xxx a Table 5 Downgrading praise in translation Grammatical resources Teachers’ praise Mar´a’s conference with Ms. Salinger ı T: She-She-she’s really doing a great job in fifth grade. Elimination of Intensiﬁers Child’s downgraded translation V: 17

Dice que voy bie:n en la clases

Nova’s conference with Mr. Nolan T: he’s very well behaved

Mar´a’s conference with Ms. Barrett ı T: Uh Mar´a is doing quite ı Well Maria’s conference with Ms. Barrett 08 T: She’s a hard worker

Substitution of neutral verbs for positive affect-loaded verbs

Nova’s conference with Ms. Johnson T: he’s very much respected And liked by his peers and the other students

430

5.4. Embarrassed giggles

431

Mar´a’s conference with Ms. Barrett ı
T: V: T: V: She pays attention most of the time in class ((Smiling at Mar´a)) ı ((giggles)) Be honest Pongo atenci´ n a veces en la clases (I pay attention in class sometimes) o

432

433 434 435

If in the teachers’ narratives we saw a tendency to portray children in a positive light, mitigate their agency, and avoid direct assignation of blame and responsibility, what is most striking about the way in which children recast problematic events or actions is how they presented
Please cite this article as: Inmaculada Garc´a S´ nchez, Marjorie Faulstich Orellana, The construction ıa LINEDU 178 1–31 of moral and social identity in immigrant children’s narratives-in-translation, Linguistics and Education (2006), doi:10.1016/j.linged.2006.07.001.

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Substitution of deintensiﬁers for superlatives

Mar´a’s conference with Ms. Barrett ı T: I gave her this program because I think you can=

=handle it, the Contemporary classics.

It’s usually for the best= =students in reading.

DP
M: M: N: V:

(She says that I am doing we:ll in class)

que: me porto bien en l clase (tha:t I behave well in class)

que estoy haciendo bien (That I am doing well)

que soy una trabajadora (That I am a worker) me llevo bien con los estestudents= =y ellos se llevan bien conmigo (I get along with the students and they get along with me) Y me dio ese programa porque- porque- yo soy m´ s o menos- que puedo a leer bien (And she gave me that program becausebecause- I am more or less- I can read well)

LINEDU 178 1–31 18
436 437 438 439 440 441 442 443 444 445 446 447 448 449 450 451 452 453 454 455 456 457 458 459 460 461 462 463 464 465

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5.5. Use of deintensiﬁer + positive-affect diminutive sufﬁx (“-ito”) ”poquito” Mar´a’s conference with Ms. Barrett ı
Teacher:She pays attention most of the time in class ((Smiling at Mar´a)) ı Mar´a: ı ((giggles)) Teacher: Be honest Mar´a: ı Pongo atenci´ n a veces en la clases (I pay attention in class sometimes) o Teacher:she has to talk a little bit’ Mar´a: ((giggles)) ı Mother: habla mucho (She talks a lot) Teacher:yes Mar´a: ı Poquito no mucho (A little bit not a lot)

467

468

469 470

In another example, Miguel distanced himself from Ms. Harrison’s report on his grade of a “C” in Social Studies by adopting a negative and distanced stance toward the grade:

3 Although the pronoun “yo” (“I”) does not appear explicitly in the children’s translation, it must be pointed out that Spanish is a pro-drop language and that the semantic role of agent is morphologically encoded in the ﬁrst person singular verbal sufﬁx “−o,” i.e. Tomo = I take.

