An English Learner as a Cultural Broker for Youth Interviews

Authors

Cynthia C. Reyes, University of VermontFollow

Abstract

In the field of student voice, listening is a notion that is made more complex when related to student participation and agency. To listen to who English learners are requires a reframing of these students against the deficit discourse that is often used to describe their linguistic competencies. Discourse analysis is employed to examine the translanguaging experiences of an adolescent English learner who assisted the researcher in interviews with his peers. This empirical piece asks the question of what researchers can learn when employing the use of students as brokers when conducting interviews. Translanguaging is considered an element of cultural brokering in this piece and emphasized as a method for engaging student voice in educational research.

Keywords

Discourse Analysis, Student Voice, Cultural Broker, Interviews, Translanguaging, English Learner, Listening

Author Bio(s)

Cynthia C. Reyes is an Associate Professor in the Department of Education at the University of Vermont in Burlington, VT. Correspondence regarding this article can be addressed directly to: creyes@uvm.edu.

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my gratitude to Hassan without whom I would not have been able to do this work, or without the support of his teachers. I would also like to acknowledge my colleagues Alan Tinkler and Kelly Clark Keefe for their thoughtful mentorship on my work.

Publication Date

3-10-2019

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.

DOI

10.46743/2160-3715/2019.3671

Recommended APA Citation

Reyes, C. C. (2019). An English Learner as a Cultural Broker for Youth Interviews. The Qualitative Report, 24(3), 532-549. https://doi.org/10.46743/2160-3715/2019.3671