Constructing Social Identity in the Sch

CHILDREN’S SOCIAL IDENTITY IN THE SCHOOL WORLD

Warning! 6-Year-old Architects at Work: Constructing Social Identity in the School World

Diana Marcela Fajardo Bonilla Tatiana Valcárcel Ríos

THESIS ADVISOR: Eliana Garzón Duarte, M.A.

A thesis submitted as a requirement to obtain the degree BACHELOR IN BASIC EDUCATION MAJORING IN ENGLISH

UNIVERSIDAD DISTRITAL FRANCISCO JOSÉ DE CALDAS SCHOOL OF SCIENCE AND EDUCATION Major in English Language Teaching Bogotá D.C 2012


Note of acceptance

________________________________ ________________________________ ________________________________ ________________________________ ________________________________

Thesis advisor

________________________________ Eliana Garzón Duarte, M.A.

Juror _________________________________ Pilar Méndez Rivera, M.A

Juror

________________________________ Julia Posada Ortiz, M.A


Universidad Distrital Francisco José de Caldas Acuerdo 19 de 1998 de Consejo Superior Universitario. Artículo 177. “La Universidad Francisco José de Caldas no será responsable por las ideas expuestas en este trabajo”


Acknowledgements Few words and so many people to whom I say thanks. First, thanks God for all the patience and love these pages were written with. Thanks also, for each one of the beautiful children main characters of this process to whom this work is dedicated. Thanks UD for having been the place and space where I lived wonderful academic and personal experiences and where I met wonderful people such as my dear friends and admired teachers; special thanks to Lore, Ivonne, Tatiana, their families, and to professors Eliana Garzón and Pilar Méndez. Last but not least, and even when they never understood the reason why I studied this career, thanks family for having been helpers in this goal of becoming a teacher. Diana Marcela Fajardo Bonilla

Drawing moments that left traces on time and taking steps that contained our endeavors were enterprises that I could not have accomplished without the support of those whom I want to dedicate and acknowledge this work. First, to Jehovah God who provided me with the balance between wisdom and patience necessary to persevere in the purpose, to my father for his altruistic efforts which taught me to give my best in every commitment acquired and whose ideals were materialized in the professional I am now. To my mother for her valuable pieces of advice and the dawns she sacrificed to see me going forth. To my brother and sister I thank for their expectations, faith in me and their selfless collaboration. Also I reserve my special gratitude for Diana, for her unconditional helping hand and her kind patience in the process, to those of my teachers who spent their hours cultivating my talents, to my friends and colleagues for the indispensable joyful and hard-working journeys. Last but not least, I owe my gratitude to the group of first graders and to the Distrital University community that permitted me to grow while experiencing the most rewarding times of my self-construction as a language teacher. Tatiana Valcárcel Rios


Abstract This is a qualitative ethnographic study carried out at a school in the downtown of Bogotá, with 21 first graders: 12 boys and 9 girls. This research describes and understands the phenomenon of children’s social identity construction when immersed in their school world. As EFL teachers in charge of an academic process as well as of a social education, we applied some principles taken from the Whole Language Approach as the pedagogical methodology. A learner-centered syllabus for English classes was designed by researchers from general topics to personal ones allowing students to use language in close context with the objective of permitting them to develop their self-confidence as EFL learners constructing their social identity in the school world. For doing so, researchers planned activities for children to use materials made by them like puppets, sociograms, key holders and drawings to address their classes. Data was gathered during 15 weeks through students’ artifacts, semi-structured interviews, and reflective journals. The data suggested that children construct their social identity by making use of three sources of identity which were the TV, the family and the friends; by learning and using socially the language resulting in a process of making the language their own, and by playingat school where this social activity portrayed social discursive practices involving a social learning. Key words:Social identity, self-confidence, school world. Resumen Este es un estudio cualitativo etnográfico llevado a cabo en una escuela en el centro de Bogotá, con 21 niños de primero: 12 niñas y 9 niños. Esta investigación describe y entiende el fenómeno deconstrucción de identidad social en los niños cuando están inmersos en su mundo escolar. Como profesoras de ILE a cargo de un proceso académico tanto como de una educación social, aplicamos algunos principios del enfoque Lenguaje Total como metodología pedagógica. Un plan de estudios centrado en el estudiante fue diseñado por las investigadoras desde temas generales a unos particulares, permitiéndoles a los estudiantes usar el lenguaje en contexto y a desarrollar su auto confianza como aprendices de ILE en el proceso de identidad social en el mundo escolar. Las investigadoras planearon actividades donde los niños usaron material elaborado por ellos tales como títeres, sociogramas, llaveros y dibujos. Los datos fueron recolectados durante 15 semanas a través de artefactos de los estudiantes, entrevistas semi-estructuradas y diarios reflexivos. Los datos sugirieron que los niños construyen su identidad social haciendo uso de tres recursos los cuales fueron la televisión, la familia y los amigos; aprendiendo y usando socialmente el lenguaje resultando en un proceso de apropiación de la lengua, y jugando en la escuela como actividad social representando practicas discursivas envueltas en un aprendizaje social. Términos claves:Identidad social, auto-confianza, mundo escolar.


Table of Contents Page AUTHORS’ FOREWORD ……………………………………………………..1 INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………..……..2 CHAPTER I RATIONALE ……………………………………………………………………8 Justification………………………………………………………………………8 Problem statement ……………………………………………………………....12 Research question ……………………………………………………………….14 Research objectives ..……………………………………………..……………..14 CHAPTER II THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK ………………………………………………15 What is Identity about?………………………………………..………………...15 Social Identity ……………………………………………..…………………….18 Intersubjectivity and social learning ……………………………………………23 Self-confidencein EFL learning……………………………..……………….....27 School World: children’s possible world ……………………………………….29 CHAPTER III RESEARCH DESIGN ………………………………………..…………………34 Type of research: Qualitative descriptive-interpretative research ……………...34 Type of study: Ethnographic ……………………………………………………37 Setting ……………………………………………..…………………………….43 Population ……………………………………………………………………….43 Participants ………………………………………………………………………45


Data collection instruments and procedures …………………………………….47 Students’ artifacts ……………………………………………………………47 Sociogram ………………………………………………………………...48 Semi-structured interviews …………………………………………………. 49 Teachers’ reflective journals.. …………………………………….………….50 CHAPTER IV INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGN ………………………………………………….. 52 Teachable objectives ……………………………………………………………52 Methodology …………………………………………………………………….53 Pedagogical implementation …………………………………………………….55 Syllabus ………………………………………………………………………57 Activities Description ……………………………………………………………62 Evaluation ………………………………………………………………………..67 CHAPTER V DATA ANALYSIS …………………………………………………………...…68 Strategy of analysis supporting data interpretation: Ethnography of speaking….71 Finding commonalities and relationships ……………………………………….73 Children’s conceptions about …………………………………………...……74 Defining categories ……………………………………………………………....84 Category 1: Here I am: In my family, in the TV, and with my Friends ……...87 Sources of social identity ………………………………………………….88 Experiences mediated others’ voices ………………………………………94 Category 2: Here I am: with my own words in my own world…………..…..96


The voice of children’s language ……………………………………….....100 Category 3: Here I am: playing and learning ………………………………...101 CHAPTER VI CONCLUSIONS………………………………………………………………...109 CHAPTER VII PEDAGOGICAL IMPLICATIONS AND FURTHER RESEARCH……….….113 REFERENCES...………………………………………………………………...119 LIST OF ANNEXES Annex 1: Student´s interviews format………………………………………..125 Annex 2: Teachers’ reflective journals format…………………………….....126 Annex 3: Consent form for parents…………………………………………..127 Annex 4: First-bookdescription...……………………………………………128 Annex 5: Plan de Estudios de Lengua Extranjera – Inglés………….………..129 Annex 6: Common European Framework Reference Levels: Self-assessment grid………………………………………………..130 Annex 7: Data organization matrix sample.…………………………….…....131 Annex 8: Parents’ survey...………………………………………….………. 132 Annex 9: Children’s school drawings….……………………………….…….133 Annex 10: Children families’ drawings….……………………………….…..134 Annex 11: Karen’s sociogram…..…………………………………………….135 Annex 12: Children’s professions drawings……..……………………….….136 Annex 13: Children’s keyholders…….……………………………………....137 Annex 14: Children’s puppets..…………………………………………..…..138


Annex 15: Speech events in the EFL classes..………………………….…….139 List of Tables and Figures Page Table 1: Philosophical assumptions for practice………………………………36 Table 2: Research design summary……………………………………………51 Table 3: Syllabus ……………………………………………………………...58 Table 4: First teaching cycle………………………………………………….. 60 Table 5: Linguistic skills for first-graders…………………………….……….62 Table 6: Activities description………………………………………………...64 Table 7: Speaking acronym……………………………………………………71 Table 8: Sociogram analysis grid……………………………………………...80 Table 9: Speaking model result………………………………………………..85 Table 10: Factors involved in social identity construction………………….....88 Table 11: Data analysis results summary……………………………………...107 Figure 1: Sociogram…………………………………………………..……….49 Figure 2: Contents sequence…………………………………………………..57 Figure 3: Data organization matrix……………………………………………70 Figure 4: Horizontal and vertical managementmatrix ……………………….70 Figure 5: Children’s age………………….........................................................72 Figure 6: Parents’ occupations………………………………………………...72 Figure 7: Children’s neighborhoods…………………………………………...73


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Authors’ Foreword “A man’s true homeland is his childhood”- Rainer Maria Rilke Truly childhood years are times that most of us recall with joyfulness, years that went along with our life as students and that explain in some mode the individuals we are now. In our case, those years as learners were transcendental to raise a motif in us to offer others something similar to what we had the chance to live then. In fact, teaching for us represents living once and again in more interesting fashions the rewarding experiences we had in the past, and a way of helping our inner child to survive throughout the routine of the educational systems that consider the “adulthood” as the goal of the educational practices. In doing so as in every goal you set there is a space for idealization. However, having the opportunity to face the realities that underlie the student profile in different schools being novice teachers led us to reconsider our role as educators and eagerly look for alternatives to make sense of the knowledge we approached criticized and, in occasions, warmly discussed at the university. Yes, the idea of crossing the barrier between students and teachers figures which reinforce and legitimate imaginaries of one group over the other and discard the possibilities that we have to exchange those roles inside the classroom, to become learners among learners who are willing to maintain a spirit of permanent exploration; that idea made worthy the hard-work implied in contributing with something that moved other language teachers to undertake actions in our field.


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Introduction For many years teachers have played an important role in educating the members not only of the classrooms but also of the societies. Thus, the pedagogical functions teachers have performed go through teachable situations, becoming so, socio-cultural functions to be practiced inside and outside the socio-cultural institution known as school. However, little sense would make the social and learning dynamics intertwined in the school lifeif children as the main workers on the project of self-construction were taken for granted. Even if the foregoing point seems to be hypothetical, it is one of the main concerns that moved us as teacher-researchers to create a Warning signal through the development of the current project that called the attention on the active role that children as architects perform when undertaking the course of their social identity building, a role that is mainly captured and manifested in the discursive practices through which children’s voices express, share and define a particular position in and towards their immediate communities. Thus, given that these children’s particular positions and seeing of the world are radically different from adults’ perspectives, and recognizing and accepting that social identity construction process takes part in all areas of life not being the educational one the exception, this warning signal is reflected on our conception about who children are: social subjects. In this path, the present research study attempts to understand how first graders from a public school in Bogotá construct their social identity when immersed in their school world. From a pedagogical standpoint we attempt in the EFL (English as a


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Foreign Language) classes to allow children to develop their self-confidence as EFL learners, bearing in mind that self-confidence is a sub-concept derived from the social identity theoretical construct. The importance of the previous ideas linked to the relevance of acknowledging the powerful relationship between language teaching-learning and social identity construction (Norton, 1997, 2011) are condensed in chapter I in the form of a justification. There we pose the need of valuing children’s voices as to enrich the EFL teaching-learning process allowing children to act as meaning-makers and self explorers portraying who they are in an EFL classroom, as a crucial scenario in the process of identity construction, that considers the language not only as a system but as a means of self-expression (Tudor, 2001. p 63). Perhaps, the reader could be wondering what is social identity about.Without going deeper in details that will be the main focus of chapter II, briefly, we will remind that this phenomenon has been studied with adults in foreign contexts(e.g. Jimenez, 2007; Norton, 1997, 2004; Nieto, 2002), and with teenagers and children in more local contexts (e.g. Bocanegra&Gamba, 2009; Castillo, Suarez, &Velandia, 2005). Therefore, the insights on this phenomenon have been diverse. For some, the identity is defined according to the cultural features like nationality of the community I belong to, for some others, it is defined according to the implications those cultural features have in my identification as member of such community. It means the identity is socially mediated through language (Norton, 1995, 2002), intersubjective relationships and discursive practices (Hirst in Leander & Sheehy, 2004;


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Jaimes&Rodriguez, 1996b); which, in the end, answers the question who am I? (Quesada, 2000). Thus, in our understanding of this phenomenon, we state that, at the moment of being part of a classroom community, the socio-cultural dynamics that take place in the school and the social identity construction cannot be separated from a meaningful EFL learning process -or “place of learning” (Hirst in Leander & Sheehy, 2004). Indeed, this mutual relationship regards to a human construction which represents the reason why we focus our attention on identifying and describing the factors involved in such process of children’s construction of social identity when immersed in the school world. It is worthy to clarify the main differences between the concept of school and the one used in this study: the school world. Generally, the school is conceived as the institution in charge of supplying children’s learning and basic needs (Políticaspara la Calidad de Vida de Niños, Niñas y Adolescentes 2004-2008; Código de Infancia y Adolescencia, Ley 1098 de 1996). However, the varied social interactions portrayed in situated discursive practices that are produced in this institution, lead us to describe it as an active and interactive context that holds a relationship of mutual influence with the EFL learning process as a social learning process, and the social identity construction. In this sense, the school is not defined as a concrete or physical place, but rather as an abstract, wonderful and possible world created by children (Amar, 1998; Ferreiro, 1998, 2003): the school world.


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Due to the previous, we structured a research design (chapter III) based on the principles of the qualitative paradigm (Merriam, 2009; Creswell, 2007) in the frame of an ethnographic study (Goetz &LeCompte, 1988) which suggests a descriptiveinterpretative research methodology characterized as inductive, subjective, generative and constructive. The previous traits determine some practical implications on the focus, process, researchers’ roles and product of the research. To implement the described methodology and to accomplish the research objectives in a public school, setting of this study, where 21 first graders as participants with varied social backgrounds and diverse world views – who illuminated through their own voices our understanding on social identity construction – we as EFL teachers researchers and participants observers, made use of student’s artifacts, students’ semi-structured interviews and teachers’ reflective journals as data collection instruments. On the other hand, approaching the pedagogical dimension, in chapter IV, the reader will find the teachable objectives geared to describe the relationship between the development of children’s self-confidence in the EFL learning and the construction of their social identity when immersed in the school world. With that purpose in mind, the use of some principles of the Whole Language Approach (Richards & Rodgers, 2002) served us to plan a pedagogical intervention founded on the constructivism and humanism teaching philosophy. Step followed, we present the core aspects of a pedagogical implementation guided by a learner-centered syllabus designed taking as theoretical basis the standards for the foreign language teaching, namely, the Common European Framework and the Cycles-based education. Finally,


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in that chapter, we depict the activities carried out during the data collection stage as well as the formative way in which children’s performance was evaluated. At this point, we move to the most descriptive and detailed section of this paper: the data analysis stage (Chapter V) by presenting the data organization and management worked under the directions of the grounded approach (Freeman, 1998). For the descriptive phase we employed some matrixes that helped us to identify individual features and patterns, and we applied the SPEAKING model proposed by Dell Hymes (1974) which led us to define children’s voices (taking the notion of voice from Bakhtin in Baxter, 2003) as unit of analysis and to find some commonalities and relationships that would be the first insights to define our categories. In such definition it was essential the grouping task. Three categories that respond to the research question How do children construct their social identity when immersed in their school world?emerged: Here I am: in my family, in the TV and with my friends Here I am: with my own words in my o wn world and Here I am: playing and learning In this way the family, the television and friends represent those social factors involved in the construction of social identity when children are immersed in their school world, at the same time, the language is managed in a very particular form by children evidenced in their semantic differences, their discursive practices and their interaction when immersed in the school world as EFL learners. Thus, playing, a


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social practice representing children’s roles as social subjects came up as mirror of a social learning process; constitutive of their social identity construction. Finally, in chapters VI and VII we present the conclusions of this formative research process where we include the answer to the research question, our reflections upon researching on children’s social identity specifically as EFL learners as well as some inquiries for future research in our field.


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CHAPTER I Rationale In the following pages the reader will find first the pertinence of conducting this study for us as teacher-researchers as much as for children-learners who are the main characters of the construction of their social identity; in other words the justification. Second, our concerns regarding the phenomena already introduced, its origins, and the way we approach to it, namely, our research problem statement. Third, the main research question that guided the entire development of the research process is posed. Finally, we present the main objectives which provided our study with the coherence necessary for the implementation and the theoretical construction stages. Justification “Everybody says I look just like my mother. Everybody says I’m the image of Aunt Bee. Everybody says my nose is like my father’s. But I want to look like me.” —Dorothy Aldis (2006. p.1). This justification starts with a composition by the children’s literature author and poet Dorothy Aldis (used in the Series Helping Children Grow. February, 2006) and it is relevant for this study because of its social, cultural and educational implications. How important are for our society the children’s voices? In current times, childhood has become recognized as a stage that performs a crucially important role in the development of the individuals as human beings. That idea has been expressed in the childhood policies and has been a widely discussed topic in summits for the agreements of human and children rights supported by the “Convention on the Rights


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of the Child” (Act 1098, 1996. Title II, Chapter I, Art. 6), and according to the premises presented,it has been attributed to children the responsibility of improving the society: children are the future, the future belongs to children. Nonetheless, children have not been recognized as socio cultural subjects within a process of identity construction, as is it mentioned in the document titled Políticapara la Calidad de Vida de Niños, Niñas y Adolescentespara Bogotá 2004-2008 that there are “predominant forms of seeing childhood and adolescence in the city characterized by a scarce social and politic acknowledgement, by social and cultural imaginaries of handicap and non-acknowledgement of their status as subjects with rights. Seeing children and adolescents as adults’ property impedes the acknowledgement of their autonomy”1, thus, children are not assumed as thinking subjects that perceive and interpret the world. How is it translated for the educational field and its members?Unfortunately, according to the idea expressed in the previous excerpt it can be asserted that the educational policies attempt in the official documents have not been applied in the practicum. The educational field has not been the exception and that is why still pupils are conceived by many teachers and administrators as subjects that only receive information and content, and both groups have forgotten that the socio-cultural environment and the identity could be resources to address the learning process in a meaningful way and to fulfill the goal of educating children for them to become self-confident individuals who have a critical view of the society and; therefore, contribute to transform and solve the challenges imposed by it.

1

Traslated by the author.


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On the other hand, following some historical features of Bogotá, as the Colombian capital, it can be said that, since and due to pre-Colombian period and Spanishcolonization occurred in the 1500 – 1538 period, the amount of population with different cultural patterns like traditions, customs, food, folklore, etc. has increased with time. Thus, for instance, we can find afro-colombian people, indigenous people, displaced people… living together, sharing time, eating the same food… and all of them can be referred as “Bogotanos”. It is so not only because of the mere fact that, they were born in the Colombian capital city. They live together because they are under similar economic, cultural and political ideologies affecting the educational conditions; they share time because they speak Spanish as their native language; they eat at the same restaurant or even the same food… Even though, their ancient origins are varied. A classroom in a public school is open to children and families with those characteristics: displacement, poorness, indigenous, black, rich…etc. and all the conditions behind these characteristics shape and reshape children’s process of social identity construction, process in which the school becomes a crucial scenario for them to know, to reflect, to learn, to interact, to think, to grow, to play, to communicate… to live; the school becomes a children’s possible world: the school world. The previous exemplification serves as a reference of the creation of a multicultural society and multicultural classrooms. Kramsch (1998) in Acevedo et. al, “the term multicultural is more frequently used in two ways. In a societal sense, it indicates the coexistence of people from many different backgrounds and ethnicities, as in ‘multicultural societies’ […] in an individual sense, it characterizes persons who belong to various discourse communities, and who therefore have the linguistic


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resources and social strategies to affiliate and identify with many different cultures and ways of using language” (p. 82). That mutual relationship between the societal and individual senses function as a starting point to understand the cultural and biological heritage that permits children to construct their social identity to fortress their self-confidence, as adjacent concept of the construction of identity in the school world. Having in mind the concept explained above, its practical implications enrich this study because, inside a first grade EFL classroom we can wonder about plenty of thoughts, feelings, perceptions, voices and processes of identity constructions that converge in the school world. These processes are deeper socio-cultural dimensions that, at the same time, demand deeper analysis from spheres like the education; especially, from us as EFL and culture teachers-researchers who teach ruled by educational policies of bilingualism in order to seek ways to implement, adapt but overall innovate when teaching. In this way we inspire learners to become language users; not just based on the systematic features of the language, but mainly on the appreciation of the foreign and own cultures that links the conception of language as closely related with culture and thought (Ashworth &Wakefiel,2005), being it considered as an inherent element of social identity construction because of the natural connection that exist between culture, society and identity (Kramsch, 1998). Up to here, it is important to recognize that language is not a non-contextualized human beings creation; language is power, only if it lives in the integration of human beings manifestations. It means that, social identity integrates language learner, language leaning context and EFL theories (Norton,1995). As Norton (1997) claims:


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“[…] every time language learners speak, they are not only exchanging information with their interlocutors; they are also constantly organizing and reorganizing a sense of who they are and how they relate to the social world. They are, in other words, engaged in identity construction and negotiation” (p. 410). Finally, we present this qualitative ethnographic research study as a bridge between theory and practice with regards to EFL teaching standards and the children’s needs. In the same way, we attempted to establish coherent connections between our pedagogical intervention in the EFL classroom and the mission of the public institution where our participants took their classes. This mission superimposes the holistic and intercultural perspective as the prime source of an education with a view aimed to the social transformation. In addition, the mentioned connections should consider the EFL as a basic resource for students to know themselves and their socio-cultural context promoting their ability for decisionmaking on their learning process. Accordingly, the EFL classroom becomes the main scenario where students have the opportunity to construct their social identity while they assume a role of meaning-makers and self-explorers through discursive practices that configure their school world. Problem Statement “We have teachers ready to go beyond the futile battle over methods that ignore the person doing the learning. We have psychologists, psycho-pedagogues and psycholinguists with sufficiently valid theories for restoring our conception of the child as a thinking being in its existential totality.” —Emilia Ferreiro (2002/2003. p. 34).