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themselves as agentive actors, amplifying their moral responsibility for their poor performance, lack of effort, or bad behavior in the classroom. Again the children drew on linguistic resources to do so; for example, they recast the teachers’ passive voice (used to avoid assignation of blame) in the active, and used the personal possessive pronoun (“mis” or “my”) to denote ownership where the teacher had used the generic (“the”). In one conference with Ms. Salinger, Maria consistently recast the language her teacher used to avoid assigning moral responsibility to Mar´a) into a language of personal responsibility, saying: “Tengo que mirarlos” (“I ı have to look at them”), “Tengo que componerlos” (“I have to fix them”), Tengo que buscarlas” (“I have to look for them’), “Tengo que leerla” (“I have to read it”), “Tengo que aprender” (“I have to learn”), “Tengo que proofread” (“I have to proofread”), Tengo que aprender m´ s“(”I have to learn more”), and ”Tengo que cora rectar (sic)“) (”I have to correct them”). Table 63 shows the different linguistic resources that children utilized to portray themselves as responsible moral actors. Taken together, the discursive and grammatical features of the translations show how these children recast the moral and social identities that teachers constructed for them in a much more negative light. Children gave discursive prominence to the central problematic events, magnifying their own moral responsibility, while simultaneously downplaying their good behavior and academic strengths. This recasting is particularly signiﬁcant because the children’s translations and the identities that are instantiated therein are the versions that their parents ultimately got to hear. It must be noted that on a few occasions, the children also displayed their resourcefulness at using their position as translators to resist teachers’ and parents’ characterizations of their behaviors or to present themselves in a particular light. In the following segment, Ms. Salinger portrayed Mar´a as being sometimes inattentive and talkative in class (“she has to talk a ı little bit’.”). When Mar´a’s mother paraphrased the teacher’s description as (“habla ı mucho” -she talks a lot-), Mar´a, in a defensive move against her mother’s take-up of the teacher’s ı comment, corrected her mother’s translation replacing the adverb “mucho” (-a lot-) by the deintensiﬁer adverb “poco” with the positive-affect diminutive sufﬁx “-ito” attached to the deintensiﬁer (“poquito”):

LINEDU 178 1–31 I.G. S´ nchez, M.F. Orellana / Linguistics and Education xxx (2006) xxx–xxx a Table 6 Assumption of moral agency Linguistic resources Portraying oneself in the semantic role of agent3 Teachers’ narratives Mar´a’s conference with Ms. Salinger ı Children’s translations 19

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T: and in reading it’s the um, the need to elaborate and the completing of your= =reports. the need to give as much information as possible. I find that that when I read your reports, especially some of the

Portraying oneself in the semantic role of agent + use of morally-evaluative adjectives [“malas”]

Miguel’s conference with Ms. Harrison

book= =reports, some sections you’re doing= =very well but other areas you’ll just answer one sent- one word

M: Dice que cuando tomo lasT: the only thi-reason tengo una “I”? that I put an porque cuando tomo lasinconsistent, las tests, no hago bien is sometimes Mar´a’s math ı (She says that when I take the-I have an “I”? because when I take the- the tests I don’t do well) tests aren’t- they don’t show me as much as what I know that she knows.

N: reportes de libro queuhm, en unas partes las hago bien y en otras partes no porque en unasen las malas este uhm uhm doy uhm nom´ s una a palabra o uhm una oraci´ n en vez de un o p´ rrafo. a (book reports that-uhm, in some parts I do them well and in other parts I don’t because in somein the bad ones this uhm uhm I give uhm only a word or uhm a sentence instead of a paragraph)

LINEDU 178 1–31 20 Table 6 (Continued ) I.G. S´ nchez, M.F. Orellana / Linguistics and Education xxx (2006) xxx–xxx a

or one sentence answer where I’ve asked you for a paragraph Substitution of adverbs of frequency Mar´a’s conference with Ms. Barrett ı [“a veces”] T: She pays attention most of the time in class

Use of possessive

Nova’s conference with Ms. Johnson

personal adjectives [“mis”]

T: uhm so he will do better on the test as his English improves miscomo- estoy bajo

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T: ok, so that’s really the only =thing I would tell you that you need to improve, is continue to do well with= =your homework cuz you are getting a

Including critical and incriminating comments in the translation that are not present in the teacher’s narrative

Miguel’s conference with Ms. Conroy

lot= =better with that, and I would say that these test scores need to= =come up, I know you can do= better than that

DP
N:

M: Pongo atenci´ n a veces o en la clases (I pay attention in class sometimes)

Dice que- que- en mis-

este- tests que voy as´ ı

(He says that- thatin my- my- this- tests that I am doing like this- I am low)

