Orellana, M. (2001). The work kids do: Mexican and Central American immigrant children’s contributions to households and schools in California. Harvard Educational Review, 71(3), 366-390.
At the heart of this article is the author’s concern with how children, in particular (im)migrant children, have been variously constructed in public discourse as burdens on society. The author, who now goes by Marjorie Elaine, notes that even outside of this framing, children have, since the Progressive Era, been seen as simply ‘adults-in-the-making’ who must be cared for. Through ethnographic research into the lives of young people attending one of Los Angeles’s largest elementary schools in a neighborhood where many Central American families had migrated (the same school where the author worked as a bilingual teacher from 1983-93), Marjorie Elaine attends to how young people act as social agents in their own lives and contribute to the well-being of both their families and their communities. In this sense, kids are not just burdens on the state – they actively shape their social environments in significant ways through the work they do.
In this article, there are some important findings that can help teachers understand more about who their students are and how they live their lives. Marjorie Elaine found that young people were often doing lots of tasks to support household maintenance, including cleaning, laundry, and caring for siblings. Some were also doing paid work at food stalls and in stores, or doing piecework. Importantly, kids helped translate from Spanish to English to support the functioning of their homes and other parts of their community. For example, one girl in the study, Adalia, age 12 explained that she translated for anyone who needed it:
“I translate for whoever wants, for teachers, for my father, my mother, sometimes for the police. It’s that if they go over there in the house, because some gangsters, they always are in the house, and they were looking for them one day, and they enter the house and the manager didn’t know how to talk with them, so I said to him that if he wanted to say something, and I translate to the police.”
Adalia’s words suggest that children are more than just vessels for educational facts to be poured into. They are already aware of many social needs in their environment, and they contribute in various skilled ways to help fulfill these needs. Schools and the larger society can help support kids by understanding and validating this work and seeing young people as integral actors in their communities.
Orellana, M., Reynolds, J., Dorner, L., & Meza, M. (2003). In other words: Translating or “para‐phrasing” as a family literacy practice in immigrant households. Reading Research Quarterly, 38(1), 12-34.
This article examines how the children of U.S. immigrants use their knowledge of English to read/speak for their families. There is not only one word that captures what children are doing at home for — and often times with — their families. People use words like: paraphrasing, language brokering, translating, and interpreting. Such work involves not only the literal translation of documents like mail, formal government papers, medical instructions, and other written texts, but also navigating cultural and linguistic differences between speakers from different backgrounds.
Language brokering is a ubiquitous, commonplace experience in immigrant communities, even if it’s not fully recognized by the larger world. This study explored how child language brokers navigated negotiations particularly with their family members. Some of the documents they translated carried great weight, demanding a translation that was as close to the “original” as possible. Others could be summarized and explained, in more general ways. Family members often worked together, leveraging their knowledge and experience (in the two languages and in the world) to make sense of the texts and respond to them.
Data for this study came from two communities that were part of a larger ethnographic project, developed in stages over five years. One community was located on the northwest side of Chicago and composed mostly of immigrants from Mexico and Poland. The second was a mixed-ethnic, mixed-income urban and suburban community near Chicago that was home to a growing number of immigrants from Mexico. Data included field notes of participant observations in homes and classrooms, transcripts of audio-recorded live translations, transcripts of interviews with 66 children (ages 10-14) and several adults, and a survey of 280 fifth and sixth graders regarding language, preferences, translating experiences, and daily life literacy practices. Other data included reenactments of translation situations (done during interviews and in “junior ethnographer” meetings when youth came together to discuss their experiences), journal entries written by children recounting translation experiences, transcripts of interviews with teachers and administrators, literacy assessments and standardized test scores from youth participants, along with other school record data and work samples.
Through their analyses, the authors highlight how language brokers develop literacy skills through their brokering experiences. In their daily lives, children are exposed to a variety of genres, domains, and forms of written texts that they actively interpret. They discuss how schools could build on this learning, possibly by simply recognizing and talking about what children do, and also including interpreting activities – like interpreting textbook instructions – during lessons in class. These kinds of activities could help U.S. schools and teachers re-organize, value students’ languages and experiences, and work against a typical, systemic “deficit” lens –– that is, seeing children as “limited” in English rather than as emerging multilinguals and language brokers. (See more ideas for incorporating language brokering into classrooms on our pages for teachers and teaching.)
Guan, S., Greenfield, P., & Orellana, M. (2014). Translating into understanding: Language brokering and prosocial development in emerging adults from immigrant families. Journal of Adolescent Research, 29(3), 331-355.
This article explores how language brokering contributes to the prosocial development of adolescent youth, recasting it as a skillful, helpful developmental practice rather than a burden. It is based on data collected with young college students who had extensive experiences as language brokers while growing up.
The research team measured the capacity of young adult language brokers to take on the perspectives of others – a prosocial skill they call “transcultural perspective taking.” They found that this capacity was correlated with the extent of their language brokering experiences. In other words, language brokering seemed to have helped them develop the capacity to see and understand people with different cultural experiences than their own. This is an important pro-social skill that could be recognized, celebrated, and expanded in school. Based on their analyses, the authors offer important lessons for educators, summarized in our pages for teachers and teaching.