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Working with children of first grade at a public school with particular social and economic conditions that reveal a public Colombian reality affecting them inside and outside the school, demands being sensitive to the children’s particular realities in our teaching EFL doing and research practice. Our starting point is that many language educators are prone to think of diversity in didactic terms, they base that point of view on the possibilities that a language, especially English offers to interact with different cultures. However, nowadays, it has become an imperative necessity for language teachers to understand the concept of diversity in other terms, that is, the social diversity. For that purpose it is necessary to acknowledge thesocial processes that every learner carries out since the early childhood stages. The construction of social identity as part of those social processes needs to be included in the EFL teaching-learning, in order to take advantage of all what children as learners may contribute to make of their EFL classroom a meaningful place with a meaningful learning by staging the experiences they have in all areas of life, not only the academic one. Exploring such complex relationships between EFL learning and the construction of social identity through our teaching tools might be an enriching enterprise for us as teachers and remarkable for children as EFL learners; overall taking into account that to approach such relationship in the EFL learning, the target language for us as teacher of English needs to be conceived more than asa system of communication with the world: “a means of achieving pragmatic goals, [a means for] “self-


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expression” (Tudor, 2001. p.63).Precisely, this conception of the language as inherent to the inner growth and the discovering of the world is the core for us to approach the process of social identity in the school world. Although inherent, language is neither the cause nor the end of such growth and discovering in children (Norton, 1995, 1997). Viewing English as a language from that perspective permits us to understand the development of children as particular social subjects in a specific community and setting, that is the EFL classroom in the school world, in this fundamental stage of life that is the childhood. Hence, the purpose of this study is to explore, understand and narrate how do children construct their social identity when they are immersed in the school world.

Research question. How do children construct their social identity when immersed in their school world? Mainobjectives.  To describe the way children construct their social identity when immersed in the school world.  To identify the factors involved in children’s construction of social identity in the school world.


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CHAPTER II Theoretical Framework “Children - all children, - I assure you are willing to embark on the adventure of intelligent learning. They are sick of being treated as under-skilled or miniature adults. They are what they are and they have the right to be what they are: changing beings by nature, because to learn and to change is the way of being in the world” —Emilia Ferreiro(2002/2003.p 36)

If children are changing beings by nature because that is their essence or their identity then, what is identity about? If children are willing to embark on the adventure of intelligent learning then the educational institution becomes their school world. Thus, we encourage the reader to follow the interpretations rather than the personal definitions of the constructs core of this theoretical framework: social identity and school world. What is Identity About? A large body of research focused on identity has been published inthe educational field. For EFL teachers it has not been a less interesting issue in the development of cultural integrated curriculum and social integration as participants of the construction of identity process. Most of the conducted studies have understood the concept of identity in terms of the comparison between native-national patterns and foreign-national patterns. These patterns refer to representative symbols like the national anthem, customs, folklore, flora and fauna, typical food and music, etc. For instance, Bocanegra&Gamba (2009) carried out a qualitative case study at a public school in Bogota with 10th graders where the students’ ideas regarding Colombian cultural identity were explored through three categories which laid the foundations


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for the conceptualization of identity. These were: personal identity, social identity and cultural identity. This last category represented the most relevant of their study and it is defined as “the characteristics that allow an individual to fit into a group, in this case, characteristics such as heritage, genealogy, language, religion, territory” (Molina, 2000 in Bocanegra&Gamba, 2009). In contrast Nieto (2002) asserts that “culture is complex and intricate; it cannot be reduced to holidays, food or dances, although these are of course elements of culture. Everyone has a culture because all people participate in the world through social and political relationships informed by history as well as by race, ethnicity, language, social class, sexual orientation, gender, and other circumstances related to identity and experience”(p. 10). These social and political relations take place inside the frame of cultural dynamics like acculturation, enculturation, interculturation or cross culturalization and multiculturalization basis of Acevedo &Álvarez(2007) study entitled “Cultural Identity”. In their work it can be found how 9th graders at a public school in Bogota develop Colombian cultural awareness when identifying American cultural features. In fact, these authors admit that identity is not only the product of a social or cultural process isolated, but it is the result of a socio-cultural practice. Such practice emerge from the experiences lived by an individual. Castillo, Suarez, &Velandia (2005) as EFL teacher-researchers as well highlight the necessary understanding of the experiences and events around children in academic, socio-cultural and personal dimensions in order to see them as human beings who have to face different realities and phenomenon. The major contribution


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of this qualitative study carried out with children from 4th to 5th grade lies in the importance of the learning process based on the world and human dimension, it means, when children learn from the world they establish their own points of view adopting a position according to their social interaction. At this stage, it is worthy to mention that several studies on identity construction and interpretation of the world have been conducted with adult population (e.g., Jiménez, 2007; Nieto, 2002; Norton, 1997, 2004) emphasizing the relationship among identity, language, teaching and learning, socio-cultural context and personal interactions. In like manner, Guerrero (2005) conducted an ethnographic study with Colombian internally displaced children where she admits that “identity is not a stable entity instead it is dynamic, fluid and constructed in and through discourse practice” as a consequence is it is subject to variations across particular scenarios and events (Guerrero,2005. p. 21). She endorses her assertion by advocating sociocultural theories of identity construction; particularly the one posed by Sfard&Prusakwho pose actual identities (stories in the present tense) in contrast to designated identities (stories in future tense that are expected to become part of one’s actual identity which drive people’s actions but that surface in the interaction) stating that learning is the key to close the gap between them (Sfard&Prusak in Guerrero,2005). Besides, to account for the contexts of identity, she resorts to Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner & Cain (1998)to explain the transaction that occurs through, in and out of four contexts (Figured World,possitionality, space of authoring and making worlds) which are understood as dimensions where the identity is implicated in the gradual


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possibility of ‘authoring one-self as empowered into the world and make new worlds’. (as cited in Guerrero, 2005. p. 25, 26). Bearing in mind the previous lines, it must be recognized how essential is to assume consciously and responsibly the emphasized relation mentioned before (among identity, language, teaching and learning, socio-cultural context and personal interactions), in education from the initial stages of the human development (especially childhood): as subject being socio-culturally defined. Because “everything not provided today [to children] will be an irredeemable loss” [reflected in their adulthood] because childhood is only lived once”2 (Políticapor la Calidad de vida de Niños, Niñas y Adolescentes, Bogotá 2004-2008). Social Identity Is identity a psychological concept? Is identity a sociological concept? Or, it is an educational one? Actually, identity has been a concept widely categorized from several perspectives or fields. Anyhow, it is relevant to acknowledge that most of times identity has been defined in psychological terms. Without making of the psychological or sociological definitions about identity our theoretical focus, we will briefly mention a socio-psychological synthesis about it, moving to the theoretical meeting points between the understandings of social identity for socio-psychological perspective and the educational one, arriving to the main focus of this chapter: social identity in the educational field, especially in language teaching field.

2

Trasnlated by the authors.


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Several categories have been used for referring to the identity: personal identity, cultural identity, national identity, group identity, etc. Côté& Levine (2002) in their socio-psychological synthesis remark that identity is a concept derived from the selfconcept since it is a self-construction represented in a path of self-discovery. In this way, it can be referred to identity as social identity since the self-concept is socially constructed when we include other in the self (IOS), or naturally, when we interact and communicate with others. This interaction and communication are mediated by four domains equally identified in the educational settings as in any other social setting. These domains are: 1- Moral and spiritual (ideas and values); 2-family, gender and sexual (interpersonal interaction); 3-econimic and civic, ethnic organizational and workplace setting as well as individual contribution to social functioning), 4 -cultural and national. Situated this concept in the educational-language field, it can be started by saying that generally identity could answer the question who am I? This has been a question whose subjects internally know the answer. In this sense Quesada (2000) points out “knowing who I am is like knowing where I am. My identity is defined by the commitments and identifications […] it is the framework or horizon in which I try to determine, in each case, what is right, valuable, what it should be done, what I agree with or not. It is the horizon where I can adopt a position”3 (p. 106). Adopting a position is determined by agreements and disagreements which are carried out among subjects, like children, who constitute communities or groups, like

3

Translated by the authors.


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the EFL class, in a society which are not in isolation. This same author adds “the identity is always socialized”. It implies an acknowledgment of one-self as participant in a community that holds a vision of the world, of the space and of the time, […] at the same time, it establishes the distance with those who are not part of that community”4 (p. 107). As an interpretation of what identity is for this study and based on statements from the author mentioned above, this term is defined as constructed and regulated by our experiences and our authentic voices. To make this point more explicit it will be referred to Norton &Tooheil (2004) when they agree that identity must be understood 1) as multiple, which means that the self is composed of multiple subjectivities deriving from the heterogeneous codes, register, and discourse that are found in society; 2) as negotiated, that is, in order to find coherence and empowerment, the subjects have to negotiate these competing identities and subjects positions; 3) as evolving, which implies that selves are not immutable our innate; they are reconstructed and reconstituted in relation to the changing discursive and material context; and 4) as conflictual, that is, the self is shaped considerably by language and discourse. Having in mind these features, it is worthy to say that if language and discourse are key elements in the process of identity construction by means of socialization, the foreign language becomes a factor that affect the structuration of new interpretations of the 21 pupils toward themselves and others situated in a particular context: the school world. 4



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Thus, the line of the theory arrives to the enrichment of identity by saying that this is expressed by the “self” and interpreted by the “selves”, and vice versa. This is illustrated with a phrase used in Norton &Tooheil (2004) which says that “the images of the other and self are neither neutral nor natural but are discursively constructed and are influenced by, a reinforcement binary thinking”, in this regard, identity construction process is linked to a process of changing, intersubjectivity and negotiation of differences and meanings. It becomes evident that making room effectively for these phenomena in the language learning process seems to be a hard enterprise; that is the reason why the EFL classrooms demand educational actors to address this concern through interdisciplinary research on students’ identity issues. Rounding off the previous lines, “identity is considered a sort of mosaic in which people identify themselves” in two ways: in stable and in dynamic terms. Stable terms include elements such as the nationality, the mother –tongue, the ethnic group, the age or the gender of the individual. On the other hand, the dynamic terms refer to the alternatives of propping, negotiating, modifying, confirming and questioning through the communication and the contact with others (Byram& Fleming, 2001. p. 124). According to the previous paragraph, identity is consider as individually and mutually built up; since the former takes several factors from the latter to recognize my own culture and society and to become aware of it through the understanding, confrontation and acceptance of the others and the characteristics of other culture and society members (e.g. worldviews and behaviors).


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Thus, the social identity is the product of the permanent interaction with members of a community in which a subject is involved, being a “social process in which one blances what s/he thinks oneself to be and what others believe that want to be” (Lum in Acevedo &Álvarez, 2007. p.25) From the pedagogical stand point, it is necessary to establish and maintain dialogical relationships for and between the individual differences or particular features, the immediate socio-cultural context and the social subjects at school; to take a look at the students’ identity as an inherent process of the EFL learningteaching one. As Tudor highlights “not just as future language users, but as language learners who are involved in developing a certain competence in [social] interaction with a given set of [language] teaching procedures and learning activities” (Tudor, 2001). How easy it could be achieve this? Gergen inCôté et.al (2002) asks a question considered here a crucially important one for us as EFL teacher-researchers when seeing children as unique social subjects constructing their social identity in a school world that belongs to the Colombian context: "can we list a set of things that I "am", or has the late-modern world saturated us with so many choices -and so much information- that one's self of self is nearly impossible to pin down from moment to moment?” (p.10) Concluding, “if identity is potentially threatened in cross-cultural encounter, it could also be said that innumerable benefits may accrue […] 1) global conception of the world 2) decline in authoritarianism 3) internal control 4) achievement values […] people can influence their destinies through their own efforts” (Byram& Fleming, 1998, p. 240).


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Hence, in a society as the Colombian one where the roles for teachers and students look very hard-edged it is worthy to wonder what happens when a foreign language is introduced and is a sponsor of the transformation of the identities and going beyond, how can we us as English teachers implement strategies at the schools to promote a better learning process, a better teaching. Finally, we can bring to a close by reminding that social identity construction is not linear, a mess, a cycle… it is a social process. Intersubjectivity and Social Learning. To continue whit this chapter and before going into this subtitle development, first we consider important to answer the following question: how are children understood in this social identity construction? Taking a look at documents like Políticaspor la calidad de vida de niños, niñas y adolescentes, Bogotá 2004-2008 and Código de infancia y adolescencia children are understood as under 18 age people,actors, citizens, transformers of the reality to whom certain legal conditions in a democratic society are guaranteed; in this way they are defined as subject with rights. However, in a social identity construction process children not only are ascribed to some legal dispositions, but to a set of conditions such as a contextual change, several discursive practices of participation, a transformation of their self, and to a construction of their subjectivity. In this path, children are social subjects rather than subject with rights, whose participation might be portrayed in social spaces like the school when their voices are listened, read, written and spoken out. To understand this idea in practical terms, we resort to the distinction Weedon (In Norton&Toohey,


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2011 ) states between a subject of a set of relationships (e.g. in a position of power) and a subject to a set of relationships (e.g. in a position of reduced power). Specifically, in an EFL classroom, children might be engaged as active social subjects of an individual and collective process of identity construction and language learning when their right to the word is enforced. That is when they “gain increasing control over the mediatonal means made available by their culture, including language for interpersonal (social interaction) and intrapersonal (thinking) purposes […] they thus develop the source of behaviors required for participation, and in so doing change the activities and the tools” (Lantolf in Norton&Toohey, 2011). After having posted the concepts of social identity and subject, and having acknowledged what and how important it is the relationship between the construction of social identity and the EFL learning process, now we question ourselves what characterizes children’s interaction and what type of learning emerges in this construction of social identity? Thus, if identity is socially constructed and subjects construct identity, the interaction and type of learning representing this construction are of the same roots: social. In this path, we can make reference to an intersubjective interaction and to a social learning. These two concepts are closely related given that both of them recognize the importance and necessity of the self and the others in a place, time and space: one linguistic, historical, cultural and social. In this sense, considering that the foundation of the intersubjectivity is the people’s interaction mediated by language in a sociohistorical space and time, we can bring into consideration that the mediation


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mentioned above is born in discursive practices. In this view, the discursive activity is a social practice that is not given in a “social gap5” (Jaimes& Rodríguez, 1996a); it is given in socio-cultural conditions that involve issues of identity. Up to this point it is worthy to clarify that through social interactions the child makes sense of the natural and social realities representing his way of “being and doing in the world”; being the children’s discursive practices the “construction of the reality” rather than a mere “calque of the reality” (Jaimes& Rodríguez, 1996a). In sum, knowing others in the social world is possible through the interaction, at the same time and by the same way that the self-knowledge is possible. According to Bakhtin in Toohey (2000), there is a dialogical thread between other’s utterances in the past, present and future, making possible the use of someone else’s words –taking into account his role/position- as our own voice when giving them a different intention or simply, our intention. Going deeper in analysis, for this intersubjective practice, what has been mentioned about Bakhtin’s theory implies a trialectical relationship (Hirst, 2004) between mediation actions, social contexts and people. Hirst claims “when we act [interact], we are acting not only with people places and things that are spatially and temporally present, but also with those that are removed yet present in the social context ” Additionally, we can expand the conception of intersubjectivity as social practice portraying the children’s interaction when constructing their social identity, by posting the words of Jaimes& Rodríguez (1996b) when they affirm that the intersubjectivity as well as the own semantic

5

Spanish term: vacio social.


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intentions shape the social reality in three dialectical moments: externalization like the habits and customs, objectification as the social products and, internalization as the subjectification.Hence, in the EFL classroom as in any other setting, the intersubjective social practice not only entailsinterpersonal interactions but a personal and social learning. In paragraphs above it was mentioned a relationship between actions, contexts and people. Now, we remark that the relationship among these three elements is aprofound one in view of the fact that they may interact as mirror of one another but also as rejection of one another: my actions may or not define my context, my context may or not define the people, my actions may or not be similar to other people... This conception refers to a social learning when, summarizing Ormrod’s theory (1999) about social learning, it is important to point out that people learn from one another by observing, imitating or modeling, what means that learning may or not occur with a change in people’s behavior or people’s context. In fact each of these three variables, the person, the behavior, and the environment can have an influence on each other. We learn in activities and interactions, but in social learning we learn more fully in networks of activities and interactions that are interdependent on one another, that facilitate and enable one another, that are marked out as being relevant to understanding each other’s voices. As a result, we learn just by observing others’ actions, language, expressions… or we learn just by imitating or modeling others “ways of being and doing in the world” (Jaimes& Rodríguez, 1996a).


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Along these lines, in social learning there can also be asymbolic model (Ormrod, 1999) which can be a person or action portrayed in some other medium such as television, videotape or computer program. Accordingly, concept of the self like the self-regulation, the self-efficacy, self- monitoring, self-reinforcement and selfconfidence take a very important role in learning for a person to know how to interact and how to make of that interaction a personal and social learning. As a matter of fact, self-confidence becomes one of the most remarkable concepts of the self when teaching any subject, in our case when teaching EFL, since self-confident students believe that they are capable of accomplishing school tasks. Ormrod affirms to this point that for increasing self-confidence, teachers should make sure of having students receive confidence-building messages. Self-confidence in EFL Learning. Self-confidence as ZoltánDörnyei states has been generally defined as “the belief that a person has the ability to produce results, accomplish goals or perform tasks competently” (p. 87). Nonetheless for the present research paper it is necessary to include a clarification that the author makes about other close concepts that might cause confusion for the reader. For doing so, the author establishes the limit between what is understood as self-efficacy and self-confidence. On one hand, he asserts that self-efficacy refers only to the performance in particular assignments. On the other hand self-confidence implies “the generalized perception of one’s coping potentials, relevant to a range of tasks and subject domains” Such conceptual differentiation is essentially pertinent when working with the concept of self-confidence as it has been addressed in several fields (Cohen, 2002;


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Clément et.al 1977). For our concrete case as language teachers we have adopted the explanation given by Clément who poses self-confidence concept as “primarily a socially defined construct (in contrast to the cognitive nature of self.-efficacy in the motivational psychological literature), [however it is clear that] self-confidence also as a cognitive component, the ‘perceived L2 proficiency’.” (Clément, et.al. in Dörnyei, 2001b. p. 56). Besides, one of the major contributions of Clément and his colleagues to the understanding of the self-confidence concept has consisted of posing it as a “significant motivational subsystem in foreign language learning situations, in which there is little direct contact with members of the L2community but considerable indirect contact with the L2 culture through the media, for example, as is the case with world languages such as English.” (Clément, et.al. in Dörnyei, 2001b. p. 56). Likewise, it is vitally important to keep in mind that the self-confidence works mutually with the social learning process, it is illustrated by Dörnyei(2001a) who states that students “need to have a healthy self-respect and need to believe in themselves as learners” (p. 87). He gives special attention to the fact that not even good technological aids can have the effect that the self-confidence has on a learner to face the tasks and challenges that emerge during the learning course. And jointly last but not least, the same author recognizes one of the main conceptual bridges that this project focused on: ‘self-confidence is a social product which means that is created and shaped by the people around us, so, starting when we are young children our identities evolve to a great extent from the feedback we receive’ (Dörnyei, 2001a. p. 87).