M: dice que puedo estehacer m´ s bien en las a tests y lo puedo asina, lo pu- asina estar m´ s a asina uhm uhm uhm poner m´ s atenci´ n a o (she says that I can this- do better on the tests and I can likeI c- like- to be more like- uhm uhm uhm pay more attention)

Linguistic resources

Teachers’ narratives

Children’s translations

LINEDU 178 1–31 I.G. S´ nchez, M.F. Orellana / Linguistics and Education xxx (2006) xxx–xxx a Table 6 (Continued ) Linguistic resources Translating the teacher’s optimistic projections of the student’s future performance in terms of present personal deﬁcits Teachers’ narratives Nova’s conference with Ms. Johnson Children’s translations N: Dice que- que- en mismis- este- tests que voy as´ ı (He says that- thatin my- my- this- tests that I am doing like this- I am low) 21

471

5.6. Use of the demonstrative adjective “ese” Miguel’s conference with Ms. Harrison
T: M:

472 473

474

475 476 477 478 479 480 481

483 484 485 486 487 488 489 490 491 492 493 494 495 496 497 498 499

Finally, two features of the teachers’ narratives that were maintained faithfully in the children’s translations are the cause–effect relationships as expressed in the teachers’ narrative logics and the optimistic futures that teachers often projected for the children. Examples of these are presented in Tables 7 and 8. As can be seen in these examples, the children’s translations took up the causal relationships and theories of events put forward in the teachers’ narratives. In reproducing the teachers’ narrative logics in their translations (i.e. having limited English proﬁciency as the cause for performing poorly on tests and getting bad grades as the consequence of low test performance), the children appropriated institutional theories of learning and performance as frameworks for interpreting and organizing their own academic experiences. These examples speak to how children are apprenticed into institutional systems of beliefs and how they may learn about institutions’ expectations (Miller et al., 1990; Ochs & Capps, 1995). The versions of events and the cause–effect relationships established in the teachers’ narratives that were maintained in the children’s translations provide institutional cultural schemata through which children structured their experiences. The signiﬁcance of these interactions for how children learn to interpret their own lives in a culturally-inscribed narrative format is also underscored by how children took up the imagined
Please cite this article as: Inmaculada Garc´a S´ nchez, Marjorie Faulstich Orellana, The construction ıa LINEDU 178 1–31 of moral and social identity in immigrant children’s narratives-in-translation, Linguistics and Education (2006), doi:10.1016/j.linged.2006.07.001.

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5.7. Children’s organization of their experiences in translation

Miguel translates his teacher’s characterization of the central problematic event “you got a c“as “me dio ese grado” (-she gave me that grade-). The use of the demonstrative adjective “ese” (“that”) indexes the child’s negative stance toward the grade. This negative stance is further accentuated by the translation of “you got” as “me dio” -she gave me-, which highlights the teacher’s role and responsibility in the assignment of the grade. Such examples of resistance also suggest these children’s understandings of how narrative practices in the context of parent–teacher conferences expose them as objects of adults’ evaluation (Ochs & Taylor, 1992).

the area of social studies you got a C and I think that mainly that is based on test scores from the social studies tests, dice que- as´- como- en social studies ı me dio ese grado que- porque- este- las tests (she says that- this way- like- in social studies she gave me that grade that- because- this- the tests)

T: uhm so he will do better on the test as his English improves

LINEDU 178 1–31 22 I.G. S´ nchez, M.F. Orellana / Linguistics and Education xxx (2006) xxx–xxx a

Table 7 Cause and effect relationships in teachers’ narratives Teachers’ narrative logic Mar´a’s conference with Ms. Salinger ı T:Um, this- this “I” inconsistent means that Sometimes on your math tests, you get- you do all your homework and you- and you participate in class, and you do everything you’re supposed to do, but when it comes to taking the test, you don’t- you don’t- get as good of a grade on your test as you do in the classroom. Nova’s conference with Ms. Johnson T:uhm so he will do better on the test as his English improves= Children’s translations

Miguel’s conference with Ms. Harrison T:the area of social studies you got a C and I think that mainly that is based on test scores from the social studies tests,

