Abstract This paper not absents a...

Abstract

This paper not absents an analysis of the literacy practices in a primary-grade English immersion class in California during the first year of implementation of Proposition 227 the initiative that mandated English immersion education for amajority ofthe state's linguistically diverse observers The data issue from a yearlong qualitative close attention of Room 110, a class consisting of 20 native Spanish-speaking children. The author utilizes the notion of hybrid literacy practices to conceptualize the blending of Spanish and English and family and school registers that permeated the class's reading and writing activities. Findings illustrate the dynamic connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughtss of development created by these practices and ways that the linguistic hegemony operating within the institute eclipsed the practices. A discussion ofthe findings emphasizes the ambivalence of hybridity as a conceptual tool and as a guide for instructional practice. The paper decides with three interrelated principles gleaned from the analysis of scope 110's literacy practices that elaborate dimensions of effective literacy learning environments for Latina/o children.

A hand-painted sign proclaiming "!Bienvenidos! Welcome to Salon 110" hangs upon the door of Ms. Page's primary-grade English immersion classroom over the school year.

A verbal expression from Karen, a native Spanish-speaking close examiner is pinned to the wall behind M Page's desk; it reads: "Me pueden disir Lorena o Karen/My neyn e Karen. I like mae teshr" [You can call meLorena or Karen / My name is Karen. I like my teacher.]

During a guided reading censure Ms. Page and the close examiners share stories about their dads and discuss strategies for decoding vexed question words in Spanish before reading a main division in English about a father's daily routine.

M Page reads aloud to the children from an English language storybook. They eagerly propound predictions, life-to-text connections, and interpretive remarks in Spanish that are translated into English at the asking of monolingual English-speaking students.

In light of the uncertainty among U educators regarding optimal instructional approaches for Spanish speakers and of Latina/o children, apartment 110 stands out as a classroom in which many of the native Spanish-speaking Latina/o observers successfully took up literacy in brace languages (Manyak, 2000). As illustrated by the agency of the preceding collage of images, in play 110 the children's broad linguistic repertoires functioned as resources for their participation in the class's literacy activities and thus for their acquisition of reading and writing. Following Gutierrez and her colleagues (Gutierrez, Baquedano-Lopez, & Tejeda, 1999; Gutierrez, Baquedano-L6pez, Alvarez, & Chiu, 1999) I have utilized the erect of hybrid literacy practices to conceptualize the blending of Spanish and English, place of abode and school registers, and "formal" and "informal" knowledge that characterized these activities (Manyak, 20002001) Like Gutierrez, et al. (1999) I assert that "hybrid literacy practices are not simply code-switching as the alternation between brace language codes," but rather "a systematic, strategic, affiliative, and sensemaking process" (p 88) undertaken by way of participants in linguistically and culturally diverse learning environments. However, in contrast to the cases discussed on Gutierrez et al., the hybrid literacy practices of apartment 110 constituted the core of the literacy curriculum for an entire class of native Spanish-speaking scholars In addition, the practices I observ in latitude 110 occurred during the first year of implementation of Proposition 227 the California initiative that effectively eliminated many of the state's bilingual education programs. These brace factors give particular significance to the emerging see the verb and effects of the hybrid literacy practices in this classroom.

In this paper I focus expressly onward the consequences of hybrid literacy practices for the language and literacy unravelling of the children in range 110. In doing so, I solicit to give greater depth to the notion of hybridity and thus to present it a more adequate theoretical tool for analyzing culturally and linguistically diverse classrooms. In the following section, I establish a framework for understanding the data from swing 110 by discussing some of the uses and critiques of the set up of hybridity within literary and cultural studies and considering to what extent these perspectives contribute to its use as a len for examining classroom practices.

While the conception of hybridity has a lengthy history within cultural and literary studies (see Young, 1995 for a discussion of the evolution of theories of hybridity), I am interested in its use as an analytic tool for understanding classroom practices. Thus, I attribute selectively to the scholarly treatment that hybridity has received outside of education, drawing upon those discussions that I find helpful in furthering its use for understanding classrooms as entangled social spaces. As befits a boundary that at its basic horizontal connotes heterogeneity and mixture, theorizing in succession hybridity has produced a disputeed conceptual terrain. In this brief account, I emphasize the ambivalence of hybridity as a theoretical fabricate juxtaposing contrasting views on the notion and considering the different disturbs that these views raise in regard to classroom practice.