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For that reason this research proposal was aimed in certain sense to promote the construction of the social identity of the students based on a positive view of their capacities that increased their confidence on themselves, making of the English classroom a “safe place where their self-worth is protected and where they can gain confidence” (Dörnyei, 2001b. p. 89), which would give them the opportunity to assume “more critically the social context of their learning, the contingency of what is presented to them as the target language and the potential for social change implicit in language learning” (Kenny in Gardner & Miller, 1999). Making of the classroom a ‘safe place’ for pupils self-expression is not an easy work, even it might be viewed as a pretentious one, however, the problematic matter lies more on the traditional indisposition that some teachers have had toward assuming this task with enough reflection, which might come true based on a systematic exploration of those practices inside the language classroom that estimate the students as active builders and valuable contributors to their own social and cognitive development; a classroom with less dependent students and more selfconfidence learners. In the words of Scharle&Szabó(2000) not responsible learners as “teacher’s pets” (p.3) but as learners that take part of their own learning, being aware of the available opportunities to their benefit. That is why the following concepts are transcendental for the present work. School World: Children’s possible world Due to global changes economists, politicians, psychologists, linguistics and language teachers have defined the school concept and they have used it according to


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their purposes, in few words, most of the times the ones who define what a school is are not those who live and experience all what a school involves. All of those perspectives are valid for providing enrichment and, perhaps, an interdisciplinarity among those mentioned fields. However, for this study it was more important to concentrate the attention on how the first graders defined the school as part of their childhood life and world. Although EFL teachers and students are immersed in the Colombian educational context, the definitions given for the school are radically different (because of age, personality, immediate and familiar background among others) since children belong to and grow in a different time: a time of constant social changes in term of values, behaviors, ideologies, etc. At this point it is crucial to use the words of Heath(1983) to reinforce the idea that: “the child is not left on his own to see the relation between the two occurrences or to explore the ways the integration of the reference in a new context may alter its meaning (…) he may learn on his own some relational meaning not seen by adults” (p. 351). Anyhow, a concept like the one expressed in the Law 1098 of 1996 (Código de Infancia y Adolescencia) is very important for the educational field since children, teachers and all the members of this institution are ruled by it. This concept tells us that the school is an educational institution whose main aim is an integral education achieved by means of the performance of rights and duties. Then, the family, the society and the national state have several duties as well as the mass media do (Title II, Chapter I. Article 47).


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It is noticeable that school is a dependent concept rather than an interdisciplinary one. Thus, an integral education is understood as the set of sexual, civil, pedagogical, psychological, physical, etc. knowledge provided to children. Children are not recipients; they are primary sources of knowledge. The previous lines are exemplified with the program called “Bogota Bien Alimentada” included into the Políticasdel Plan de Desarrollo: Bogotá Positiva. This program attempts to ensure nutritional health to children through a daily lunch as a right in the public school. From the several realities generated by all the changes in the world, have arisen some questions: How can children’s education answer to these new social realities? How could children be prepared to live in a world in permanent changing? How can children be prepared to face successfully a more plural society without losing their identity? How to ensure to children a moral order that unites the collective order and that gives meaning and sense to their lives?6 (Amar, 1998. p. 2) Thus, the school does not supply the answers for all the previous questions but it represents a possibility for constructing new meanings and visions of children’s selves and their context. The school represents just one of the edges of the children’s world in which are given the first steps in the process of socialization inasmuch as therein the pupils interact with their peers that are walking toward the same goal (not at the same rhythm and by the same route). Therefore, for this proposal the school is observed as a “social space” (Guerrero, 2009) for integral education and as a space to use and create the world (Bruner, 1986).The school becomes the school world.Hence,

6



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what is implied in the differentiation between the school and the school world? The school is generally understood as the physical space known as the educational institution where the social identity where the purpose for learning is determined by someone else –administrators, educational policies, educators- that is not the learner. While in the school world the learning process transcends the barrier of someone else voices through children’s imaginaries, interpretations, experiences and voices that are put into play to construct a social identity in a social world. As Bruner states “what we call the world is a product of some mind whose procedures construct the world” (Bruner, 1986. p. 103)As a consequence, the school world is a possible world created by children. In despite of the previous, we admit the meeting points between the school and the school world in terms of their hardly modifiable norms like wearing uniforms, fulfilling a schedule, learning by heart anthems, following academic pre-defined stages and so on. Not dismissing the divergence point that is what these norms entail for children. In that way, for the school world three main components are posed: the subjects, the objects or means and the processes; according to Jaimes the school reality involves subjects, actions and underlying conceptions in general the classroom life is understood as a social microcosm (Jaimes& Rodríguez, 1996b).The subjects are the students as individuals, the classmates and the teacher; the objects or means are encompass the physical spaces that are functional for children education; and the processes are comprised the learning, the experiences, the formation and the


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interaction. All that system is enacted by the socialization that takes place by means of language and that involves a permanent reconstruction. Nevertheless, it is pertinent to mention that the school world is a social context framed by a wider one in which these children act as sons, as siblings, as workers, as consumers or where they are just invisible.


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CHAPTER III Research Design In this section we will go deeper in the description of the research dimension that supports this study, comprising the research paradigm, the type of study, the setting, the population, the participants and the instruments for collecting the data and procedures. Despite the main focus of this chapter is on the research dimension, our description is also aimed at underlining the relationship between our perspectives as educational researchers with our role as reflective teachers. Type of Research: Qualitative descriptive-interpretative research Several theoretical positions have represented the attempts to define the main characteristics that constitute a qualitative research process, in our case we decided to adopt Merriam’s (2009) terms used to frame it and the implications that John Creswell (2007) observes for us as teacher-researchers in regards to both our general view on the teaching practices and the decisions and actions that such vision allows us to configure during the process. First, in a qualitative study “[the researcher is] interested in how people interpret their experiences, how they construct their worlds, what meaning they attribute to their experiences […] an understanding of how people make sense out of their lives”. (Merriam, 2009. p 5) In this same line of theory, this author posed four main characteristics for this type of study. The following is the detailed presentation of the conceptual framework of each one of these and their relationship with our study: 1. The focus of a qualitative study is on process, understanding and meaning


2.

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In a qualitative study the researcher is the primary instrument of data collection and procedures

3. Thequalitativeprocessisinductive 4. The product of a qualitative research is richly descriptive Bearing in mind this characterization, in this research study we acknowledge the uniqueness of the setting where the research was carried out (which will be described later) and of the participants’ interpretations that emerged during the EFL classes. Therefore, we were concentrated on the process of children’s construction of social identity. Furthermore, following Merriam’s assertions, in our study, children and researchers as human instruments (members of the school world) contributed with the subjective element which was important to reformulate the interpretation of identity as phenomena, which in turns was part of our research innovation. In regards the inductivity of our study, it is mainly reflected in the ongoing elaboration of the construction of the school world as an abstract and complex concept that reveals a children’s possible world affecting the construction of their social identity. Such process of social identity construction cannot be measured in terms of statistics, enumeration; neither controlled nor tested. Therefore, the main purpose of this kind of research is aimed to “find the perfect balance between the theory, the reality and who we are” (Méndez, P. Personal communication in Pedagogical Project II class. March 31st, 2011).


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The connection between the characteristics numbered and explained in the former paragraphs was primarily mediated by the language learnt and taught, and by the discourses that took place in the setting where this research was conducted. On the other hand, the following is the summary of the implications presented by Creswell in his theoretical position toward the philosophical assumptions of a qualitative study which were reflected in the practicum.

Philosophicalassumptionsforpractice Ontological

What is the nature of the reality?

Epistemological

What is the relationship between the researcher and the participants?

Axiological

What is the role of values?

Rhetorical

What is the language of research?

Methodological

What is the process of research?

The global realities lived today, expose children to multiple individual realities, influencing their interpretations about their world. Then, we recognize that each child is a different world although living in the same one. Since the researcher is a participant observer, the distance between children and researcher plays an important role for promoting and helping children to develop self-confidence in the process of learning EFL. As researcher we have some professional ethical principles that, at the same time, are linked to the teaching philosophy and the emic and etic perspective. The language used portrays a narrative structure which uses the first person with the objective of making sense of the process for us, positioning in this way both: the participants and the researchers in the study. Due to the particularities of the context and individual features of children, requires flexibility reflected in the observation, planning, analysis, identification, interpretation and implementation: a qualitative research process and a process that is carried out each class and according to the data already collected following the principles of educational ethnographic studies.

Table 1Adapted from Creswell, J. 2007.page 17


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Type of Study: Ethnographic Having situated our research work in the qualitative research paradigm, the next step is to offer more insights on the type of study, which in our case corresponds to some principles of the ethnography type of study. For approaching this form of inquiry, we will resort to the theoretical guidelines contributed by Goetz &LeCompte(1988) who admit that in the last decades the ethnographic studies were mainly attached to the sociology, the anthropology and the psychology fields, nonetheless, the increasing interest in that type of study, especially in education, emerged due to the possibilities it comprised for teachers. In short terms, the educational ethnography implies more descriptive studies that share the goals of the traditional ethnographies conducted in other epistemological areas such as “describing the empirical world and developing an explicative theory on the human behavior” (Goetz &LeCompte,1988. p.27) Thus, in our view, it means two basic points: interdisciplinary research in education and educational research closer to be what it should be: more than a technical exercise to find answers for well elaborated questions, it is an activity aimed to the permanent questioning on the practices at the classrooms. In that sense, it becomes indispensable in an educational ethnographic study to offer a detailed description of the scenario where it takes place, which ought to recreate for the reader the shared beliefs, the practices, artifacts, popular knowledge and behaviors of a group of people. As a consequence, the researcher starts examining the group and its processes even if they are very common, as exceptional


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and unique, revealing the researcher’s appreciation of the scenario (Goetz&LeCompte, 1988. p.28). In order to reach our purposes we made use of the research strategies posed by Goetz and LeCompte (1988), which include not only the list of parameters given by these authors but their applications in our own specific study. After this description we will explain the suppositional7 modes that provide our study with a well-defined profile from the design to the analysis phases and we will finish this section talking about some important points for clarifying our role as teachers-researchers in the research scenario. The research strategies for the reconstruction suggested by the authors should fulfill most of the following characteristics (Adapted from Goetz&LeCompte, 1988. p.28): 1. Collection of phenomenological data: these are the data that represent the conception of the world of the participants of the study. In our case, such data were gathered through the drawings that children elaborated, these taken as artifacts as well as through the voices that children manifested during the interviews and the EFL classes. The information that we collected allowed the reshaping and ongoing structure of the project. 2. They are empirical and naturalistic: the strategy in our case was reflected in the participant observation researcher’s role which allowed us to perceive children’s

7

Term taken from Goetz & LeCompte (1988).


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voices exactly as they manifested in their own words and the possible situations that occurred in the EFL classroom as they appeared. 3. They have a holistic character: The ethnography should provide the description of the phenomena in their global context establishing connections that affect the behavior and the beliefs in regards those phenomena. In this specific study, the description of the process of children social identity construction established connections with their voices permitted us to understand the roles that children performed in the school world as a social place. 4. They should enrich the study and make it multimodal and eclectic: it demands from us to use “varied techniques to obtain data” (Goetz &LeCompte, 1988) maybe techniques created and developed in other disciplines, like in the distinct branches of the social sciences. In this study we attempted to be equipped with sufficient tools for exploring the complex issues we addressed. Therefore, we decided to include the elaboration of artifacts such as the sociograms and the children’s drawings. Summarizing the characteristics related to the objectives of ethnography in education, in the following chart we continue with the assumptive modes that outlined the whole research study. Characteristics related to the objectives of the ethnographic research in education 1. To analyze, comprehend and take reflective and practical action in the reality 2. To promote formative evaluation: on process, members and actions. 3. To improve the teaching-learning processes


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4. To allow the researcher to put in the other’s shoes (children or teachers)

Actually, although we have highlighted that they were the blueprint for the course of the study, the reader probably still is wondering what the assumptive modes are; Goetz &LeCompte conceptualize them basically as the modes in which a research study assumes the realities and assigns explanations for them (Goetz &LeCompte, 1988. p. 29). They are four and are organized by pairs: inductive-deductive, generative-verificative, constructive-enumerative, subjective-objective. For serving our purposes we only will be concentrated on the ones that were brought into effect in this research. The first has to do with the manner in which a theory is placed in the study and its relationship with the data collected. Our research was according to that mode, an inductive one. We constantly were carrying out a search for a theory that explained the data. Our categories emerged progressively, they were not predetermined. For instance, we observed that there were certain factors that were involved in the construction of social identity when immerse in the school world. Now, what we know about those factors is that they were tightly related to the social context where children lived and to the interaction that children performed in that environment, but offering an explanation for the influence of those factors was possible only after having analyzed the answers of the children to the interviews about children’s immediate people and context around them.


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The second assumptive mode is the generative feature of the research. Unlike the verificative, that is the opposite, it means that it is attempted to construct and propose based on several sources of information and evidence, not to corroborate if a set of generalizations describe the context. Throughout our exploration we made an effort to generate certain knowledge in education, in regards the way children constructed their social identity and its pertinence in the EFL classroom they carried out in that particular scenario that was the school world. We expected to understand and to describe widely these phenomena but based on sufficient data obtained from the pupils. Thus, the categories and constructs emerged from the data organization and classification not on the contrary. Such generation of knowledge was motivated not only by a wish of discovering who our students were and what they tough but also by a wish of highlighting the importance of these two aspects to promote meaningful EFL learning -overall in contexts as the one where we developed our EFL teaching doing- one that really had an impact not only on the students’ cognitive capacities but rather on the students themselves. The third assumptive mode is the constructive dimension, which implies that the analytic constructs and the categories of the study are born while a continuum process of abstraction is done. So, ‘the units of analysis are revealed in the flow of the observation and the description’ (Goetz & LeCompte,1988. p. 31) To cite an example, the dimensions that we proposed for the definition of the school world arose after having observed the registers on the journals and the answers of some of the interviewees. In fact, the unit of analysis was elaborated while we collected and organized the data that is why we got concentrated in the children’s voices as a way


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in which children manifested their social identification when inside their school world. The fourth, and last mode, marks the study as subjective. This is reflected in two aspects: first, the research attempts to reconstruct the categories that the participants use for the conceptualization of their own experiences and their conception of the world. Second, as it was our case, as participant observers in the course of the research we formed some categories by interpreting the meaning they had for the participants, the children, and for us. The previous were the emic and the etic dimensions which provided the explanation of the phenomena from two perspectives, the emic from the insider’s standpoint and the etic from the outsider’s one. Finally, after having positioned our study as an inductive-generative-constructivesubjective research process, analyzed the elements involved in the reconstruction of the “social universe”8 and having taken into account the insights and the overview on the implications of the type of study for our research project, it is pertinent to make reference to our role in such process. Although, nowadays it is still common the total immersion of the researchers in the community for carrying out ethnographic studies, in the educational settings this immersion is understood also as repeated sojourns at the research scenario (Wax & Wax in Goetz et.al, 1988.p. 41). This guideline applied in our case as we were teacher-researchers, namely, participant observers. The frequency of our presence in the institution was twice a week, during those occasions

8

Term taken from Goetz, J;&LeCompte, M. (1988. p.42) when explaining the educational ethnography as a type of study.


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was allowed one hour of English class, where we were directly engaged with the group of first-graders.

Setting Current educational policies for Bogota’s public school demand the physical modification of these institutions. These new structures are known as Mega-colegios. But this was not the case of the IED PolicarpaSalavarrieta where this study was carried out. Located in the downtown of Bogotá, this institution has two locations in the first study children and adolescents from fifth to eleventh grades, in the second study children from pre-school to fourth grades. Coming back to the first lines, the physical structure of this location was not the most appropriate for teaching, since it was a big house whose rooms had been accommodated as classroom and offices. Some classrooms had too much space producing echo, others were too long, others had walls made of wood… but all of the previous onesdid not represent a wall for teaching and learning, because as it was mentioned in the justification, this school is characterized by being an institution that works with a holistic and intercultural philosophy as it is highlighted in its mission, and whose main focus is to educate people for being responsible citizens with a view of social transformation. As other schools, this one has very particular characteristics in term of location, population and members, since most of students were children who came from a


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sector whose economical and familiar conditions situated them in a vulnerable social situation, as it is going to be explained later. Population Our population consisted of very young children in first grade who attended our English classes at IED PolicarpaSalavarrieta, in Bogotá. A public school where English as a subject was not part of the general curriculum, till the second semester of 2010, when we as members of a group of EFL student-teachers arrived in the institution on behalf of the Distrital University and the English Major program. As we described in the setting, there were students from almost all the levels of primary, thus, in the same place it was common to find in different groups or even in the same group children who live in the same neighborhood or from the same family. For the case of our specific group, children had a teacher who was in charge of most of the subjects. However, they had a different teacher for areas such as computing, physical education and arts. The home-room teacher was a woman; she was a very experienced professional teacher who had worked for several years at that school. She considered the construction of habits in childhood as the main objective for first graders because they will need them in their future levels at school or when becoming adults. In regards the group, we selected children as our population because they were in a stage of development that is considered crucial for them as human and social beings. Indeed, they were in a stage in which they did not have too many infused taboos. Thus, in the majority of the cases they expressed their thoughts freely when they were given the opportunity, the space and they had gained the confidence to do it. As well,


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we observed that research studies on identity addressed the issue in a fragmented way so, we thought how interesting would be for a group of children to learn English for the first time while they took advantage of their natural curiosity and sense of exploration to discover who they were and to reveal it to others. That enterprise seemed even more interesting when everything around the population we worked with looked like closed doors. Indeed, we perceived in those closed doors the key to access to more meaningful learning, the limitations in many occasions became options to improve the task that, although challenging, made us passionate of doing it. Finally, we consider necessary to clarify two matters: first, there was a girl that had a high level of absenteeism. However, she had a remarkable role in the map of relationships of the group, then, the information that children revealed about her was taken into account in the general consensus but her data were not enough and that is the reason why the inclusion of them would play down in certain aspects the validity of the conclusions of the study. The second is that a new student, a boy, was integrated in the group after the closing of the first term; thus, he was not part of the group of participants that we will describe now. Participants We dare to assert that not many research studies depend as much on the particular characteristics of the subjects under study as ours, especially when we bear in mind the principles of the ethnography study. These characteristics constituted the core that underlined every single part of the project. Thus, we will start describing how particular was our group of participants mentioning that was a small community


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whose twenty-one members had a great potential of transformation now and in the future. They were 12 girls and 9 boys, their average age was 6. Some of they had been our students in the second semester of 2010 when they were in pre-school. However, at the beginning of the year 2011 the members of the original group were mixed, some students went to other schools and new pupils arrived in. As a consequence, it was a mixture of two groups of pre-school. They attended their classes in the morning and some of them returned to their homes alone; homes that were located in the same neighborhood or some contiguous to the downtown of the city and in some cases near the red-line zones of Bogota. It is worthy to say that although the members of this small community shared a common social context, some spaces at school and some physical features, their visions of the reality were different and were mediated by elements of their individual experiences in the school, in their neighborhoods, in their families, in their lives, in this country or in another. But, their diversity was evident not only in terms of their voices or their social identity as members of this community. For instance, in this group we counted with what is called a minority, children who were not born in Bogota and one boy who was born in Ecuador. These children had also many needs, some of them affective and some in economic sense. Some of them, for example, were part of one-parent families, others did not live with their parents, and some were in charge of younger siblings. As language educators one of the expectations on this project was to approach some of those needs. We understood that it would have not been realistic to attempt to cover


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them through the school intervention, nevertheless, at least we expected these children to take advantage of the potential they had in themselves to see themselves as worthy, as valuable and to see in the language learning an opportunity to change their realities, as we said before, the purpose was to touch them not only as students but impacting them for life, making their experiences and themselves the best resource to continue learning when practically some of them did not have any other resource for learning English. Data collection instruments and procedures A study on social identity construction in children when immersed in their school world demands a sort of instruments that allows us to collect information on thoughts and actions (verbal and non-verbal communication) in a natural setting; that facilitates analysis, validity checks and triangulation and, that provides (sociocultural) context information. For this reason, the materialization of these instruments we used for conducting this research is reflected in the students’ artifacts, teachers’ reflective journals and the semi-structured interviews. In this way, we present below the instruments’ definition, methodology and usefulness applied for our specific case. Underlining that the central aim why we chose these mentioned instruments was to achieve an articulation between the research concern, inquiry and the pedagogical and research methodologies. Students’ Artifacts. Based on Tellis (1997) “physical artifacts can be tools, instruments or some other physical evidence that may be collected during the study as part of a field visit”. They constitute an unobtrusive measure for data collection (Marshall &Rossman,1999 p.