500 501 502 503 504 505 506 507 508 509 510 511

futures their teachers project for them. When these projected optimistic futures were present in the teachers’ narratives, they were almost always taken up by the children in their translations. Unlike praise, these optimistic projections for the future were never downgraded or left untranslated. (See examples in Table 9.) Although children constructed their present identities in terms of their deﬁciencies and problematic behaviors, they embraced teachers’ orientations to more favorable futures and, thus, formulated future identities for themselves as successful students who were capable of performing better on tests, of getting As, or making the honor roll. Thus, the narratives served as vehicles for children to construct their moral and social identities of students not only in the present but also in the future. It is in the children’s uptake of these imagined futures that we can see most clearly how caregivers’ narratives about children simultaneously shape and constrain children’s organization of their own experiences along a temporal line of development (Cole, 2002; Ochs & Capps, 1995, 2001).
Please cite this article as: Inmaculada Garc´a S´ nchez, Marjorie Faulstich Orellana, The construction ıa LINEDU 178 1–31 of moral and social identity in immigrant children’s narratives-in-translation, Linguistics and Education (2006), doi:10.1016/j.linged.2006.07.001.

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N:Dice que-que en mis- mis- este- tests que voy as´como- estoy bajo ı porque en mi lenguaje de- porque- porque no tengo la- el- el nivel del-del lenguaje (He says that- that in my- my- this tests that I am doing like this- I am low because in my language of because- because I don’t have thethe- the level of- of the language) M:este dice que as´como ı en social studies me dio ese grado que- porque- este- las tests (this- she says that this way like in social studies she gave me that grade that- because of- the test)

V:Dice que cuando tomo lastengo una “I”? porque cuando tomo las- las tests, no hago bien como le hago encuando tengo- cuando tengo testscomo cuando hago en Social Studies? Le hago m´ s bien que en el test. a (She says that when I take the- I have an “I”? because when I take the- the tests, I don’t do well like I do it in- when I have- when I have testslike when I do in Social Studies? I do it better than on the test).

LINEDU 178 1–31 I.G. S´ nchez, M.F. Orellana / Linguistics and Education xxx (2006) xxx–xxx a Table 8 Teachers projection of optimistic futures Teachers’ imagined futures (a) 02 Nova’s conference with Mr. Nolan T: So: when he gets his (0.6) English skills (·) Uhm to be more proficient he should be get-getting A’s and B’s in science Children’s translation 23

(and that but i::f- that is if I improved my language thisI- I would get A’s and B’s in science) M: este- dice que puedo, ver asi naen, tienen una lista de honor y estepuedo hacer asi uhm me pueden poner en la lista (this- she says that I can- see- likein- they have an honor list and I can make it like- uhm thisthey can put me on the list) M: dice que puedo este hacer mas bien en las tests (she says that I can thisdo better on the tests)

(b) 03 Miguel’s conference with Ms. Harrison T: you’re very capable of making the honor roll.

(c) 04 Miguel’s conference with Ms. Conroy T: I would say that these test scores need to come up, I know you can do better than that Mig guel’s conference with Mr. Roper

512

6. Parents’ responses

514 515 516 517 518 519 520 521 522 523 524 525 526 527 528 529 530 531

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For the most part, parents did not participate vocally in these conferences. Teachers designed their narratives with the mothers as primary ratiﬁed recipients and spoke about the child in the third person (though they sometimes moved between the ﬁrst and the third person). But the mothers generally did not respond directly to the narratives nor did they attempt to engage in conversation with the teachers. They rarely interrupted the teachers’ narratives and seldom challenged the teachers’ accounts of events. Miguel’s mother did direct a series of questions to Miguel in the course of his translations, and she prompted him to tell the teachers about things that the teachers might not know (e.g. that Miguel was having problems with his locker partner, that he had begun attending an after-school homework assistance program, and that he would be getting more exercises in the summer). She also questioned Miguel about the problems his teacher named, but she did not direct her questions to the teacher. Miguel translated some but not all of this information back to his teachers; on one occasion he clariﬁed to the teacher that his mother’s comment was “just for him.” And Estela’s mother engaged in a long exchange with Mr. Vick once space was opened for her to raise questions at the end of the conference, but this took place after the teacher had delivered his narrative. But with these exceptions the most common response by parents to teachers’ narratives was the passive receipt of information followed a topic shift, as illustrated in Table 11. Sometimes, however, mothers offered a coda to the children’s translation of the teachers’ narrative in which they brought together the central problematic event and ways in which the

N: y que pero si::- o sea si subiera mi lenguaje este yo- yo sacara As y Bs en ciencias

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Table 9 Parents responses to teacher narratives Typology of responses (1) Mother receives the information followed by a topic shift Data examples (a) 02 Nova’s conference

→N:

T: N:

do you have any questions

T: →M:

reuniones-

able=

(2) Mother provides a coda, summarizing the import of the teacher’s narrative

(a) 04 Miguel’s conference

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a sus juntas porque esteporque no hablamos ingl´ s e por eso a veces no- no hemos podido venir pero que nos interesa mucho estar aqu´ ı (Uhm well this- what would I ask her? Uhm huh that we ha- can’t come to your meetingsto your conferences because thiswe don’t speak English that’s why sometimes we haven’t- we haven’t been =to come but we are very interested in being here)

ser m´ s aplicado a pos si- si pones m´ s atenci´ n a o vas a ser mejor, vas a ser major (to be more dedicated cuz ifif you pay more attention you’re going to be better, you are going to be better)

, tienes preguntas? (Do you have any questions?) any comments? uhm pues este- que le preguntare? Uhm huh o que no he- podemos venir a sus

→M:

me llevo bien con los este-students= =y ellos se llevan bien conmigo (I get along with the students and they get along with me) uhm huh

OF
End of Nova’s translation Mother receives the information Topic shift

LINEDU 178 1–31 I.G. S´ nchez, M.F. Orellana / Linguistics and Education xxx (2006) xxx–xxx a Table 9 (Continued ) Typology of responses (3) Mother problematizes the child behavior (Mo= Mother Mi= Miguel) Data examples (a) 05 Miguel’s conference 25

Mo:

Mi: Mo:

532 533 534 535 536 537 538 539 540 541 542 543 544 545 546 547 548 549

child could improve in the future. (This is also illustrated in Table 11.) With these codas, mothers aligned themselves with the institutional narrative logics and moral universe portrayed in the teachers’ narratives. Alignment between caregivers in adults’ narratives in which the child is cast as protagonist has previously been documented as characteristic of family narrative practices in U.S. middle-class households and analyzed as crucial to the process by which children are educated and socialized into adult worldviews (Ochs & Taylor, 1992). This complicity between teachers and parents was also evident in the third type of parental response. In addition to these codas, mothers often responded to the children’s translations of the narratives by problematizing the child’s behavior upon which the narrative was centered. This problematization took the shape of questions that were aimed at determining why the child was having the speciﬁc problem and establishing the degree of moral responsibility of the child. For example, Miguel’s mother asked him why he hadn’t completed his homework (the central problematic event named by his teacher: “Pero no le entiendes en realidad o no la haces?” (But you don’t really understand, or you don’t do it?). In terms of moral responsibility, not completing school assignments is different if the child does not understand what is required than if the child is simply not doing the work; if s/he doesn’t understand, the teacher may be the morally responsible party, but if s/he simply is not completing the work, the child is morally responsible by failing to fulﬁll his responsibilities as a student. This scrutinizing practice resembles the ways in which
Please cite this article as: Inmaculada Garc´a S´ nchez, Marjorie Faulstich Orellana, The construction ıa LINEDU 178 1–31 of moral and social identity in immigrant children’s narratives-in-translation, Linguistics and Education (2006), doi:10.1016/j.linged.2006.07.001.