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128). Among the type of artifacts providing data our research purposes we can mention puppets, drawings, worksheets, diagrams such as sociograms, which are artifacts mainly used in ethnographic research studies. These artifacts were collected in eight of the fourteen classes planned for the semester in the way that they helped us to be more objective when seeing the environment in its natural context, providing a description of children’s complex actions, expressions and interactions. Then, our perspective as researchers was broadened as a result of the discovery. Sociogram The sociogram is a sociometric technique used with research aims in order to know the social relationships in the classroom (Álvarez, 2009); the one chosen for our study is friendship. The sociogram is structured into two kinds of questions with negative and positive balances: effective (intellectual preferences) and affective (affective preferences). Then, we formulated one positive-affective question, one negative-affective question, the same in regards the effective type of question and, one question that involved the two dimensions in the two forms resulting as observed in the figure 1. Bearing in mind that children in first grade, as the participants of this study were, do not manage the written code yet neither in their mother tongue nor in the foreign language, we gave each one of them 25 photos for them to answer the six questions written above: one photo of themselves, one of the classroom teacher, one of each one of us and one of the social-service student.


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Figure 1. Sociogram.

Semi-structured Interviews. Qualitative interviews are defined as “social encounters, not merely as data collection exercise”. Specifically, the semi-structured interviews are a mixture of closed and open questions where the interviewee has a fair of freedom: what to talk about, how much to say and how to express it. Thus, the interviewer can assert control when necessary (Lopez,Zuluaga, Gallego, Buitrago, Gonzales,Infante& Quintero, 2004. p.196). Interviews were done at the moment we were introducing a new topic for the class, and their main purpose was to know children’s semantic meaning (most of the questions were formulated like what is the English class for you?) about the topic introduced, as well as to strength other instruments that had as their weakness a why no answered, supporting the validity in the data analysis process. To register each child answers we deployed a special format for each class (See Annex 1page 125).


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Teachers’ Reflective Journals At the end of every single class we wrote down as detailed as possible what we observed during the class. As, sometimes, it was not an easy task unless we had a good memory, we made use of a format with some broad questions - like what did I like most about this class? Were my students positive involved? What is it interesting to write down for my project? etc. – that served as guidance for us to take carefully notes about our pedagogical intervention and research exercise (See Annex 2 page 126). The journals were useful for us as running accounts of facts, anecdotes and thoughts, whose use encouraged description, interpretation, reflection and evaluation on our part. These reflective journals were developed in three stages: descriptive, interpretative and decision-making (Lopez et al, 2004. p. 181, 182). In addition to the set of three instruments mentioned before, we had planned to use video-recordings for the data gathering stage ought to their usefulness for capturing both verbal and non-verbal interactions (Cruz, 2007). Nonetheless, in this sense an obstacle appeared. Although we designed an initial consent form to request parents’ permissions to collect and use their children’s information, the classroom teacher insisted several times in the modification of the format. After some classes she permitted us to send the definite format to parents (See Annex 3 page 127), even though, parents seemed to be indifferent to the communication, thus, we decided to initiate the data collection process accepting one condition expressed by the classroom teacher: it was not possible either to video-record the class without an official consentform signed by one of the school coordinators.


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In despite of these inconveniences, as the reader likely will observe in the data analysis chapter, the student’s artifacts, semi-structured interviews and teachers’ reflective journals were valuable instruments that yielded types of data pertinent to approach in a consistent mode our query, that is, taking into account different perspectives on the phenomena for providing a valid and reliable description and account on children’s process of social identity construction when immersed in the school world, and of the factors embraced in such process. Before continuing with the fourth chapter, we estimate important to summarize in the following (Table 2) the relevant sections included in this third chapter: Research Design. RESEARCH QUESTION

How do children construct their social identity when immersed in their school world?

RESEARCH OBJECTIVES

To describe the ways children construct their social identity when immersed in the school world

TYPE OF RESEARCH

SETTING AND PARTICIPANTS

DATA COLLECTION INSTRUMENTS

Qualitative research study with ethnographic principles and descriptive interpretative research methodology.

A group of 21 first graders from a public school located in Bogotá.

Students’ artifacts

To identify factors involved in children’s construction of social identity in the school world.

Table 2. Research Design Summary

Teachers’ reflective journals Semi-structured interviews


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CHAPTER IV Instructional Design Several fields have studied the phenomena of social identity construction providing different explanations of how this process takes place in different settings. As EFL teacher-researchers working with six years old first graders studying atIED PolicarpaSalavarrietaSchool, we attempt to accomplish the objectives described below: TeachableObjectives  To describe the relationship between the development of children’s selfconfidence in EFL learning and the construction of their social identity when immersed in their school world.  To fortress children’s self-confidence through language activities in the EFL classroom.  To integrate language activities with and to support children’s construction of identity.  To contribute children to enrich their integral EFL learning process meaningfully and integrally through their own voices. Bearing in mind that self-confidence plays an essential role in the social identity construction; the pedagogical dimension this study is based on will be deeply explained in the following lines starting from the methodology, the pedagogical implementation, the syllabus, the description of the activities through which the teachable objectives were accomplished and finally, the evaluation.


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In the same way, as product of the intervention carried out a first-book was designed compiling a series of activities subject to adaptations and useful for language teachers to accomplish the teachable objectives mentioned before in an EFL classroom where students’ particular realities and visions are the core of the teaching procedures (See description in 4 page 128). Methodology As EFL teacher-researchers we consider that some principles have to frame our doing in the EFL classroom. The first one is the prior knowledge. It is crucially important since it reveals a positive progress in and to the learning process, especially when you are teaching to children of first grade who are becoming familiar with the school context. The second one is the students’ social background and particularities. This second characteristic comprises children’s interests, needs, cognitive development as well as the link between the target language and their socio-cultural background, making of learners the center of the class. The last principle, but not the least, summarizes the two previous since we consider that the learning-teaching activity should have as its main goal an integral and integrated process revealed in the teaching philosophy, pedagogical approach adopted; the role of teacher, learner and activities, etc. Being theoretically specific, we adopted the Whole Language Approach, given that this emphasizes on meaning and meaning making in teaching and learning. This meaningful process of learning-teaching in EFL classes for this project was portrayed by the material made by children. In this sense the target language activities allowed students to use language to think as in this regard Rigg in Richards & Rodgers (2002)


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argues “we use language to think: in order to discover what we know, we sometimes write, perhaps talk to a friend, or mutter to ourselves silently” (p. 109). Then, we have that language is a crucial element, not only, to express but rather to construct our identity and for interpreting the world. Thus the activities conducted throughout the lesson plans and syllabus were mirror of EFL classroom as a vehicle for internal ‘’interaction’’ Richards et al. (2001). All the previous ideas are matched to a brief but deeply explanation of the Whole Language’s roots. This approach arose from humanistic and constructivism schools. For the first one, the main characteristic is the students-centered learning, which in last; give children chances for understanding the world. For the second school, the main characteristic is that knowledge is socially constructed, promoting in last, the inclusion of individual variations portrayed on the construction of identity in the EFL teaching-research process. This line of thought deals necessary with the role of the teacher and the learners as well as the role of the activities for this particular study. In first place, it is necessary to mention that most of the time teacher is presented in the EFL classroom as guider, controller, provider, and evaluator. Children from first grade demand something more of their English teachers. Facilitators, collaborators and promoters of the foreign language setting as pluralistic were the roles teachers played for this study. Behind the interaction English teachers maintain with children while developing those roles in the EFL classroom, there is a more profound one: English teacher as constantly reflective practitioner (William & Burden, 2002. p. 54) on children integral EFL learning process: children who are seen


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as explorers and discovers of their world through the understanding of their work done during, not for, the English classes in the EFL classroom. As a result of this, first graders were self-evaluators of their learning integral process, at the same time that, they were real active participants of the class focusing the attention on them, in the same way as the sort of language activities function as integrators of the language skills. -understanding language skills here not as four (speaking, reading, listening, writing: linguistic skills) but, making reference to the integral learning process and bearing in mind the European Common Framework, as more than four including: reflection, creation, interpretation via language, among others. Somehow, these activities were translators of children’s interests, likes, needs, experiences… everything immersed in construction of identity and interpretation of the world supported by their self-confidence. Pedagogical Implementation In this pedagogical proposal the teaching philosophy behind the pedagogical approach that lays on the basis of the humanism and the constructivism, led us to create and focus the course plan on two dimensions that allowed us to link the particular children social world and the theory: Myself (emic perspective) and W.A.Y or Who are you? (etic perspective) which were aimed in the case of the former to offer an internal explanation or view and the later to the external explanation or view (Goodenough, 1981 p:18) that children had about themselves in the school world and the possible interpretations that we can make on their social identity.


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In accordance with the previous lines, most of the times the topics, activities and situations in language syllabuses are presented in a general form that does not attach directly to the students specific context and needs. For example, the family, the school, likes and dislikes and so forth (Halliwell, 1992. p10). As it is noticed the definite article “the” is followed by the noun, but according to our students background, prior-knowledge and needs the structure that we used to present the topics and activities in the syllabus started with the personal possessive pronoun “My” followed by the noun. Modifying the previous examples: my family, my school, my likes and dislikes and so on. This difference in the presentation went beyond the form; it implied that the language contents were directly connected to our students particularities. The use of the personal possessive pronoun dealt in certain way with the children’s self-confidence in their EFL learning process. Anyhow, working on first graders’ self-confidence was very complicated due to its complexity: we could not ask, for instance, to children about their family or about their daily routine at the very first time we introduced ourselves as the English teachers. Some of them would have answered but some others would have felt offended or even disrespected. Even us as adult could have felt the same in such situation. Human beings need time for developing our self-confidence in order to interact with others, and the EFL classroom is not the exception. Bearing in mind all the previous, we organized the sequence of the topics and activities trying to avoid as much as possible being disrespectful but promoting children’s self-confidence development starting the


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pedagogical implementation from the most general topic to the most personal one (See figure 2).

W.A.Y. (Who are you?) Dimension.

MyselfDimension.

My Place

My Friends

My family My likes and dislikes

SELF-CONFIDENCE

My School

My biography

Figure 2.Contents sequence

Syllabus As syllabus design is not an easy enterprise especially when it implies the implementation guided by some standards balanced with a very particular context where you find very complex, diverse and specific subjects as the ones first graders were. The task went beyond planning some contents to be covered. It required from us as educators to understand how that content touched children and their social context, and how to make sense of these elements in the EFL classroom and learning


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process. So, it corresponded mainly to us as educators of human beings, citizens and social beings to contribute with alternative strategies in terms of providing or formulating from our field the possibilities for children to express and show those areas of the “inner spirit that [were] being dwarfed or untapped”(Rollins, 1992) giving them the raw materials for being self-confident in their identity construction and language learning processes which were expected to impact the later development stages. Next, we present the reader the linear syllabus (table 3) for teaching English as a foreign language to first grades described above and the theory that underlies it.

- Professions

My first English class

My Place

My School - Members and objects of the school -Professions

My Friends

ACHIEVEMENT

COMMUNICATIVE LANGUAGE COMPETENCES Linguistic, sociolinguistic and pragmatic

Personal Pronouns Affirmative and Negative Forms in present simple tense Verb “to be” Verbs in present simple tense

- Commands - Numbers from 1 to 12 - Colors

TOPIC

1. 2. 3. 4.

GRAMMAR

CONTENT VOCABULARY

Children will express verbally and individually their perceptions about the English class and about the language itself, stimulating their prior-knowledge. Children will use the vocabulary of professions while they express the role that they wish to have in a particular community and revealing their perceptions of themselves as members of it. Children will express (individually) through drawings their interpretations of the school world and (collectively) through a diagram constructed by the whole group their general vision of the school context. While doing so, the students will individually be in charge of some vocabulary about the school to be shared and taught to their classmates. Children will use their priorknowledge and new knowledge on the FL for expressing through it the conception of friendship and their


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vision of themselves in the social context that such relationships generate

- Members of the family

Free vocabulary (games, food, sports, cloth, actions)

My Family

My Likes My Dislikes

Children will express freely their likes and dislikes, as part of their identity, by answering the question “what do you like?” in order to put into practice the negative and affirmative forms “ I like” and “ I don’t like” in verbal and written form. Children will express freely their likes and dislikes, as part of their identity, by answering the question “what do you like?” in order to put into practice the negative and affirmative forms “ I like” and “ I don’t like” in verbal and written form.

Table 3: Syllabus

Reinforcement session

Adaptedfrom Plan de Estudios de Lengua Extranjera – Inglés (2007). Ediciones S.E.M (Sevicios Educativos del Magisterio). See Annex 5 p.129

Following the line of theory, in the design stage of the syllabus for teaching EFL to first graders it was crucially important to take pupils prior-knowledge as the starting point of the process, since children were the center of the class planning; they were the center of the class due to the particular and specific school they attended and the particular and specific context they lived in. The complex step of this stage was to find the coherence between the FLT standards (Common European framework-CEF) demands and these children’s EFL learning process demands. Once a reflective reading of the CEF was done, the searching started to yield coherence between the particular (children’s school world) and the general aspects (CEF standards). In first place, the CEF classifies the competences that students should develop in their EFL learning process in two types: general competences and


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communicative language competences. We will devote some lines to explain each group. On the one hand, the general competences comprise the learner’s knowledge, skills and existence that are linked to the learner’s ability to learn. Bearing in mind the connection among these general competences, we consider children in the school world as social subjects who construct their social identity. In this same path, the Colombian public educational system known as “Educación por Ciclos” poses for the first cycle of basic education childhood and subject construction as its main focus as it is shown in the table 4. It corresponds to our vision of childhood as a unique and crucial human being’s stage in the construction of social identity, since it constitutes the first step for the reminder stages of human life: adolescence and adulthood. Once this important fact was understood in our specific teaching context it was possible to focus our implementation on the development of children’s selfconfidence as inherent to their social identity construction when learning EFL. CYCLE

FIRST

Axis of Development

Stimulation and Exploration

Nucleus

Childhood and subjects construction

Levels

Pre-school, First and second grades

Ages

5, 6 and 7 years

Table 4: First teaching cycle (taken from original document “Reorganización de la Enseñanza por Ciclos”)

On the other hand, the communicative language competences are divided into linguistic, sociolinguistic and pragmatic. Especially in language teaching-learning, the methodology almost always focuses its attention on the linguistic ones in order to


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learners coding and decoding the language. The CEF presents the relationship between these three divisions of communicative language competences in a scale of three reference levels (A1-C1) already known for EFL teachers. The one that corresponded to first graders was A1 level (See Annex 6: Common European Framework Reference Levels: self-assessment grid. Page 130) Most of times, the parameters of assessment are addressed to the skills that students have to develop and the goals they have to accomplish but, in the case of a study whose pedagogical implementation is based on the whole language approach principles, as this one, the teacher has to develop some skills in order to facilitate the achievement of the goals posed for the learning process. For instance, when the teacher is explaining the use of expressions, vocabulary or structures to children, he should introduce the language in a balanced way, that is, without taking off to the language its complexity but presenting it in a comprehensible mode. Such task is not really easy. However, as it is considered in the Whole Language Approach we make use of the singular speech and context that is familiar to children and which constitutes one of the easiest ways to teach a language in a contextualized way, using made by and for children relevant use of the language and make them the main characters of the process. Being in agreement with the previous but considering that children are few times in contact with the EFL learning process and that they are mainly concentrated on their mother tongue literacy process, we have pointing out a conceptualization of the linguistics skills in terms of children’s particular EFL learning process (See table 5 page 62).


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A1 U N D E R S T A N D I N G S P E A K I N G

W R I T I N G

Listening

Reading

Spoken interaction Spoken production

Writing

Listening to others: I can listen and understand the others expressions in the foreign language, expressions such as the greetings, the vocabulary related to my close social context. I show respect listening while others speak in my mother tongue and in the foreign language. Reading the world: I can understand and make my own interpretations on the events that occur in my social context and my classroom also the kinesics through which my classmates, teachers and other express themselves.

Speaking to the world: I can make the language mine (Halliwell, S. 1992. p9) to establish relationships and agreements with others if I count with the support and guidance of the hearer (teachers or classmates) for my authentic message to be transmitted and understood. Furthermore, I understand the function that the expressions and words I already know perform in the oral interaction.

Writing my world: I can use graphic devices like drawings, diagrams to express my conceptions about the context that surrounds me, my vision of others and my place in that social world. In addition, I am giving my first steps in mastering the written code to name the subjects, objects and events that make part of the school world.

Table 5: Linguistic skills for first graders(adapted from CEF Levels, self-assessment grid)

Activities Description Before moving to the activities description, it is also important to clarify that even if at the beginning of the implementation children were guided to write their names on their works by following a model, they were encouraged to use the personal pronouns in written form. Therefore, on time they had a space to write “I am… In like manner the inclusion of the instructions on the worksheets was necessary in the initial moments of the intervention; however, in the last stages it was possible to guide them orally for the development of the tasks.


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At this moment it is pertinent to present the description of the activities designed and planned for the development of the pedagogical proposal and the achievement of the instructional objectives in the EFL classes. For doing such description a chart (Table 6 page 65) comprises in a summarized way the implementation including the dates, lessons, topics, main activities, their corresponding objectives and the learning materials which supported children’s language learning process and that simultaneously permitted us approach children’s construction of their social identity when immersed in the school world.


February

DATE

17t h

24t h

3rd

March

10t h

17t h

LESSON

1

2

3

TOPIC

My English class

My Place and my role in it

6

31 st

7

8

April

7th

28t h

To express and share my perceptions and expectations about the English class and about the language itself. To learn and use the vocabulary of the professions related to my social context. 2. Helpers of community

5

h

4. My school: a common place

5. Sociogram of my Friends

May

My Family 5th

10

To express and share my perceptions about my future social Worksheet about children’s actions –professions- in a place (my future professions country, my city, my school) as helper of the community. To recall and connect the vocabulary of the professions related to my social and school context. To express and share my interpretations of the school world, the characters in it, the objects inside it and my role in that social context.

Drawings about children’s school.

To represent the dynamics of my friends relationships in and outside Sociogram about children’s the school context by using the FL. friends. To express and share the conceptions I have about friendship and the vision of myself in the social context this relationship generates.

6. My Family Portrait

9

Poster about children’s future professions.

To learn and use the third singular personal pronoun and the verb to be in short structures in order to identify my friends and acquaintances’ gender.

My Friends

My Friends ,my School and me

LEARNING RESOURCES

1. English is…

3. Coloring my school

4

SPECIFIC OBJECTIVES To recall and practicemy priorknowledge by means of a gamereinforcement of the topics I worked on last year.

My place

My School 24t

MAIN ACTIVITY

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7. List of my Family members

To express and share my familiar context and the role I play in this social nucleon by using the vocabulary related to the family members.

Worksheet about children’s families. Worksheet about children’s families.


65

To practice the third personal pronoun while expressing and sharing the conceptions I have about the family and its functions in the society.

12t h

8. These are the things I like the most. Homework: Biography

11

My likes and dislikes

h

12

9. The key holders of my likes and dislikes.

26t

13

10. My puppet: telling my likes and dislikes

19t

To express and share mylikes and dislikes, as part of my identity, in order let others know my preferences through the FL.

Worksheet about the three things children liked the most and about the three things children disliked the most.

To learn and use the negative and affirmative structural form of the Red key holder and blue sentences “I like” and “I don’t like” key holder made by to express verbally and nonchildren. verbally my preferences through the function of the language. A puppet representing each child.

Table 6: Activities Description

The activities displayed in the previous table achieved the teachable objectives posed at the beginning of this chapter since they permitted us, as EFL teachers, to understand the relationship between children’s EFL learning and children’s selfconfidence. But mainly, these objectives were accomplished when these activities, based on children opportunities to express, share, represent, etc. engaged them in a gradual process of self-confidence fortressing, and where children’s voices enriched their EFL learning conferring importance to their experiences in their immediate social places and groups. Activity 1: English is… As it was the first English class, children practiced the vocabulary related to colors, numbers and others topics worked in preschool. While doing this, they responded to the question what is English for you?