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pero no la entiendes, no la haces, no le entiendes en realidad o no la haces? (But you don’t understand, you don’t do it you don’t really understand, or you don’t do it?) no la entiendo (I don’t understand) la´ ltima nom´ s? la´ ltima? u a u (Only the last one? The last one?) uh huh y porque unas si, las primeras, y ya no tienes= (and why do you do some, the first ones, and then you don’t) porque est´ n dif´ciles a ı (because they are difficult) hay de f´ ciles y dif´ciles? o a ı sea las primeras y luego van m´ s y m´ s? a a (There are difficult ones and easy ones? that is to say the first ones and then they get more and more difficult?)

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T:
553

when you study: um, for your tests, is it that you sometimes forget what- what you’ve studied? um, on your math test? or is it more, that, um, when you’re taking the test, you don’t- (1.5) you go kind of quickly:?

555 556 557 558

559

7. Discussion and conclusion

560 561 562 563 564 565 566 567 568 569 570 571 572 573 574 575 576 577 578 579 580 581 582 583 584 585 586 587 588 589 590 591

In this article, we have examined the discursive structuring of teachers’ narratives about students told in the context of parent–teacher conferences, and immigrant children’s participation in and translation of these narratives. We have seen how the children were socialized through these narratives into institutional expectations and world views, and how they constructed their own social and moral identities in and through this talk. Their parents were socialized as well, with children playing an active role in that socialization process, as mediators of the messages and the worldviews that they contain. In their narratives, the teachers in this study most commonly centered on problems, actions, or behaviors that they viewed as creating disequilibrium in the children’s appropriate academic and social development. They attempted to persuade parents and children to see these problems in a particular ways (which usually exculpated teachers of moral responsibility) and to determine the students’ responsibility for the problems. Thus, the narratives functioned as both persuasive and sense-making tools (Mattingly, 1998). Because they regularly dealt with particular sets of students’ academic experiences that are explained in terms of institutional narrative logics, the narratives served as important vehicles for the socialization of immigrant children and their parents into institutional expectations, discourses, and moral orders. In addition, the teachers’ institutional narratives had a proleptic quality (Cole, 2002) in that they not only commented on students’ experiences and/or behaviors, but also created experience and provided an immediate context and continuity for development by bringing to bear children’s pasts and presents on their possible futures, according to institutional developmental expectations. The narratives, then, provided important cultural frameworks for children to organize their own academic experiences in terms of institutional worldviews. Although teachers centered their narratives on children’s academic problems and behaviors, they did not deﬁne children’s identities in terms of their academic deﬁciencies and problematic actions. Rather, through the discursive structuring of the narratives and deployment of certain linguistic resources, teachers avoided direct assignation of blame and mitigate children’s responsibility for the problems and violations that they identiﬁed. At the same time, they highlighted children’s positive attitudes as students and emphasized their present and future potential. In their translations, however, children narrated themselves in a more negative light. Although they occasionally took advantage of their positions as para-phrasers to resist certain characterizations of them by adults, most often they organized their translations around the issues their teachers have named for redress. They ampliﬁed their moral responsibility for problematic actions
Please cite this article as: Inmaculada Garc´a S´ nchez, Marjorie Faulstich Orellana, The construction ıa LINEDU 178 1–31 of moral and social identity in immigrant children’s narratives-in-translation, Linguistics and Education (2006), doi:10.1016/j.linged.2006.07.001.

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However, an important difference between the ways in which teachers and mothers engaged children in questioning is that the mothers adopted a more explicitly critical/evaluative stance and cast children more overtly as responsible moral agents. In this sense, some of the mothers took up a strong narrative role of problematizers (Ochs & Taylor, 1992; Ochs & Capps, 2001) in parent–teacher conferences narrative practices.

teachers engage children in questioning in their narratives when trying to ﬁgure out why a speciﬁc academic problem has developed, as in the following example from Maria’s conference with Ms. Salinger:

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by casting themselves in the role of agent even when their teachers did not. They took on much greater responsibility for the problems the teachers named than the teachers accorded to them. While embracing their teachers’ optimistic future projections, children often deﬁned their present identities as students in terms of their deﬁciencies and poor performance. Children’s peculiar positionalities in these encounters were especially evidenced by the seemingly paradoxical ways in which they handle teachers’ praise in their translations. Often they simply did not translate the positive commentaries their teachers made. When they did, they generally downgraded them and transformed speciﬁc praise to more generic or neutral terms. A child’s move not to translate or to downgrade the teachers’ praise may seem surprising, and we would like to consider several possible interpretations of this pattern. Some researchers have argued that this kind of self-effacing behavior and denial of the individual corresponds with a collectivist cultural orientation, in contrast with one in which people seek and/or give credit to individuals (Trumbull, Rothstein-Fisch, Greenﬁeld, & Quiroz, 1998, 2001). Others have suggested that there are social class differences in the degree to which children claim or are given attention for their accomplishments, especially in their interactions with adults (LaReau, 1994). These kinds of social class and cultural norms may partly guide the youths’ behavior in the context of parent–teacher conferences. Observations of these same young people at home certainly revealed a strong orientation toward the collective good and a general tendency both to share responsibilities and celebrate achievements with others (Orellana, 2001; Orellana et al., 2003a,b). Yet although there may be cultural and social class group norms that show up in parent–teacher conferences—an interpretation that would require more research with participants from a wider range of cultural backgrounds - it is important to note that in many contexts, self-praise and displays of agreement with others’ praise in everyday conversation with non-intimates is a dispreferred practice (Pomerantz, 1978, 1984). Thus, whether they are modeling themselves on a local group norm or a more generalized one, the self-effacing behavior of the children in this study can be read as a display of their competence as social actors and language users. The children’s behaviors can also be seen as an index of their social attunement to parents’ and teachers’ orientations in these interactions (see above, Pillet-Shore, 2001, 2003a), as well as of their own orientation to the reportable central events in the teachers’ narratives. That is, their translations corresponded with and reinforced the narrative structures that the teachers use, in that the teacher’s core message was one of identifying a problem and a solution to the problem. Praise for good behavior, while sincere, was used by teachers discursively in part to set up the problem and then to soften its ﬁnal effect. This is underscored at the discourse structure level, since the positive assessments that children did not translate were often those that preceded the central problematic events in the teachers’ narratives; the central problematic events therefore became the ﬁrst structural element in the children’s translations of the narratives. Importantly, this attunement to the discourse process points away from interpretations that the youths’ missed translations were attributable to linguistic or cognitive deﬁcits. Indeed, the children’s translations generally corresponded with the teachers’ messages at a deep level, even when details, such as speciﬁc praise, were omitted. Often, these students summarized the teachers’ comments rather than offering line-by-line translations; this ability to summarize and extract main ideas requires a sophisticated level of linguistic skills. For example, Nova reduced his teacher’s praise to a neat summary: “Me llevo bien con mis compa˜ eros y ellos se llevan bien conmigo.” n (“I get along well with my classmates and they get along well with me.”) This translation leaves off the speciﬁc laudatory detail but captures the core meaning of the teacher’s words, in a way that deﬂects attention from Nova by sharing credit for good behavior with his classmates.
Please cite this article as: Inmaculada Garc´a S´ nchez, Marjorie Faulstich Orellana, The construction ıa LINEDU 178 1–31 of moral and social identity in immigrant children’s narratives-in-translation, Linguistics and Education (2006), doi:10.1016/j.linged.2006.07.001.