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Activity 2: Helpers of community. Children drew themselves on a paper of their same size expressing their profession, sharing information about the reasons why they selected such profession and about people from their social context who performed those professions and their roles in their place (city, country, etc).. Activity 3-4: Coloring my school &My school: a common place. Children wrote and talked about their school by means of a drawing of it. Besides, individually they were in charge of teaching to their classmates a sort of vocabulary or short sentences related to members, objects and places of their school (e.g. the green door, the teacher Dora, the classroom, etc.). Then, children watched some photos of places, members and objects of their school and by using the structure “she/he is…” and the vocabulary learnt they expressed orally what they observed in the photos. Activity 5: Sociogram of my Friends Children answered six questions related to friendship (who do and don’t you like playing with? Who do and don’t you like studying with? Who would and wouldn’t you invite to your house?) Using pictures of their teachers (classroom and English teachers), of other members of their school and of themselves in the completion of a diagram. Also they wrote in front of each photo the sentence “she/he is a girl/boy”. Activities 6-7: My family portrait & List of my family members. In the first session children developed a worksheet elaborating and decorating a portrait of their family, in the second they made a list on the template of a worksheet of their family members. Being more specific, they used the vocabulary of the family


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members and practiced the third singular personal pronoun while they expressed the particular characteristics of their familiar context including other forms of the language such as gestures. Activities 8, 9, 10: These are the things I like the most, the key-holders of my likes and dislikes &My puppet: telling my likes and dislikes. In the activity 8 children developed a worksheet where they drew the three things they liked the most and the three things they disliked the most, also in that session under each one of the drawings they used the written form of the clause I like/ I don´t like with free vocabulary about different themes (supported by the teachers). Then for the activity number 9 they used the drawings to create a couple of key holders one with a strip of blue wood and one with red wood for their likes and dislikes correspondingly. In the last of this set of activities each pupil created a puppet (representing him/herself) to tell his/her likes and dislikes supported by his/her two key-holders. Evaluation An integral and integrated learning-teaching process is the mirror of a formative evaluation where the core is not the product but the process, in which children are able to make use of the foreign language supported by their mother tongue for constructing their social identity when immersed in the school world and vice versa: the social identity they are constructing is used by them to develop self-confidence, the communicative competence and linguistic skills besides everything that learning EFL in such particular context implies.


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CHAPTER V Data Analysis To begin with this chapter we will present the reader the process developed to reach a deeper understanding of how children construct their social identity in the school world. First, we want to remind the reader that the research methodology used to deal with this concern was a descriptive-interpretative one and that the data collection stage was carried out implementing students’ artifacts, semi-structured interviews and teachers’ reflective journals. For the organization of the information gathered we used a folder divided into four sections: 1) Lesson plans 2) students’ artifacts 3) Teachers’ reflective journals and 4) students semi-structured Interviews. To start analyzing the data, the next step was to organize students’ individual information in sets. After doing so, we designed a matrix that allowed us to display the individual description of children’s artifacts and answers to the interviews (See Annex 7 page 131), as it is shown in the figure 3(page 71), where the questions for the interviews and the names of the artifacts are presented. Once we completed the horizontal description per student in the matrix we proceeded to a vertical one that led us to observe the common patterns (See figure 4 page 71). This point, where we finished the descriptive phase previously narrated and we moved to the interpretative phase was very important since the management of information led us to obtain the data, and as it was mentioned in the research design chapter due to the constructive principle (Third assumptive mode according to Goetz et al, 1988) that guided our study, the unit of analysis emerged as children’s voices.


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According to Baxter (2003) “the notion of ‘voice’ is particularly associated with Bakhtin’s views on polyphony, which call attention to the co-existence in any discursive context of a plurality of voices that do not fuse into a single consciousness but rather, exist in different registers, generating a ‘dialogic’ dynamism among themselves” (p. 38). With this concept in mind and going ahead in the interpretative phase, we developed a methodological triangulation following the principles of the grounded approach. Understanding methodological triangulation as the one that “uses multiple ways to collect data, and thus to study the problem. You might conduct observations and interviews, and collect student work to study the question you have” (Freeman, 1998. p.97) and Grounded Approach rather than as a method, as a specific style of doing qualitative analysis where the researcher starts the observation without a hypothesis, instead of, he discovers patterns and categories through the process. (Freeman, 1998). To provide validity and reliability to the interpretation we took into account three perspectives: the participants’ perspective (captured in the instruments), the theoretical perspective (reflected on the literature review) and the researcher perspective (materialized in the observation and the progressive understanding of the phenomena). Finally, as it will be illustrated, with some limitations we implemented the Ethnography of Speaking Model (Hymes, 1974) as part of our strategy of analysis given that it offered us the possibility of considering first graders as a particular speech community whose social discursive practices gave an account of their process

my puppet

key holders: my likes and dislikes

worksheet: members of my family

drawing: my family

Interviews (I)

Sociogram: my friends

drawing: my school

drawing: my profession

faceless-head

A) Who do you live with? B) Are they your family? C) What do you do with your family? D) Does your family come to the School? E) What does your family need?

A) where are your friends? B) What do you do with your friends? C) Why are they your friends? D) What is friendship for you?

A) what is the school for you? B) Do you like going to school?

A) what do you want to be? B) Why? C) Do you know someone who performs this profession?

What is your place for you?

What is English for you?


of social identity construction in an specific setting where they were learning the

EFL: the school world. Artifacts (A) Individual Features Observations

Figure 3.Data Organization Matrix

Figure 4.Horizontal and vertical management matrix Correspondence s

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Strategy of Analysis Supporting Data Interpretation: Ethnography of Speaking Hymes in Kramsch (1993), adopting the basis of Jakobson’s scheme (addresser, addressee, context, message, contact and code), through the acronym SPEAKING (see table 7 below), redefines the concept of context by listing the factors to describe the situational context of the speech events. S etting

P articipants E nds

A ct sequence K ey I ntrumentalities N orms of interaction and interpretation G enre

Refers to the time and place- that is the physical setup of the class. Place include: the space occupied by teacher and students; the movements of participants within that space; the seating arrangements; the temperature, background noise, place, size and quality of the blackboard, etc. Time includes: the time devoted to each activity, its timing within the whole lesson, its relative length, its pace, the presence of absence of concurrent activities. Include combinations of speakers and listeners in various roles that are either given to them or taken on during the lesson. Refers to the purposes of the activities and what participants seek to accomplish. This can be short-term learning goals such as the linguistic, cognitive, or affective outcomes of a particular activity, or they can be long-term goals such as motivations or attitudes or specific professional outcomes. Refers both to the form and the content of utterances, both to what it said and what is meant by the way it is said. Refers to the tone, manner, or spirit in which a particular message is conveyed: serious or ironical, matter-of-fact or playful. The key can be conveyed verbally and non-verbally and the two may sometimes contradict one another. Refers to the choice of channel (for example oral or written), and of code (mother tongue, foreign language, or a mix of codes or code-switching). Refers to the way participant in the lesson interact and interpret what it said or what they are reading. Refers to the type of oral or written activity students and teachers are engaged in: casual conversation, drill, lecture, discussion, role-play, grammatical exercise, written summary, report, essay, written dialogue.

Table 7: Speaking Acronym (taken from: Kramsch, C. 1993. p.37-38)

Now that the reader has a clearer notion of this model, we clarify some issues that limited the application of the complete acronym to analyze the speech events occurred in the EFL classroom during the development of our study focused on understanding how first graders constructed their social identity. These issues relate to the impossibility of using video recording as a data collection instrument, since there was not an official permission for us to use it during the EFL teaching lessons. If we had been allowed to use video recording, we could have explored more in detail


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each one of the factors suggested by Hymes like the temperature, the participants’ movements, and the tone, among others. On the other hand, the ethnography of speaking gave us the possibility of considering children of first grade as an academic speech community whose interactants9 participated in meaning making processes that provided us with insights on the process of social identity construction. Thus, other techniques like parents’ surveys (See Annex 8 page 132) and sporadic conversations with students, school administrators and support staff; compensated for the limitation described above. For instance, we went deeper in knowing children’s social context as illustrated in figures 5 (Children’s Age), 6 (Parents’ occupations) and 7 (Children’s Neighborhoods). CHILDREN'S AGE 6 years 7 years 8 years

Figure 5: Children’s age

PARENTS’ OCCUPATIONS MOTHERS FATHERS Housewife Cleaning lady Watchman “Misión Bogotá” Bus driver Typist Newspaper vendor Shopkeeper Carpenter Saleswoman Operator Street peddler Micro-entrepreneur Recycler Street peddler Student Unemployed Unemployed Employee Employee

Figure 6: Parents’ occupations

9

Term taken from Toohey, K. (2000)


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Figure 7: Children’s neighborhoods

Finding Commonalities and Relationships Once a general view of children’s social context was shown and before moving to the data analysis categories, we present the commonalities and relationships identified between the individual features (result of the horizontal view of the matrix) and the group features (result of the vertical view of the matrix). In first place, through children’s interviews and artifacts we could not only have a wider vision of children’s social context but also we could have a wider understanding on their conceptions about the school, the family, the friendship, their place, the English class and their individual characteristics such as likes and dislikes, their future professions and about themselves.In words ofMarshall& Rossman (1999) interviews and artifacts as data collection instruments “foster face-to-face interaction with participants, facilitate immediate follow-up for clarification, facilitate discovery of nuances in culture, provide context information, allow wide range of types of data and participants” (Marshall et al, 1999. P. 134)


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Following the instruments’ characteristics above, we considered of great importance children’s conceptions about their places and people, as a way of moving to triangulationstep and to approaching the interpretation phase of data analysis. Children´s Conceptions about… When children were asked what was the school for them they answered: Miguel10: “Hacer tareas, respetar a la profe y jugar” Karen: “Aprender, estudiar” Violet: “Aprender y jugar” Daniela: “Muchas cosas. Leer, aprender, pintar, jugar” David: “Divertirme con Inglés y con el profesor de educación física” (Interview 4: March 10, 2011). TRANSLATION INTO ENGLISH11 Miguel: “To do homework, respect the teacher and play” Karen: “Learning and studying” Violet: “Learning and playing” Daniela: “Many things. Reading, learning, coloring, playing” David: “Having fun with English and with the coach”. Nicolle: “I like to study and learn, because I do” (Interview 4: March 10, 2011).

On the other hand, when contrasting their answers with their school drawings (See Annex 9 page 133), we observed that there was neither an individual nor a group correspondence between the graphic representation and the oral responses in terms of concept but there were individual correspondences in terms of reasons, since when we asked children if they liked going to the school they answered: Miguel: “Yes, porque es chévere no me quedo en la casa encerrado y puedo descansar 30 minutos, aunque no sea tan chévere porque dure mucho tiempo en el salón, es mejor que estar en la en la casa porque me siento solo y encerrado y sin desayuno que es lo peor” Karen: “Yes, porque aprendo mucho” Violet: “Yes, porque es divertidodespertarme temprano, no me gusta trasnochar” Daniela: “Yes, porque aprendo muchas cosas” David: “No, porque es aburrido con las tareas, me están quemando el cerebro y mira (cogiéndose la cabeza) ya lo tengo todo rojo” 10

The names used to present the excerpts and samples have beenreplaced by seudonyms because of ethical issues. 11 Trasnlated by the authors.


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Nicolle: “Yes, quiero aprender cosas” (Interview 4. March 10, 2011). TRANSLATION INTO ENGLISH Miguel: “Yes, because it’s cool, I’m not locked at home and I can have a break of 30 minutes, though it’s not that cool because I am in the classroom too much time, it is better than being at home, because there I feel alone and locked, and what is even worst, without breakfast. Karen: “Yes, because I learn a lot” Violet: “Yes, because waking up is funny, I don’t like to stay up late” Daniela: “Yes, because I learn many thing” David: “No, because it’s boring to do homework, they are burning my brain, and look (touching his head) I have all it red” Nicolle: “Yes, I want to learn things (Interview 4. March 10, 2011).

As a result of the comparison between the answers and the artifacts of the school, we noticed that most of the children’s replies were similar while the only commonality we identified in the drawings was their diversity. Besides, this definition of a place such as a school not as a place but as what they saw in that place, what they knew about that place and what they did in that place was also evident in the conception about the country: Researcher: ¿Qué es el país para ti? Violet: “Parques” Valentina: “Jugar” Ángel: “Cielo” Juan: “Fútbol” Alexnader: “Mundo” Luisa: “Para ir a piscina” (Interview 2. February 24, 2011). TRANSLATION INTO ENGLISH Researcher: “What is the country for you?” Violet: “Parks” Valentina: “Playing” Ángel: “Sky” Juan: “Football” Alexnader: “World” Luisa: “To go to the swimming pool” (Interview 2. February 24, 2011).

For the case of the family conception most of children affirmed in the interview that the people they lived with were their family. This was portrayed in their drawings


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(See Annex 10 page 134). The contrast between the children families’ graphic representations and the responses to the interviews, allowed us to perceive particularities that characterize each family and other issues that are common among them such as socio-economic needs and weekend activities. Researcher (R): ¿Qué necesita tu familia? Miguel: “Un tele no mas porque ya se está dañando el que tenemos.” Daniela: “Mi familia necesita una casa, ropa y mi mamá necesita brasieres, medias, necesitan zapatos...” Alexander: “Plata para comprar comida.” Maria: “Huevos, pan, leche, una libra de carne, cilantro…” Valentina: “Un apartamento, mi papá y mi mamá quieren vivir en un apartamento y no tenemos el apartamento.” Luisa: “La casa bonita necesita plata.” Danna: “Plata porque somos pobres.” Karen: “Unidad de toda la familia. ¿Por qué? Ella (la mamá) vive con un señor que se llama Carlos. Mi mamá nos quiere poner padrino pero ni yo, ni mi hermano ni mi abuelita estamos de acuerdo porque toma trago. Por ejemplo yo fui a quedarme a la pieza donde vive mi mamá un día, en realidad fueron tres, y por la noche el llegó con unos amigos y todos borrachos y se pusieron a pelear.” Violet: “No sé. Mi mamá, mi papá y mi hermanito. Es que yo tengo una familia grande, grande y ellos viven en villas del Dorado. Una familia grande, grande pero mientras tanto mi familia es mi abuelita.” Andrea: “Nada, bueno mi papá y mi mamá no se quieren tanto.” Santiago: “Vivir con todos.” (Interview 6. April 28, 2011). TRANSLATION INTO ENGLISH

Researcher (R): What does your family need? Miguel: “A TV no more because the one we have is dying” Daniela: “My family needs a house, clothes and my mom needs bras, socks, needs shoes…” Alexander: “Money to buy food.” Maria: “Eggs, milk, one pound of meat, cilantro…” Valentina: “An apartment, my dad and my mom want to live in an apartment and we don’t have it” Luisa: “The beautiful house needs money” Danna: “Money because we are poor.” Karen: “Family unity. Why? She (her mother) lives with a man, his name is Carlos. My mom wants to assign us a godfather but neither I nor my brother or grandma agrees with that because he drinks alcohol. For example, I went to the house where my mom lives, one day, to be honest, they were three, and at night, he arrived with some friends, they were drinking and they started a fight” Violet: “I don’t know. My mom, my dad and my brother. It’s just that I have a big family and they live in Villas del Dorado. A big family but meanwhile my family is my granny” Andrea: “Nothing, well my dad and my mom don’t love each other that much.” Santiago: “To live together” (Interview 6. April 28, 2011).

We classified the answers into two groups the economic and the affective needs. The economic needs, which are reflected on the first six answers above, represent the


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lack of money, food, and of an own house. The affective ones presented in the last four, involve the family unity and conflict solving in the interpersonal relationships. Researcher (R): ¿Qué haces con tu familia? Miguel: “Jugamos, hacemos tareas, también jugamos en el computador, juego triqui con mi mamá. Ese jueguito es todo chévere. Jugamos un jueguito que se juega al ahorcado. –R: Y ¿los fines de semana que hacen? - Salimos al parque y comemos helado.” Ángel: “Jugar play con el exnovio de mi mamá… William.” Violet: “Mi abuelita me da la comida, me lleva todos los días al colegio y ayer no puedo llevarme porque ella sale hasta las cuatro – R: ¿Qué más haces con ella? - Le hago el favor de hacerle los mandados - R: ¿y cuándo vas donde el papá? Veo televisión, juego y nada más.” Karen: “Mi mamá a veces viene a la casa, a veces trae comida, chicles, dulces y muñecos.” Daniela: “Pasear al parque a Girardot. Hay veces Violet va a mi casa y a veces jugamos con mi mamá, mi papa y la mascota.” David: “Hacer tareas, hacer chocolate con mi mamá.” Nicolle: “Juego. Vamos al parque yo cocino con mi mamá, le ayudo a mi mamá a tender la ropa.” Danna: “Jugamos, yo les ayudo a hacer aseo. A hacer la comida. Yo cocino… ¡mentiras!” Alexandra: “Nada, a veces me llevan al parque y a veces vamos a pasear.” Leonardo: “Abrazo a mi mamá y a mis hermanos, les hago cosquillas, juego a una pelea de ‘injas’.” Juan: “Jugar fútbol y nada más, los fines de semana veo tele y juego con mi hermano X-box y con Paco y que son dos pájaros.” (Interview 6. April 28, 2011) TRANSLATION INTO ENGLISH

Researcher (R): What do you do with your family? Miguel: “We play, do the homework, we also play in the computer, I play tic-tac toe with my mom. That little game is cool. We play a game that is played as the hanging man. -R: And what do you do on weekends? – “We go to the park and we eat ice cream.” Ángel: “We play play-station with my mother’s ex-boyfriend. William.” Violet: “My granny gives me the food, she takes me every day to the school and yesterday she couldn’t take me because she finishes her journey at four.” - R: What else do you do with her? – “I go shopping for her as a favor” - R: And what do you do when you go where your father lives? – “I watch TV, play and no more.” Karen: “My mom sometimes comes to our house; sometimes she brings foods, bubble gums, candies and toys.” Daniela: “Go to walk to the park at Girardot; at times Violet goes to my home and sometimes we play with my mom, my dad and my pet.” David: “To do homework, cooking chocolate with my mom.” Nicolle: “I play. We go to the park, I cook with my mom, I help her to hang out the clothes.” Danna: “We play; I help them to clean the house. To cook. I cook… just kidding!” Alexandra: “Nothing, sometimes they take me to the park and sometimes we go to a stroll. Leonardo: “I hug my mom and my brothers, I tickle them, I play fighting as ‘injas’.” Juan: “To play football and nothing else. On weekends I watch TV and play X-box with my brother and with Paco and Luna that are my two birds (Interview 6. April 28, 2011)

In this group of answers it is evident that the activities that children developed with their families, especially during the weekends, basically had two purposes: 1) to share


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and 2) to meet the absent member of their families. The purpose of sharing was related to “playing” and the absent relative in most of the cases was one of their parents. Likewise, in the EFL class we asked pupils for their conceptions about the foreign language that they were learning. In this regard, we could establish relations between the answers to the question “¿Qué es Inglés para ti?”(Interview 1.February 17, 2011), and their attitudes in the class and the rapport with their classmates. TRANSLATION INTO ENGLISH Violet: “Chévere.” Karen: “Para salir adelante.” Ángel: “Ser juicioso.” Leonardo: “Hacer tareas.” Alexandra: “Palabras.” Camila: “Aprender.”

Violet: “Cool.” Karen: “To pull through” Ángel: “To be a good child.” Leonardo: “To do homework.” Alexandra: “Words.” Camila: “To learn.”

The projection of the former excerpts was observable in terms of children’s behavior in the EFL classes and their performance in the academic assignments. For example, those children who held a conception of the English class as a space for learning used to participate actively in the lessons and were more prone to assume leadership roles that influenced their friendship circles. It was the case of Karen and Andrea. As a parenthesis, we remind the use of a sociogram as an artifact (See Research Design, p.48) that allowed us to know the social relationships like friendship among students during the classes. In this section, it is important to mention that when we analyze sociograms we have to take into account three structures: external, internal and the social reality that interferes in the other two. These three structures let us


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know the domain and affiliation in regards the relationships of the individual into the community he belongs to and his role on it (Álvarez, 2009), this analytical process is summarized in table 8.

Name

1

Andrea Violet Camila Danna Edison Daniela Nicole Alexander Miguel María Alexandra Valentina Karen Luisa Ángel Sebastián Yury Leornardo David Daniel Juan Classroom teacher Teacher Diana Teacher Tatiana Social-service student

2

5 1 1 8 1 1 10 2 3 7 0 1 0 0 1

4 3 1 0 1 2 1 1 1 3 4 2 3 2 1 0

1 1 3 1 1 3 0 0 9

2 1 1 1 1 7 6 6 3

Questions 3 4 Amount of elections by classmates 4 2 2 1 2 1 5 0 2 1 5 2 3 0 7 4 4 2 0 3 1 2 2 7 1 4 3 4 4 1 0 1 8 1 2 1 3 0 3 0 5 2 1 3 1 1 1 1 2

5

6

1 5 2 2 6 3 0 4 1 1 2 2 2 1 2

0 1 2 1 6 2

3 6 3 3 3 1 1 1

1 5 3 4 4 2 3 2

1 1 1 3 1 0 8 3

0

Table 8: Sociogram Analysis Grid

Besides the limitation of using sociograms is the lack of knowing the “why” of the choices seen in the organization of answers. Then, we have complemented this sociogram with an interview about friendship in order to overcome part of this limitation.


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In Andrea’s sociogram we observed that she liked to study English, she liked to play and she would invite to her house those that used to be the most responsible, respectful, punctual and well-behaved students. In Karen’s sociogram (See Annex 11 page 135) we noticed that she not only liked to play to study and invite to her house to those responsible, respectful, punctual and well behaved students but also to the classmates that had been with her from pre-school and to the teachers including both classroom and English teachers. It is worthy to mention at this point that regardless of the interaction the EFL classroom and other school spaces most of them had a positive view of friendship: Researcher: ¿Qué es la Amistad para ti? Juan: “Amistad es no pegarle a mis amigos”. Yury: “Está bien. Hacer amor y para mí, amar, querer”. Ángel: “La amistad es jugar”. Valentina: “La amistad es el amor. La amistad y el corazón y el amor”. Alexander: “Cariño, amistad”. Daniela: “Sonreír”. Karen: “Amor, paz y libertad”. (Interview 5. March 31, 2011) TRANSLATION INTO ENGLISH

Researcher: ¿What is friendship for you? Juan: “Friendship is not to hurt my friends.” Yury: “It’s OK. To do love and for me, loving and loving.” Ángel: “Friendship is playing.” Valentina: “Friendship is love. Friendship, the heart and the love.” Alexander: “Affection, friendship.” Daniela: “To smile.” Karen: “Love, peace and freedom.”. (Interview 5. March 31, 2011)

Other students’ drawings, answers and works served children to portray their image as well as their expectations for their future; in sum, they served them for self expressing and served us to know something more about them such as their likes and dislikes, their future professions and their self-portray. Just to mention an example the


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drawings of their professions (See Annex 12 page 136) and the answers to the question “What do you want to be?” yield the same information in all the cases. Nevertheless, in the sub-sequent questions a) “Why? And b) “Do you know someone who performs that profession?” the information varied. Andrea (Singer): a) “Me gusta la música b) Shakira. Pero no quiero ser como Shakira”. David (Motorcyclist): a) “Me gustan las motos. Me gusta la velocidad”. b) “En la televisión”. Leonardo (Soldier): a) “Porque conozco a un soldado”. b) “Daniel, mi hermano, está en Tolemaida”. Yury (Model): a) “Me gustan los desfiles y modelar porque vi una novela”. b) Scarlet, la de la novela”. Ángel (Waiter): a) “Para llevar las órdenes” b) “Un amigo de la pizzería, Tomás”. Juan (Futball player): a) “Porque mi papá me llevó al campin y jugaron bien y me gustó. Porque primero tuve a mi papá Abraham pero ahora también tengo a mi papá Guillermo que se fue para mi casa con mi mamá”. b) “Mi tío Lalo y mi papá Abraham”. (Interview 3. March 3, 2011) TRANSLATION INTO ENGLISH Andrea (Singer): a) “I like music” b) Shakira. But I don’t want to be like Shakira”. David (Motorcyclist): a) “I like motorcycles. I like the speed.” b) “In the TV.” Leonardo (Soldier): a) “Because I know a soldier.” b) “Daniel, my brother, he is in Tolemaida.” Yury (Model): a) “I like the runways and modeling because I watched a soup opera.” b) “Scarlet, the one in the soup opera”. Ángel (Waiter): a) “To take the orders.” b) “A friend from a pizzeria, Tomas.” Juan (Football player): a) “Because my dad took me to the stadium and they played well and I liked it. Because first I had my dad Abraham but now I also have my dad Guillermo who went to my house with my mom.” b) “My uncle Lalo and my dad Abraham”. (Interview 3. March 3, 2011)

The professions children selected were related to their likes, this aspect was evident in the objects, the garment, and the animals among other details they included in the graphics which represented their future professions. In addition, the reasons behind their choices were related to the people they know in the family, in the neighborhood and in the TV shows. Besides, when they developed the key holders activity (See Annex 13 page 137) we realized that some of their likes were linked to activities such as housework, spare-time activities like playing and to the phenomena and elements of nature like the raining and the flowers.


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In the same manner, the reasons why they liked what was mentioned in the lines above were varied, in the same way as the puppet self-representations (See Annex 14 page 138) made by each one of them to show the class who they were and what they liked or not varied as well. In the puppets self-representations we observed that some children attached themselves physical characteristics they did not have. In other cases, they attributed themselves as their favorite cartoons characters like Spiderman, and one group more modified their real physical appearance adapting it to the conception they had about the English native speakers. “Something that called our attention during this class was a conversation we had with Valentina who has black hair. She approached one of us and she said: Valentina: “¡Teacher mira! (Showing her puppet) Teacher: Y ¿Por qué te pintaste el cabello amarillo? Valentina: “Porque los que hablan Inglés son monos” (Journal entry N°12. May 19, 2011) TRANSLATION INTO ENGLISH “Something that called our attention during this class was a conversation we had with Valentina who has black hair. She approached one of us and she said: Valentina: “¡Teacher look! (Showing her puppet) Teacher: And… what did you color the hair in yellow? Valentina: “Because the ones who speak in English have blond hair” (Journal entry N°12. May 19, 2011)

In general, the previous commonalities and relationships reveal the emic and etic perspectives mentioned in the instructional design chapter, where children provided the insider’s view by talking about themselves, drawing themselves, replying to questions about themselves, telling stories about their families and their friends, sharing experiences… On the other hand, the etic perspective came from our part in as much we took the children’s view as the basis to know and understand their roles, their immediate context: their voices as EFL learners and as social subjects.


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Being more specific and making a contrast between what the emic and the etic perspectives represent up to these lines, we can round off this section by concluding that between these mentioned perspectives exist a divergence and convergence point. The meeting point is portrayed in the children’s nominations of the social places and groups they live in/with or belong to (e.g. the family, the school). The departure point is found in the why and what for of those places and people, what ends with different children’s positions and role in places, like the EFL classroom, wheninteracting among them and with others: different identity profiles in the same place. Thus, we finish data organization, management and triangulation to go into the definition of data analysis categories. Defining Categories After the identification of commonalities and relationships between the instruments mainly the semi-structured interviews and the students’ artifacts was done, we addressed Hymes’ model by using the information registered in the teachers’ reflective journals, especially through the use of sporadic conversations, comments and interventions that came up in the flow of the EFL classes (See Annex 15 page 139). When applying the acronym to the discursive events we found the resultsdisplayed in following table.


S etting

P articipants

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All the speech events took place in the school yard, the areas surrounding the school and the EFL classroom. In most of the events the participants involved did not exceed three sketched as follows: EFLT - S S-S S- EFLT-S EFLT- EFLT EFLT - CT EFLT -CT - SS (Abbreviations: EFL Teacher=EFLT, Student=S, Classroom Teacher=CT) The roles of the participants were basically named hearers and speakers. Few times the audience took part in a conversation or communicative circumstance.

E nds

Most of times children wanted to received an approval by the teacher when developing a task. In other cases, they wanted the others to know what they had learnt. Classroom teacher always wanted children to do as she told them, in this way she wanted to show her authority. EFL teachers always wanted to know children at the same time that they wanted to evaluate formatively the EFL learning. Sometimesboth of them –students and teacher- mixed the mother tongue and the foreign language for practicing the languages use. For the case of the interaction between EFLT-S, the sequence followed was: Initiation

response

question

answer

question

answer

stop

Explicitly, This sequence was developed as shown next: EFLT S EFLT S EFLT S ELFT

A ct sequence

Initiation (=greeting) Response (=greeting) Question (=yes/no question or one-two-word question) Answer (=yes/no answer or one-two-word answer) Question (=why question or appealing-for-reason question) Answer (=because answer or short narrative) Stop (=ending-words or suggestion)

The sequence varied if the interaction was between S-EFLT/S, CT-EFLT or CTS. For the first case mentioned, S intervened by saying a short sentence and EFLT/S acted as hearer or audience. The silence moment following the intervention represented the stop of the act. When CT-EFLT: CT EFLT CT EFL CT

initiation (= feeling question about the class) response (= positive or negative answer) observation (= suggestions for teaching improvement) response (= thanks) stop (=thanks)

The sequence for CT-S took the form of: CT S Stop

(=command or order) (=command or order done) (=silence moment)


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Thus, the types of speech (Yule, G. 1996)acts portraying the previous analysis were. CT-EFLT: Expressive like apologizing, thanking, congratulating and welcoming. CT-S: Directive like direct requesting. EFLT-S: Representative like answering,informing, confirming or reporting.

K ey I ntrumentalities

Neither children nor classroom teacher nor EFL teachers used an elaborated language in terms of grammar or lexica. For instance, used repeatedly conjunctions like y and entonces, though they were not ordered when talking, they were brief specially when answering to the CT. The classroom teacher was very direct when talking. On contrary, the EFLT tried to be more indirect by using a soft tone of voice and the same vocabulary children used. In all the cases there was participants’ cooperation. It means,the quality, quantity and relevance (Yule, G. 1996)of the acts were not violated, except in the cases of EFLT-S. In this situation, though children gave more information when telling stories, for us it was an advantage.

N orms of interaction and interpretation

Children did not interrupt the CT; they only asked her for information at the moment she was sat down. During the break they sometimes asked her for helping with the lunch-packages. In the EFL classes there were some rules for children to develop the activities. These were: raising their hand for talking, listening to the teachers and classmates who were speaking, and some others norms that the CT did not allowed us to omit or change. During the time of break children used to approach to the EFLTs for talking and asking about issues different from the academic ones, so for those conversations there were not established rules, tough children maintained social distance by using the word teacher –in English or SpanishThis social distance was more evident when children were interacting with the CT, since they not just used the word teacher as part of the external factor affecting politeness, but also they answered her the yes/no question by saying: “si señora/no señora” Expression that, which was not used when interacting with EFLs, they just said yes or not. When children were interacting among them, they used closeness distance expressions such as their first name or some others like: ¡Oiga!, ¡mire! These two last expressions represented for the CT a lack of respect toward adults in case of being used for approaching to her.

G enre

Casual oral conversationsand Prepared oral conversations.

Table 9: Speaking model result

The description and contrast between the children’s works, drawings, and answers to our questions, sporadic comments, conversations, our observations and the application of the SPEAKING acronym made possible to enunciate the patterns that served as the raw material to structure the main categories emergent from the data analysis.


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1. Television content as provider of entertainment and models 2. Family as supplier of affection and economic sustenance 3. Friends as classmates and play-mates 4. Semantic differences between adults and children 5. Roles of EFL and mother tongue 6. Discourse management according to the context (academic and nonacademic) 7. Playing as an activity to make friends, to share with the family 8. Playing as an activity performed in and outside the school Having these patterns established, we identified common elements among them, so we grouped them as follows: numerals 1 to 3 constitute a group we denominated “social nuclei” which became sources of identity. Numerals 4 to 6 constitute the second group we denominated “children’s positioning via language” which became the voice of children’s language. And the third group is made up from the numerals 7 and 8 denominated “playing: a socialization activity” which became playing: children’s universal learning style. Each one of these groups under the lenses of theory, data resulting from the instruments, and of the researchers addressed the basis of our three categories. Category 1: Here I am: In my family, In the TV, and with my Friends In the English class three social nuclei emerged as factors involved in children’s social identity construction: the TV, the family and friends. That is the reason why we named them sources of identity. Although these sources exert and influence in that


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construction, they do not determine it, instead, it is constructed in the frame of the interpretations that children make of what these sources offer them. Sources of the social identity. The social nuclei enunciated before have been categorized in different disciplines like psychology and by authors like the linguist Aneta Pavlenko who designates them “markers of identity”. The following chart briefly presents some of the classifications. Domains: a. Moral and spiritual Côté, J. & Levine, C. b. Family, gender and sexual c. Economic and civic, (2005) ethnic cultural and national. Markers of Identity: a. Language

a. Ideas and values. b. Interpersonal interaction. c. Organizational and workplace setting as well as individual contribution to social functioning a. Ethnical and national identity

Pavlenko, A. (2004)

For this research study

Sources of social identity in the EFL classroom

a. Family b. TV c. Friends

Table 10: Factors involved in social identity construction

The factors presented in table 10 led us to gain a better understanding of how complex the social identity construction is. However, we cannot include values, organization and workplace settings, ethnical or national identity etc. as sources of identity since the EFL classroom is a particular context that differs from the ones proposed by these authors. For us the sources of identity in the EFL classroom are the social factors that contribute to the construction of identity in the school world. The family was one of these sources of identity whose influence was recurrent and transverse to different topics, some samples of this are the following ones:


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Valentina’s school: In this sample of the school drawings we noticed that this girl drew her house inside the school, for her the school is what many teachers used to say to children: the second home. For many the school is a place completely different from home in aspects such as the schedule that is managed, the kind of rules, Valentina’s school drawing

the uniforms, and so forth. Nonetheless, the affective and

the social relationships that are constructed at school are very similar to the ones we build up with our relatives. In like manner, we found that the family nucleus not only provides affect and economic sustenance but also bases for the expectations children have towards themselves in the future, it was the case of Daniela and Alexandra’s interviews about their professions. Researcher (R): What do you want to be? Daniela: “Vet” R: “¿Por qué?” Daniela: “Quiero ser veterinaria de perros y gatos porque me gustan los perros y gatos” R: “¿Conoces a alguna veterinaria?” Daniela: “Sí. La novia de mi papá.” Alexandra: “Doctor” R: “¿Por qué?” Alexandra: “Porque mi mamá es doctora” R: “¿Conoces a alguna doctora?” Alexandra: “Sí. Mi mamá, Viviana.” (Interview 3. March 3, 2011) TRANSLATION INTO ENGLISH

Researcher (R): What do you want to be? Daniela: “Vet” R: Why? Daniela: “I want to be dogs and cats vet because I love cats and dogs” R: Do you know any vet?


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Daniela: “Yes. My father’s girlfriend.” Alexandra: “Doctor” R: Why? Alexandra: “Because my mom is a doctor ” R: Do you know any doctor?” Alexandra: “Yes. My mom Viviana.” (Interview 3. March 3, 2011)

In these excerpts is observable how the selected professions were related to activities that were performed by members of their families or people who belonged to their close social groups. In other cases, the family provided bases for the child expectations respondent to the family needs; thus, some children did not want to perform the same profession as their parents (See figure 6 page 73) as it was evident when parent’s surveys (See Annex 8page 132) and interviews to students were confronted. Children not only know their relatives job and their social functions but also they recognize that family is a social nucleus whose characteristics vary from people to people and from context to context, as it is shown in the next excerpt: “What we liked the most of this class was that when we presented the pictures of different groups likea man with a pet, a man with two children, a woman with a baby, a man with a woman and some children…and we asked children if they considered that what they were seeing was a family. The answer in all the cases was yes.” (Journal entry N°10, April 28, 2011).

That diversity in the children’s familiar compositions was tangible in the artifacts where they did not draw the conventional conception of family composed by father, mother and children but they drew their families as they really were. As it is visible in Miguel’s family drawing:

Miguel with his mother, his sister and his pet. (Family Drawing)


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On the other hand, children guided their likes, dislikes, expectations and so forth based on what TV offered them. For instance, children liked to watch TV as shown in Violet’s keyholder:

Violet’s keyholder

On weekends children use to spend time with their parents in front of the screen: ¿Qué haces con tu familia? Miguel: “Jugamos, hacemos tareas, también jugamos en el computador, juego triqui con mi mamá. Ese jueguito es todo chévere. Jugamos un jueguito que se juega al ahorcado. –R: Y ¿los fines de semana que hacen? - Salimos al parque y comemos helado.” Violet: “Mi abuelita me da la comida, me lleva todos los días al colegio y ayer no puedo llevarme porque ella sale hasta las cuatro – R: ¿Qué más haces con ella? - Le hago el favor de hacerle los mandados - R: ¿y cuándo vas donde el papá? Veo televisión, juego y nada más.” Juan: “Jugar fútbol y nada más, los fines de semana veo tele y juego con mi hermano X-box y con Paco y que son dos pájaros.” (Interview 6. April 28, 2011) TRANSLATION INTO ENGLISH

Researcher (R): What do you do with your family? Miguel: “We play, do the homework, we also play in the computer, I play tic-tac toe with my mom. That little game is cool. We play a game that is played as the hanging man.-R: And what do you do on weekends? – “We go to the park and we eat ice cream.” Violet: “My granny gives me the food, she takes me every day to the school and yesterday she couldn’t take me because she finishes her journey at four.” - R: What else do you do with her? – “ I go shopping for her as a favor” - R: And what do you do when you go where your father lives? – “I watch TV, play and no more.” Juan: “To play football and nothing else. On weekends I watch TV and play X-box with my brother and with Paco and Luna that are my two birds (Interview 6. April 28, 2011)


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Also, some of them expressed they wanted to be a doctor or a model because they had seen that character in a soup opera, a rock star or a motorcyclist because they had seen it on a TV show, as shown in interview 3 on page 82 and annex 12 on page 136. Then, why is television so important up to the point of turning out to be one of those three sources for the identity construction process? The answers is not merely related to the concept of television as a provider of entertainment and models; but instead of that to the fact that contents children watch or hear when being in front of a TV screen become providers of learning for them at school, since they do not only watch and hear people interacting, they consciously or unconsciously watch and listen to social roles, social discourses, cultural acts, etc. Thus, television has become part of children’s life and part of their economics and perhaps affective needs, as expressed by Miguel: R: ¿Qué necesita tu familia? Miguel: “un tele no mas porque ya se está dañando el que tenemos” (Interview 6. April 28, 2011) TRANSLATION INTO ENGLISH

R: What does your family need? Miguel: “A TV no more because the one we have is dying”” (Interview 6. April 28, 2011)

In this sense, the Law 1098 in article 47 expresses that mass media such as television have some special duties, like the promotion and respect of children’s rights. It implies that mass media should not expose children to any content that attempts on children’s physical, psychological integrity. Nothing further from the reality, for our country’s case the young ones have access to what the policies would


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denominate not suitable information for that population, in addition, children like Miguel are not supervised by an adults when they are in front of the screen. Thus, they assume a position towards those contents which exerts a powerful influence in the ongoing shaping of their social identity. As television did, friends as the third source of identity emerged in professions like policeman and waiter: R: what do you want to be? a) “Why? b) “Do you know someone who performs that profession? Ángel (Waiter): a) “Para llevar las órdenes” b) “Un amigo de la pizzería, Tomás”.

(Interview 3. March 3, 2011) TRANSLATION INTO ENGLISH

R: ¿Qué quieres ser cuando grande? a) “¿por qué? b) “¿conoces a alguien con esa profesión? Ángel (Waiter): a) “To take the orders.” b) “A friend from a pizzeria, Tomas.” (Interview 3. March 3, 2011)

This level of importance children gave to friends is portrayed in table 8 (sociogram analysis grid in page 80), where only one of the 21 children–Alexander- considered himself as his own friend and, where only one child –Sebastian- of the 21 was “invisible” for the reminders 20, since his picture was not selected as to answer neither the affective nor the effectives sociogram questions.