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We recognize that it is possible that the children’s range of vocabulary in Spanish may also have delimited their capacity to translate some of the nuanced meanings of teachers’ commentaries. For example, much of the speciﬁc praise words like “wonderful” were glossed by the students as “voy bien” (“I’m doing well”), and it is at least possible that this is because the children did not know the corresponding superlatives in Spanish. But this interpretation is challenged by the fact that the students did seek and ﬁnd close equivalents for other more neutral terms in these and in other translation contexts (Orellana et al., 2003a,b). Moreover, they readily and often admitted what they did not know, and/or asked for assistance. For example, Nova noted that he did not know how to say “cool” in Spanish, and Mar´a responded to Ms. Salinger’s introduction to the conference ı by saying “I don’t know how to say all that!” When they understood a term in English but did not know its precise Spanish equivalent, the students were generally very skilled at conveying the meaning by explaining the term in other ways. Certainly, too, they knew how to intensify words by adding “very” and “really,” and they did so in other contexts, but these intensiﬁers were typically left off in their translations of praise. Finally, much of the praise that went untranslated was linguistically very simple. Parents’ responses to teachers’ narratives also bear consideration. First, the parents in this study mostly positioned themselves as the receivers of teachers’ assessments of their children. This accords with other research on Latino immigrant parents’ relationships with schools (Vald´ s, e 2002; Reese & Gallimore, 2000). Similarly, LaReau’s work (1994) reminds us that relationships between teachers and parents are shaped by the two groups’ relative social class standing, and the distribution of talk in any social context is also reﬂective of power relations between speakers. We should note that although parents did not challenge the teachers’ assessments of their children, they were not passive participants in the exchanges. They actively monitored the information that their children translated as well as the teachers’ manner, tone, and paralinguistic cues (as well as the teachers’ language itself, and they asked clarifying questions of their children after the conferences ended as well as sometimes within them. A more extended analysis of immigrant parents’ relations with teachers and schools falls outside the scope of this paper, but it is important to note that through participation in these conferences, not only immigrant children, but also immigrant parents are being socialized into host society institutional expectations, ideologies, and discourses (i.e. Quiroz, Greenﬁeld, & Altchech, 1998, 1999; Trumbull et al., 1998, 2001; Tse, 1996b), as well as into the social relations within which those ideologies are inscribed. But like the children, parents are active participants in their own socialization processes. What is important to consider for our discussion, however, is the narrative role that parents took up when they did speak in these conferences. For the most part, they took up positions as problematizers of the children’s actions and behaviors, focusing on the problems that they teachers named, and casting the children as responsible moral agents. In doing this, they displayed a more explicitly critical/evaluative stance toward the children than did the teachers, and they generally did not attempt to offer alternative explications for the problems. This appears to contrast with the “dance” that Baker and Keogh (1995) identiﬁed between middle class white parents and teachers, as each tried to place the blame for identiﬁed problems in the others’ camp (even as they avoided direct accusations). The parents in our study may have taken up this role as an extension of their generally deferent stance toward the teachers. In underscoring children’s moral responsibility, they aligned themselves with the teachers’ interpretations and mitigated against any possible suggestion that the teachers may be at fault for the children’s behavior. It is also possible, however that parents’ focus on the negative is partly shaped by the fact that these more negative messages are precisely what their children conveyed through their translations, as they accentuated their own problems,
Please cite this article as: Inmaculada Garc´a S´ nchez, Marjorie Faulstich Orellana, The construction ıa LINEDU 178 1–31 of moral and social identity in immigrant children’s narratives-in-translation, Linguistics and Education (2006), doi:10.1016/j.linged.2006.07.001.

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accepted moral responsibility, and downplayed the praise that their teachers have bestowed upon them. The fact that both children and parents in this study differentially focused on the problems named by teachers is useful for theorizing about issues of positionality, cultural contact, and intergenerational relations. Parent–teacher conferences offer a unique window into these issues, because the conferences are explicitly structured around evaluations of children, and these evaluations are shaped by beliefs about what children (of particular ages and genders) can and should do. In conferences that involve children as translators, children are enlisted in evaluating their own behavior, and in interpreting the values and norms that both parents and teachers bring to that evaluation. They are simultaneously positioned as translators, co-participants, and the objects of evaluation, as they mediate between people with different world views who speak from different social positions. We call for more research on conferences-in-translation involving participants from a wider range of cultural and social class contexts so that we can further unpack these complex social processes. But regardless of the reasons for the behaviors we have described, the results of the analyses we have laid out here have very important implications for practice. They challenge the popular assumption that students inﬂate their own school performance, and suggest instead that teachers should take particular effort to emphasize the positive in their narrations if they wish this message to be transmitted to parents. This can be done by conveying praise in multiple ways, through repetition, as well as through paralinguistic cues, which, parents told us, are indeed cues that they read. But most importantly, teachers’ praise should be clearly separated from their problemfocused narratives. Otherwise the narrative structure may serve to reinforce the problem-focus, and the praise may more easily run the risk of being lost in translation.

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