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In other cases, children’s pets were considered part of the family (as shown in Miguel’s family drawing in page 90) as well as a friend, or in some cases; children’s pets were included as part of their professions:

Karen’s profession drawing

Up to this point it is crucial to clarify that even if these three sources of identity were no physically present in the EFL classroom, they were removed by children brought into the EFL classroom to develop the activities and to make their learning more contextualized: they did not count with an EFL book but with their experiences as their EFL social text. Experiences mediated others’ voices. Bearing in mind the previous, it is possible to assert that the social context influences or provides bases to the process of construction of the self. However, it does not determine inexorably “who” a social subject will be. It is in this point where we can mention the conception of children’s experiences mediated other’s voices, where “other’s voices” represents other people, places and circumstances and, mediation refers to the interpretation children made of what they saw in their families, in the television and their friends. Just to mention one example,


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when Andrea was asked about her profession she answered that she wanted to be a singer, but that she did not want to be like Shakira (Interview 3. March 3, 2011). Although some students mentioned some of their parents or friends’ professions (see figure 6 page73), they did not affirm that they wanted to be like their parents or friends; they only mentioned a like for what those people did, as it was the case of Angel and Danna: R:“¿Qué quieres ser cuando grande?” Angel: “Waiter” R: “¿Por qué?” A: “Para llevar las órdenes.” R:“¿Qué quieres ser cuando grande?” Danna: “Cheerleader” R: “¿Por qué?” D: “Me gustan los movimientos y los deportes.” (Interview N° 3, March 3 2011) TRANSLATION INTO ENGLISH R: “What do you want to be?” Angel: “Waiter” R: “Why?” A: “To take the orders.” R: “What do you want to be?” Danna: “Cheerleader” R: “Why?” D: “Because I like movements and sports”. (Interview N° 3, March 3 2011)

The previous idea is reflected on Jaimes & Rodriguez,(1996) assertion about children constructing the reality rather than calquing it and on Ormrod (1999) affirmation about learning by observing rather than by imitating or modeling. However, children cannot construct the reality from a social gap, as these same authors claim, they need some bases from which they can move and make decisions. For this case, these three sources of identity construction found during the process of EFL teaching can be understood as the bases in two ways: symbolically or


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symbolically. In words of Ormrod (1999) the symbolic bases or model are defined as elements we take from others during our interpersonal interactions, and the asymbolic are elements we take from people or actions portrayed in a medium like television. In those terms, for this study that what children took from their parents, friends, or TV; is understood as other’s voices that, directly or not, influenced their experiences at the EFL classroom, making of children’s identities multiple (Norton, B 2004) or composed of multiple subjectivities; making of children’s identities construction a complex process since as Hirst (2004) claims: “when we act [interact] we are acting not only with people, places and things that are spatially and temporally present, but also with those that are removed yet present in the social context” Category 2: Here I am: With my own Words, in my own World The semantic differences between adults and children’s language [utterances], their discourse management according to their context (academic and non-academic) and the roles of EFL and mother tongue in children’s language [utterances] are the core of this second category. To begin with, children’s language was different from adults’ not only in terms of structure and form when it was less elaborated, but in terms of sense and meaning when these were taken for granted by adults at school. As Pavlenko (2004) states, the language is a marker of our identity, and then language was a means for children constructing their social identity at the same time that it was a means for expressing it. This affirmation is portrayed in the semantic differences between children’s conception about the English explained paragraphs above, and the classroom’s teacher conception about this mentioned class. After having looked at the following


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excerpts we concluded that for the classroom teacher the EFL class was a space for learning by repeating, a space for learning habits and a space for following commands: “[…] there was another girl who paid more attention to the pronunciation. For instance, at the end of the class the classroom teacher was saying commands for children to come back to their chairs. Then she said: estanap, repitan, estanap. This girl repeated saying: stand up!” (Journal entry N° 3, March 3 2011) “la canción hay que repetirla unas 50 veces para que quede bien aprendida, pero por hoy sólo la vamos a repetir 3 veces” said the classroom teacher who seemed to be very interested…” TRANSLATION INTO ENGLISH “The song must be repeated 50 times for you to memorize it well, but today we are going to repeat it three times only” said the classroom teacher who seemed to be very interested…” (Journal entry N° 5, March 17 2011) “[…] we asked: how do you say catorce in English? They said cators. So some of them laughed and then the classroom teacher immediately stood up and told them: ‘A mi no me da risa que no sepan. Repitan más bien lo que dice la profe.’ Later on, we asked how do you say porrista in English? They said: porrist” (Journal entry N° 6, March 24 2011) TRANSLATION INTO ENGLISH “[…] we asked: how do you say catorce in English? They said cators. So some of them laughed and then the classroom teacher immediately stood up and told them: ‘It is not funny for me that you don’t know. Better you repeat what the teacher says.’ Later on, we asked how do you say porrista in English? They said: porrist”

(Journal entry N° 6, March 24 2011)

These semantic differences went hand in hand with children’s positioning through discourse according to the context. As it was shown in table 9(page 85) about the application of the ethnography of speaking acronym, the act sequence followed by students when interacting among them or with one of us was very different. It permits us to conclude that when students repeated and performed commands, when they followed instructions and answered what teachers wanted to hear, they were positioning as children-students through academic discourse in an academic context.


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Giving a look at the act sequence between students and EFL teachers, it is noticeable that children used to express more when they were interacting with the classroom teacher. But not only the act sequence and others elements of the acronym like the ends and instrumentalities varied in regards this relationship: the “what” of the conversations varied too: “suddenly, almost at the beginning of the class one child who was eating an orange, approached to one of us and said: mira profe, no puedo comer nada ácido porque me duele. Es que mi mamá me pegó una cachetada porque me acosté tarde” (Journal entry N° 9, April 14 2011)

TRANSLATION INTO ENGLISH “suddenly, almost at the beginning of the class one child who was eating an orange, approached to one of us and said: ‘look teacher I cannot eat anything acid because it hurts me. The thing is that my mom slapped me because I went late to bed.” (Journal entry N° 9, April 14 2011)

This “what” of the conversation was almost completely different between classroom teacher-students and EFL teacher-students, since we respected children Spanish literacy learning process and we followed the principle of ethnography explained by Goetz et al (1988): the use of the participants’ mother tongue in an ethnographic study is essential as part of the internal roles given that the meaning researchers is not mediated by the interpretations of a third person. Furthermore, when children used their mother tongue they were more willing to express themselves about personal issues or close context issues. In other words children identified a difference between the functions of their mother-tongue and the foreign language, such difference was present in terms of the socio cultural identification and it became evident in the self-representations they elaborated in their


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puppets (See Annex 14 page 138) where some children like Santiago and Valentina colored their eyes and hair in blue and yellow correspondingly. Valentina: “¡Teacher mira! (Showing her puppet) Teacher: Y ¿Por qué te pintaste el cabello amarillo? Valentina: “Porque los que hablan Inglés son monos” (Journal entry N°12. May 19, 2011) TRANSLATION INTO ENGLISH Valentina: “¡Teacher look! (Showing her puppet) Teacher: And… what did you color the hair in yellow? Valentina: “Because the ones who speak in English have blond hair” (Journal entry N°12. May 19, 2011)

Valentina’s puppet

In the same manner as the mother tongue and foreign language cultural features interacted one another creating in children identifications about Spanish or English speakers and about the language itself, the EFL learning was also interactive and supported by children’s mother tongue as shown in the following excerpt: “First, we really liked that Alexander did the homework we had assigned –informally- during the conversational interview last Thursday when we were leaving the school. We told him that if told us the meaning of ‘imachitutacangui’ –that is a word in Quechua- we were going to tell him that same word but in English. He called us during the class and told us that the meaning of that word was ‘what is your name?’ He also taught us the meaning of the word ‘pai’ which is ‘thank you’. ” (Journal entry N°8. March 31, 2011)

Alexander was an Ecuadorian boy who used to say he did not like the English class, but after introducing words of his Quechua mother tongue like ‘imachitutacangui’ and ‘pai’, he found reasons to be more interested in his EFL learning, visible this in his behavior and academic results.

The voice of children’s language.


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The voice of children’s language is like the identity of children’s language since when they “[made] the language their own” (Halliwell, 1992, p. 9) they identified what type of discourse to use depending on the context and people they were interacting with. This trialectical relationship (Hirst, 2004) between people, discourses and contexts, determined the positioning of children. Nevertheless, the voice of children’s language was “interfered” by the other’s voices like the classroom teacher one or, children permitted the inclusion of others in their selves - IOS (Côté, et al, 2002) through the intersubjectivity mediated by social discursive practices. For instance, when Miguel was drawing the school:

“ In this point we could notice how children not only needed the adults’ approval for continuing doing their works but also how they depended on adults’ comments for modifying their works. For example there was a child –Miguel- who was drawing his school with children fighting, some other crying and the devil running after them. Then, the boy of social-service told him: ¿para que dibuja eso? (TRANSLATION: What do you draw that for?) Some minutes later, Miguel called us and told us: teacher, ya borre todo lo malo del colegio” (TRANSLATION: I already erased all the bad things from school) (Journal entry N° 4, March 10 2011)

Miguel’sschooldrawing

This IOS influenced children’s answers to the question “Who are you?” which was based on Quesada’s (2000) identity question “Who I am?” (2000) When children were asked for who they were, most of them replied by saying their names: “Santiago”, “Alexander”, “Maria”, etc. When children were asked about who they wanted to be, they responded with their future professions: “veterinaria”, “doctor”, “cantante”, etc. When they were asked who they family were the majority replied like Danna: “teacher, no ve que somos pobres.” It led us to think that when they answered


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about their future position (profession) and their position in a social group (family) they made use of dynamic forms of identification which are modified in time through interacting, and that when they answered who they were at that moment, they made use of stable forms of identification that are related to the use of their mother-tongue, their names, nationality, etc. (Byram & Fleming,1998). Category 3: Here I am: Playing and Learning The forms of identification mentioned in the category 2 are circumscribed in the frame of a social learning that flows in the school world. For the case of children, that social learning is mostly understood or, even more, judged as mere imitation; it is in this category where we take advantage of the data analysis conducted to present other modes of social learning that demand the attention from educators and that led us to understand through this research exercise the fundamental role that “playing” performs in both: children’s social identity construction and learning processes. Those modes of social learning are comprised in three that Ormrod (1999) lists as follows: a) Learning by observing, b) learning by imitating and c) learning by modeling. This author focuses his attention on the first one providing a new insight ignored by the traditional theories on imitation: learning by observation, as a mode of social learning, is not necessarily conducive to an emulation of what is observed. This position concurs with the statements of Jaimes & Rodríguez (1996b) who talk about three basic moments for the construction of reality: externalization, objectivization and internalization. Indeed, according to them a stage of subjectivization (internalization of the reality) is possible once the subject (the child) has been exposed to certain costumes and


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habits, has been in contact with the social products andhas brought the first blocks to put up his/her self-construction . It means the subject (the child) has come to attribute a particular meaning to the elements of the former stages as fundaments for his/her own creation. These basic moments added to the results of learning by observing were set in motion when children did what they know how to do best: to play. Such affirmation is based on what children’s voices revealed us about it: Researcher (R): ¿Qué haces con tus amigos? Leonardo: “Juego con ellos a los números y las vocales. Jugar a futbol y a soldados y las armas las hago. Mis amigos de la casa uno se llama Carlos y Alejo.” Karen: “Jugar, hablar y comer, pero lo que más me gusta jugar: a la doctora, a la mamá y el papá, a la casita.” (Interview 5. March 31, 2011) TRANSLATION INTO ENGLISH

Researcher (R):What do you do with your friends? Leonardo: “I play with them the numbers and vowels. I play football and soldiers and the guns, I make them. My friends at home, their names are Carlos and Alejo” Karen: “playing, talking and eating, but what I like the most is playing: to be a doctor, to be mother and father, to have a house.”

(Interview 5. March 31, 2011)

Probably many of us have wondered why children -like the ones that provided the excerpts- are experts playing and why most of them particularly enjoy playing as a social activity. Although it was not our main focus as researchers, here we pose that questioning to show that games entail for children not simply acting as “miniature adults” (Ferreiro, 2002/2003) or simulate situations or experiences observed in orlived by others (e.g parents) instead of that, games involve a type of interaction or “format” that incorporate daily life facts (Jaimes et al, 1996).For the case of our participants, most of the girls liked to play “a la mamá y al papá” and they understood housework as part of that game as it is shown in Andrea’s keyholder of her likes.


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Andrea’s keyholder

In accordance with that, we understood that when playing children made those experiences their own and modeled them through a dynamic of roles where they worked collaboratively, learntto assign roles, identified the language use in different contexts and initiated decisions making. In addition, that identification of the language use implied to ascribe new intentions for the language learnt, these, aimed to create ingeniously realities aimed to their self-definition as social subjects (Bakhtin in Toohey, 2000) Unfortunately, that conception of “playing” lived by children as a learning style, whose understanding was gained through exploring children’s practices of construction of their social identity, is a habit admitted by school but admitted, in some classrooms, as a disadvantageous practice. That gap between children’s and some teachers’ conception of playing becomes evident in the social distance and social closeness(Yule,1996) dissimulated through politeness linguistic devices that are embedded in the discursive events between the ones and the others. In our case it emerged, for instance, when children addressed the


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classroom teacher or one of us they used the expression “teacher” and then the name, which differed from the way they approached their classmates by using their name or expressions like “oiga mire” o “mira”. But that gap affected more than the words children utter to interact with others in the classroom,it had an incidence on the ongoing redefinitions of social and institutional spaces for children, the following regular registerexemplifies this point: “Were my students involved in a positive and productive way? Children got disorganized when they went out of the context where they normally take classes, so one of the possible interpretations that we have made about the classroom based on that change is that for them it is the place to study and that children cannot play there but that is something that for them does not apply to places like the auditorium” (Journal entry N° 2. February 24, 2011).

That abyss in regards the role of playing as a dynamic crucial for children’ social identity construction while they were immersed in the school world,was also prone to generate contradictions in them. Of that point the following transcript is a token: R:“¿Qué es para ti el colegio?” David:“Divertirme con inglés y con el profesor de educación física” R: “¿Te gusta ir al colegio?” David: “No porque es aburrido con las tareas me están quemando el cerebro y mira, ya lo tengo todo rojo.” (Interview 4. March 10, 2011) TRANSLATION INTO ENGLISH

Researcher (R):What do you do with your friends? Leonardo: “I play with them the numbers and vowels. I play football and soldiers and the guns, I make them. My friends at home, their names are Carlos and Alejo” Karen: “playing, talking and eating, but what I like the most is playing: to be a doctor, to be mother and father, to have a house.” (Interview 4. March 10, 2011)

In the previous sample David defined his conception of school mentioning a relationship he established with his experiences in the classes “having fun”. However, when he was asked for the second question his vision of the school was not as favorable as at the beginning. Bearing in mind that example, we resort to


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Rasmussen’s words in order to offer a partial explanation of the root of the problem: there is a difference between “places for children” and “children’s places”. Indeed children relate not only to official spaces provided by adults, but also to informal places, often unnoticed by adults (as cited in Guerrero, 2005. p. 29). Those informal places for our study were the social places that children constructed through playing and the discursive interactions they held with their peers. The ones that give an account for the witty remarks we used to hear from children, that more than witty remarks were the voices of their social identity. As expressed in the following answers: Researcher (R): ¿Qué es el país para ti? Violet: “Parques” Santiago: “Carros” Daniela: “Barbies” Nicolle: “Parques de diversiones” Miguel: “Jugar, vivir.” María: “Mundo Aventura” Juan: “Fútbol” (Interview 2. February 24, 2011) TRANSLATION INTO ENGLISH

Researcher (R): What is the country for you? Violet: “Parks” Santiago: “Cars” Daniela: “Barbies” Nicolle: “amusement parks” Miguel: “playing and living” María: “Mundo Aventura” Juan: “Football” (Interview 2. February 24, 2011)

Actually, in our study these same voices that conceived their places as dynamic, as imagined, as experienced…, led us to agree with Cohen who claims that for many in the educational field and the school world yet it is necessary to admit that “young children also play to learn about the world, […] play is children main way of


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communicating,to stop a child from playing is like stopping an adult from talking and thinking” (Cohen, 2002). To wrap up this chapter and before presenting the conclusions, pedagogical implications and remainder concerns to approach as teachers-researchers, we display in a summarized way the results of the data analysis delved in this chapter on the next table.


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Research Question: How do children construct their social identity when immersed in the school world? Category 1: Here I am: In my family, in the TV, and with my Friends Samples

Researcher (R): What do you want to be? Alexandra: “Doctor” R: “¿Por qué?” Alexandra: “Porque mi mamá es doctora” R: “¿Conoces a alguna doctora?” Alexandra: “Sí. Mi mamá, Viviana.” (Interview 3. March 3, 2011)

Karen’s profession drawing “Even young learners as ours are conscious about the socio-cultural phenomena that surround them, in Oscar’s case he expressed it when he talked about his dislikes and dislikes, and the meaning behind his words is what led us to that conclusion: he does not like guns, guns hurt people. He neither liked the “middle finger” expression that is an insult. He likes preserve the nature, he knows something about the environmental current situations (it is curious such expression, especially in this days of winter that have provoked numerous floods in our country. Floods broadcasted trough TV News and which have affected a large amount of people). Finally Oscar likes to play under the rain. Compared with the previous statement, this might mean that he enjoys nature when he preserves it and it does not hurt him. All these are issues that are normally left for adults discussion, but what would happen if we took time to listen to children talking about them, about what they think, about what is worrying for them, about the solutions that they would propose, then, we would probably have the self-confidence to admit that they have a lot to contribute, that children are constructors of the world and their interpretations of it before we notice it. And perhaps then we would understand how valuable is to let their voices to be heard.” (Journal entry N° 11. May 12, 2011).

Category 1: Here I am: In my own words, in my own world Samples


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“In this point we could notice how children not only needed the adults’ approval for continuing doing their works but also how they depended on adults’ comments for modifying their works. For example there was a child –Miguel- who was drawing his school with children fighting, some other crying and the devil running after them. Then, the boy of social-service told him: ¿para que dibuja eso? Some minutes later, Miguel called us and told us: teacher, ya borre todo lo malo del colegio” (Journal entry N° 4, March 10 2011) […] we asked: how do you say catorce in English? They said cators. So some of them laughed and then the classroom teacher immediately stood up and told them: ‘A mi no me da risa que no sepan. Repitan más bien lo que dice la profe.’ Later on, we asked how do you say porrista in English? They said: porrist” (Journal entry N° 6, March 24 2011)

Researcher (R): What is the school for you? Miguel: “Hacer tareas, respetar a la profe y jugar” Karen: “Aprender, estudiar” Violet: “Aprender y jugar” Daniela: “Muchas cosas. Leer, aprender, pintar, jugar” David: “Divertirme con Inglés y con el profesor de educación física” Nicolle: “Me gusta estudiar y aprender porque me gusta” (Interview 4. March 10, 2011)

Miguel’s school drawing

Category 3:Here I am: playing and learning Sample Researcher (R): ¿Qué haces con tus amigos? Leonardo: “Juego con ellos a los números y las vocales. Jugar a futbol y a soldados y las armas las hago. Mis amigos de la casa uno se llama Carlos y Alejo.” Karen: “Jugar, hablar y comer, pero lo que más me gusta jugar: a la doctora, a la mamá y el papá, a la casita.” (Interview 5. March 31, 2011) “Another child who was present at the moment of the argument told one of us: “Si ve profe, por eso toca traer todos los colores marcados, si es rojo, rojo Miguel Ángel, si es azul, azul Miguel Ángel… he went beyond the incident expressing a solution for preventing the problem in his own case. That make us think that children learn to deal with daily situations at the school based on their classmates experiences, and in the end problem-solving comes in certain mode from the interpretations that they make on those events.” (Journal entry N° 7. March 21, 2011).

Table 11: Data analysis results summary


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CHAPTER VI Conclusions In this chapter we will present our reflections and conclusions that emerged after analyzing data. First, we remind the reader our research question. Thus, how do children construct their social identity when immersed in their school world? Such ambitious question is narrowed by the context it was answered: the EFL classroom. Then, when children of first grade are immersed in their school world learning EFL, they construct their social identity by using their voices to portray a position: Here I am: in my family, in the TV, and with my Friends. Named in this work sources of identity, the family, the TV and the friends, were social attributes children took as bases for defining who they wanted to be in their future, for defining their likes and preferable free time activities. However, in this sense children did not express a like for what others were rather than a like for what others did; naming this last idea: experiences mediated other’s voices. Here I am: with my own words, in my own world. The role of language in terms of the semantic differences between children and adults, the EFL and mother tongue rolewereremarkable features in children’s construction of identity. Children’s conception about the school, the family, the friends, the EFL class among others, were mirror of children’s discursive practices supporting their positions in these social groups or spaces: children used academic discourse when interacting with the classroom teacher at the classroom, they used a non-academic discourse when interacting with the EFL teachers or classmates at the classroom, which means that


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the EFL classroom provides opportunities for children to express their identities through the language. Here I am: playing and learning. Some teachers take for granted playing as children’s common activity. Some teachers prohibit playing at the classroom considering it in isolation from children’s learning. For first graders playing was more than a mere common activity. For them, playing was a social activity where they could learn about themselves, others and about their contexts. At the same time, children could share social practices about their past and present as well as their desirable future. In here, children performed roles such as mothers, fathers, doctors, policemen, etc. using gestures and discourses that belonged to those characters. So, here they are, constructing their social identity by making use of some sources of identity, by using the language socially as their own language, and by playing while learning. These sources of identity that are portrayed in the first category are the TV, the children’s families and their friends. At the same time, though they are listed separately, they are closely related, which means that they did not emerge in isolation from one another. One strong way children made use of for establishing the link between the sources of identity was the social learning and practicum of the language; no the language of others but their own: their own conceptions, their own ways of interacting, their own positions. In this way, children’s language was heard through their drawings, stories, activities… through their games. When playing, children internalized their own experiences and others’; at the time they learnt in environments ruled differently from the classroom.


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Along these lines, we have moved from category one (Here I am: In my family, in the TV, and with my Friends) to category two (Here I am: with my own words, in my own world) arriving to the last one (Here I am: playing and learning). Anyhow, those children’s sources of identity, the children’s language and children’s games; were interfered by the social discursive practices they observed, imitated or modeled from others. This indirect or direct way of being interfered was mediated by a process of self-conceptualization and meaning-construction about a shared context, community, culture, language, learning… a shared world. Hence, children’s experiences mediated by others’ voices, the voice of their own language, and playing as one of their social learning styles represented their ways of being and doing in this world. This is precisely what makes children social identity different, unique and diverse.Here, we dare to affirm that children’s identities are not defined by the social context rather than by the positions they construct toward this context when assumed as their social reality,given that children not only live in a shared social context as “empty agents”, they are social agents living and facing a shared social reality. In sum, even children are conscious about the socio cultural phenomena that surround us; although sometimes, people let aside what children say or think ignoring what they say and think is as important as what others do. Here they are: imitating, modeling or observing those symbolic and asymbolic models offered by the society. Do we see them, do we hear them?Sometimes, people forget that children are more than agents we make decision on, but human being who are learning about others’ behaviors, words, conceptions, reactions... Sometimes, people forget that children do


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not need to know the past, the present and the future tense to talk about their past, their present and their future experiences and understandings. In chapter II, we mentioned an author (Quesada, 2000) who identity question was, who I am? So difficult question to be answered. We cannot affirm who first graders are in the sense this question demands, but rather we can affirm that as architects they are constructing their social identity, and that the school cannot ignore this issue as fundamental for developing pedagogical interventions and educational improvements. All the previous remarks the children’s identity not as a linear construction, not as a cyclical construction but as a social process that touches all the areas of life, and the EFL learning as part of the academic one is not the exception.In these terms, the development of an EFLlearner-centered syllabus based on children’s prior knowledge (academic and non-academic), and the development of the classes valuing their expressions (academic and non-academic) gave us opportunities to understand just a minimum part of children’s school life at our times. At the same time, this wonderful understanding and experience allowed us as EFL teachers to realize how much needs to be done in the educational field and specifically in the EFL one.


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CHAPTER VII Pedagogical Implications and Further Research Pedagogical Implications Some years ago in the linguistics field, language used to be understood as a series of combinations embedded in a “perfect” system that permitted us to accomplish communicative purposes. Later on theories that advocated the recognition of the “real”, rather than the “ideal”, subjects intervening in the communicative situation and of the socio-cultural conditions mediating it came up. In the educational field, there has been a notorious amelioration in the concept of the pupil, the new pedagogical approaches have attempted to uproot the teaching practices where the teacher had the control on the “ideal” and uniform subjects intervened in the educative process. Teachers and researchers at the head have joined efforts to redefine the role of the learners. However, advocating the recognition of the “real” learners who take classes in our classrooms, and to adapt the “ideal” contents to these “real” subjects in a “real context” is still needed. For some teachers what we assert here might sound idealistic, nonetheless, is the main premise that prompted us to undertake the “challenging” process (as we described it in different sections of this paper) of taking children’s hand to walk guided by their voices through the realities that surround their learning and that led us to understand who they are and how they are. Thus, we found conditions that are far from ideality, and that used to be even farther from the English class. In fact that is why we considered that not everything has been said about children’s social identity neither in research nor in pedagogy.


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Therefore, from this experience with first-graders we understood the importance of validating the prior knowledge children bring into the classroom, and what we mean by prior-knowledge not necessarily is knowledge about the language. That clarification is necessary because as we explained before, schools and curriculum developers intentionally or not (here is not of our concern) have posed knowledge over subjects. What would be possible if we changed the elements of this equation? Well, teachers would have to place the realities that are generally disregarded in the standardized resolutions and make sense of them in the development of more carefully planned classes. It means classes where the contents would emerge in consonance with the necessities of the particular learning communities teachers are in charge of. Albeit adapting the curricular dispositions to the specific circumstances of the class might seem an intricate task due to students different expectations, skills, interests, likes, dislikes, backgrounds, etc. it yields rewarding results for both parts: “real teachers” and “real learners”. Indeed, while designing and implementing our pedagogical proposal, we realized that when students make sense of their learning processes in relation to their particular social realities they develop a sense of closeness with teachers and are more prone to the expression of their actual needs, expectations, goals, viewpoints. In turns, that knowledge about students as subjects and their realities conduces to more responsible decision making and planning. Even if not all language teachers are committed to do such work and the success is not guaranteed in all the contexts, for all the students, it is more idealistic expecting socially vulnerable students to become expert users of a language that is learnt to be


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left on the desk before closing the classroom door. That is the reason why we encourage teachers to approach students as human and social beings before labeling them as members of an institution. In the end, our position is not to think about a personalized English class for each pupil but an English class where each pupil has the opportunities to self-express and manifest his voice when using the foreign language. The former implies that the foreign language is not understood as a norm in the class but as a mean for social construction where different resources contribute to make it meaningful. Among these resources: the sources of identity, the children’s experiences lived in and outside the school, their voices as children, as friends, as sons or daughters, their games, and any kind of information that is representative and relevant for them which addressed in the learning process confers purpose to it and place them as active builders in it. Making of that “ideal” content not something to be evaluated by the teacher but shared and learnt with both teacher and peers. Then, going back to the generalized reality, the education or as many denominate instruction in the language area, in our specific case on a foreign language, should transcend the cognitive dimension and impact the discursive one because it is mainly in this last where children are prepared to face and transform their social realities in accordance with the particularities present in their immediate social environment. Yes, the social reality has an impact on children but it does not predetermine them, the least we can do is to prepare self-confident voices that may understand and counterbalance it. That is to make of the language classroom a scenario of social


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development where children are in part prepared not to be spectators but transformers of their realities through their self-affirmation. So, we encourage language teachers, researchers and everyone interested in the improvement of the educational practices, especially in first-grade or initial stages of learning to reconsider the institutional role of the school (for us it was the school world) in children’s social construction. Hence, the academic life promoted there should assume the needs of the population that generates the necessity of its existence in the real world. In the same line of thought, this section becomes appropriate to express that the part teachers take in this process is not less important. We have in our hands the possibility of guiding the learning experiences and help children to understand certain dynamics of socialization for example, when conflicts among children arise or when they are playing. However, it is beneficial to establish the difference between guiding and controlling, we should avoid the tendency to assign roles in the interaction, sometimes, to the extent of setting children only as directed by the adults to understand the dynamics of the socialization at the school or everywhere else. It is precise to say that children negotiate and construct interpretations on their interaction with their partners and teachers in the school world, they make inferences and the collective experiences are as important as the individual ones for constructing those interpretations that in time create patterns in each child’s points of view, in each child’s way to think, in each child’s conception of him/herself, in each child’s conception of others: in each child’s social identity.


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Moreover, responding to some of the questions cited from Amar (1998) in our theoretical framework, in this regard, we have to say that children are aware of the social phenomena that surround them, as they let us know in their answers. Nevertheless, they understand them according to the permanent process of selfconstruction they are carrying out. Thus, there are many topics that are normally left for adults discussion, what would happen if we took time to listen to children talking about them, about what they think, about what is worrying for them, about the solutions that they would propose, well, we would probably have the self-confidence to admit that they have a lot to contribute, that children are constructors of the world and their interpretations of it before we notice it. And perhaps then we would understand how valuable is to let their voices to be heard. As a mode of conclusion, we remind the objection that many teachers expressed in regards the focus of our project, reason why recurrently the reader found in the body of this paper, expressions related to the complexity and challenge that represented for us to conduct a research on how children construct their social identity. They used to reply our query with a question followed by a hurried affirmation “What for? Everything is said in regards identity and you all of us know that children copy what they see, in the end they copy what they see at home.” Well the reason entailed a pedagogical implication that concerned us as learners among learners. Observing children’s particular modes of creating meaning and those they shared most of the time at the school moved us to think of the role of the school in our students’ lives, of our role as members of that school in the students’ lives and of the role of the students’ lives in our EFL teaching practices.


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That is why our initial interest did not close its course here and it gave birth to more questions that teacher-researchers might approach to obtain valuable knowledge for professional and personal development, as it occurred in this case.

Further Research The result of qualitative research in education unlike quantitative is not a product but a process. Thus, from the process described in this paper the following are some of the unanswered questions that could work as inquiries or object of further exploration by educators or researchers in the educational area:  How in time will children use the language to understand who they are?  How mightself-confidence in children be fortressed in a way that children know not only their possibilities but also their limits, especially in terms of their individual contribution to generate an agreeable work/learning environment?  What effect does it have to place the imaginaries of children in the English class on other spheres of their social identity majorly developed outside their school world?


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Annex 1 Students’ Semi-structured interviews Format Date: _______________________ Activity N°:__________________ Lesson N°:___________________

N° 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

Name

What is… for you?

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Annex 2 Teachers’ Reflective Journals Format Diana Marcela Fajardo Bonilla Tatiana Valcárcel Ríos

Journal No.

code: 20071165041

code: 20071165057

Date of lesson:

Main Topic:

Objectives:

Did we accomplish our objectives?

What did I like the most about this class?

Which difficulties do I have to overcome for the next class?

Were my students involved in a positive and productive way?

What did I find interesting to write down for my project?

A question or a doubt to discuss with my colleges and teacher?

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Annex 3 Consent Form for Parents CONSENT FORM/ FORMATO DE CONSENTIMIETO Señores Padres de Familia Como maestras de Inglés en formación de la Universidad Distrital Francisco José de Caldas nos encontramos realizando una investigación en el I.E.D Policarpa Salavarrieta dirigida a explorar la construcción de la identidad y la autoconfianza de nuestros estudiantes para interpretar el mundo escolar como factores esenciales en el proceso de aprendizaje. Por lo tanto queremos solicitar su permiso y colaboración para la autorización de su hijo a participar en el desarrollo del estudio y la posible publicación e inclusión de los datos recolectados como parte esencial de nuestro proyecto investigativo. En caso de que tenga inquietudes respecto al proyecto o a la inclusión de su hijo en la investigación puede ponerse en contacto con nosotras a cualquiera de los siguientes números de teléfono 2290014 – 3125227575 – 3124094130. En consonancia con lo anterior, si usted está de acuerdo y dispone la participación de su hijo en el estudio diligencie la presente autorización. Yo _________________________ identificado con la cédula _________________ autorizo la participación de mi hijo(a) ___________________________________ del grado Primero A de la jornada mañana. Cordialmente, Diana Fajardo Bonilla Tatiana Valcárcel Rios Firma de autorización: ____________________

Fecha: ____________________


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Annex 4 First-Book Description The first-book is entitled First grade social architects in the EFL world. It is a 19 pages teachers’ book containing the syllabus and 7 activities for teaching EFL to first graders. In the last pages the teacher can find 9 flashcards about commands, 3 flashcards about feelings (happy, sad and distracted), 12 flashcards about future professions and 14 flashcards about people, objects and places of the school. All the flashcards are posted as cut-outs.


Annex 5 Plan de Estudios

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Annex 6 Common European Framework Reference Levels: Self-assessment Grid Common Reference Levels: self-assessment grid Common Reference Levels: global scale Basic User (breakthrough) A1: Can understand and use familiar everyday expressions and very basic phrases aimed at the satisfaction of needs of a concrete type. Can introduce him/herself and others and can ask and answer questions about personal details such as where he/she lives, people he/she knows and things he/shehas. Can interact in a simple way provided the other person talks slowly and clearly and is prepared to help. A1 U N D E R S T A N D I N G

S P E A K I N G

W R I T I N G

Listening

Reading

Spoken interaction

Spoken production

Writing

I can recognize familiar words and very basic and phrases concerning myself, my family and of most immediate concrete surroundings when people speak and clearly. I can understand familiar names, words and very simple sentences for example on notices and posters or in catalogues.

I can interact in a provided the other person is prepared to repeat or rephrase things at a slower rate of speech and help me formulate what I’m trying to say. I can ask and answer simple questions in areas of immediate need or very familiar topics. I can use simple phrases and sentences to describe where I live and people know.

I can write a short, postcard, for example sending holiday greetings. I can fill in forms with personal details, for personal letter, for example entering name, nationality and address on a hotel registration form.


Annex 7 Data Organization Matrix Sample

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Annex 8 Parents’ Survey

ENCUESTA PARA PADRES DE FAMILIA IED. Policarpa Salavarrieta Preescolar A Área de Inglés/ Septiembre 23 de 2010

Nombre del niño:_____________________________ edad:_____________ Vivo con:_____________________________________________________ Vivo en:______________________________________________________ Mi acudiente es:________________________ parentesco:______________ El nombre de mi papá es:__________________ su ocupación es:___________ El nombre de mi mamá es:_________________ su ocupación es:___________ Mi papá nació en:__________________ y lleva viviendo _________ en Bogotá Mi mamá nació en:_________________ y lleva viviendo _________ en Bogotá Mi acudiente nació en:______________ y lleva viviendo _________ en Bogotá


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Annex 9 Children’s School Drawings

Image 1: “Miguel’s school”

Image 2: “Luisa’s school”

Image 3: “Daniel’s school”

Image 4: “Valentina’s school”


Annex 10 Children Families’ Drawings

Image 2: “Violet’s Family

Image 1: “Nicolle’s Family

Image 3: “Miguel’s Family

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Annex 11 Karen’s Sociogram

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Annex 12 Children’s Professions Drawings

Image 1: David’s profession

Image 3: Yury’s profession

Image 2: Nicolle’s profession

Image 4: Santiago’s profession

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Annex 13 Children’s keyholders

Image 1: Juan’s keyholder Image 2: Violet’s keyholder

Image 4: Angel’s keyholder

Image 3: Andrea’s keyholder


Annex 14 Children’s Puppets

Image 1: Valentina’s puppet

Image 3: Maria’s puppet

Image 2: Santiago’s puppet

Image 4: David’s puppet

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Annex 15 Speech events in the EFL classes Casual conversation with “Miguel”: EFLTeacher: Are you happy or sad? Miguel: ¿mmm? EFLT: Are-you-happy-or sad? M: ¿mmm…eh? Saad EFLT: Why? M: ¿mmmm? EFLT: Why? M: ¿Por qué? EFLT: Yes. M: Porque es que estoy aburrido. EFLT: Why? M: Porque es que mi mamá me pega por todo. –Looking at the classroom teacherEFLT: ¿Por todo? M: Si. Si juego en el computador me pega, si hago tareas me pega, me pega por todo. EFLT: Y ¿no tienes mascota? M: Si. EFLT: Y por qué no juegas con ella para que tu mamá no te pegue. M: También me pega. Yo llego a la casa hago tareas y juego y me pega. Estoy aburrido. EFLT: Y ¿tu hermana? M: Ella me dice que mejor me acueste a dormir después de hacer tareas. Entonces yo me acuesto y me hago el dormido. EFLT: Y porque no le dices a la profesora M: Mmmm –looking doubtfully at the classroom teacher(Journal N°13 entry. May 26, 2011 )

S etting

EFL classroom. It was a Thursday morning almost noon. The class was finishing and children were developing the last part of their EFL assignment, then, some of them were moving around the classroom and most of them were speaking loudly, except Miguel, who was sat down with his arms and head on the desk. The EFL teachers were guiding children in the activity as well as they were talking with children about several issues while the classroom teacher was present in the EFL class but, she was cutting some images for completing a worksheet. The conversation took no more than 7 minutes.

P articipants

The EFL teacher and Miguel, one of the first graders (EFLT – S). During this short conversation neither classroom teacher nor Miguel’s classmates were hearers or speakers.

E nds

In first instance, the EFL teacher, while putting into practice the foreign language, wanted to know why he was projecting sadness and why he was not acting as usual: participative, smiling, and so on.

A ct sequence

Simple Question, answer, simple question appealing reasons, child’s narrative.

K ey I ntrumentalities

The child portrayed sadness when speaking quietly, while looking at some classmates or objects of the classroom near him. He did not look at the EFL teacher’s eyes. Although the English teacher used some expression and words in the foreign language, Miguel seemed not to care about it.


The child was free to talk with the EFL teacher, although it seemed to be that he did not feel comfortable to talk aloud due to the presence of the CT, as if talking about issues different from the academic ones was part of the norms in the classroom. This child did not give importance to the language he was being asked.

G enre

Casual conversation.


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Casual conversation with “Alexander”: - EFLT: ¿Dónde vives? - S: vivo pasando “las caracas” - EFLT: ¿siempre te vas solo? - S: sí. Mi mamá no viene porque mi hermana se salta la puerta hasta por la noche. - EFLT: ¿y quién está en tu casa ahorita? - S: mi mamá, mi papá, mi hermana y Dupa (…) - EFLT: ¿no te da miedo? - S: no. - EFLT: ¿naciste en Bogotá? - S: no - EFLT: ¿Dónde? - S: en Ecuador - EFLT: ¿hace cuánto llegaste? - S: mmm... Hace mucho - EFLT: ¿desde cuándo eras bebé? - S: Sí. Nos demoramos un día, una noche y un día. Y a mí me dio mucho mareo. - EFLT: ¿viniste en avión o en bus? - S: en bus. - EFLT: ¿has montado en avión? - S: sí, pero también me da mucho mareo (…) - EFLT: ¿en Ecuador hablan español? - S: no. Quichua - EFLT: ¿sabes hablar quichua? - S: no, ni lo hablo ni lo entiendo. Mi hermana si entiende. - EFLT: y, ¿no sabes decir una palabra como mamá? - S: no, solo sé una palabra___________. - EFLT: ¿Qué significa? - S: no sé. - EFLT: si tú luego nos dices que significa esa palabra en español nosotras te enseñamos a decirla en inglés. ¿Si?, ¿hacemos ese trato? Así sabes tres idiomas. - S: mmm. Sí. - EFLT: y, ¿Qué haces cuando llegas a la casa? - S: me cambio, como, miro un poquito de tele, hago las tareas, arreglo la cocina, me duermo y veo la tele. - EFLT: ¿viven otras familias en tu casa? - S: sí, amigos. Jhony, mechas, Diego, María… -ellos me dicen Rucko. - EFLT: ¿Por qué? - S: porque no saben mi nombre. No me gusta que me digan así. - EFLT: diles que no te gusta. - S: todos me dicen Rucko. Mi papa, mis amigos, Melany… hasta Dupa. - EFLT: o sea que ¿Dupa es tu hermana…? - S: Dupa es nombre de hombre. Melany es mi hermana. Dupa llora mucho y por todo. Llora porque se va mi mamá. Llora porque lo bañamos con agua fría, llora porque le tiramos agua… hasta llora cuando no lo bañamos con jabón. - EFLT: y ¿Qué haces para que deje de llorar? - S: lo duermo. Mi hermana le pega con las “pargatas” y los ganchos. Una vez mi mama nos rompió los ganchos. - EFLT: ¿Dónde? - S: por todo el cuerpo. - EFLT: ¿Por qué? - S: porque yo le dije a mi hermana que lavara la loza y ella no me hizo caso. - EFLT: ¿y qué hace tu mamá? - S: ella habla mucho hasta la séptima, y cuando llega a la casa también. (…) mi mama vende chales y bufandas en la séptima y mi papá vende sacos y chalecos - EFLT: y, ¿te llevan? - S: no, a mi mamá no le gusta. A veces salimos a almorzar. - EFLT: ¿conoces a otras personas de ecuador que estén aquí en Bogotá?


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- S: Sí. Unos viven cerca y otros lejos…ya estoy cansado de caminar. Es que antes nos veníamos en “tapsi” pero ya no. - EFLT: ¿en bus? - S: en “tapsi”. (Journal N° 7 entry. March 24, 2011

S etting

P articipants E nds

A ct sequence

Place: The streets around to the school building. We were walking together through a noisy avenue towards Alexander’s house that was located at the downtown of Bogota as well near to the red line. In general terms, it is an area full of buildings and stores, there are many people and vehicles circulating so it uses to be noisy and it is considered dangerous and unsafe due to its high rate of thefts. Time:After leaving the school, more or less at noon. The journey took about 15 minutes. EFLT (Diana) – Alexander (S) – EFLT (Tatiana) EFLTs did not want to leave alone Alexander to go alone through dangerous and crowded neighborhoods in the downtown, that he used to walk every day to go home. That is why we decided to approach him. Our outcome was to offer protection and at the same time to know a little more about that student outside the school. Most of the EFLTs utterances with some exceptions were directive, they had the interrogative structural form and the communicative function they performed was question or request of information. An instance of the exceptions is a commisive act that one of the EFLTs performs when she ask a question with the intention of closing an agreement and at the same time intends to get the child to find out the meaning of the word in Quichua. In the case of Alexander most of his utterances have a declarative structural form, they work as statements, thus there is absence of directive acts, instead of that most of the utterances perform as representative acts and some of them violate the maxim of quantity and manner when he includes detailed information that provides extra information about his personal life and about his family. However, that information is relevant for the general theme of the conversation so there is no a recurrent violation of the maxim of relation.

K ey

The manner in which EFLTs conducted the questions was friendly in order to avoid being obtrusive and the child did not use the politeness device that most of children used when addressing EFLTs or CT in the classroom: “teacher”. Alexander talked with us about issues he normally he would not at the school, like familiar problems, the place where he lived, his parents jobs etc. He included short narrations of anecdotes to answer our questions.

I ntrumentalities

The channel that Alexander and EFLTs choose for the informal conversation was oral and the code was mainly Spanish. For us as EFLTs Spanish is our mother tongue as well as for Alexander. However, at some point of the conversation he admitted that he was born in Ecuador where the code is Quechua language, and even if he knew how to pronounce some words he did not know their meaning. Bearing in mind this we do not categorize the code as mixed.


Due to the context where the conversation was taking place (outside the school) Alexander talked freely without taking into account different norms other than the turn-taking to talk, the cooperation principle and the respect.

G enre

The student and EFLTs were engaged in a casual conversation with a model of questions and answers. The student moved freely and in some cases he jumped and played around while he was talking with us.