Middle-Class English Speakers in a Two-Way Immersion Bilingual Classroom: "Everybody Should Be Listening to Jonathan Right Now ... "

Two-way bilingual immersion education, offered in a fast-growing number of primary schools in the United States, provides primary language maintenance to minority language speakers while Simultaneously offering an enrichment "foreign" language immersion experience to English-speaking children in the same classroom, generally with the same teacher. This fusion of two different groups of children, two different sets of expectations, is controversial: Is it possible to accomplish both goals at once, or will teacher and program inevitably end up serving the needs of dominant English-speaking children first? The equation is further complicated when the English speakers in a program come from mainly highly educated middle-class families, and the Spanish speakers come from mainly working-class immigrant families, as is the case in many of these programs. Drawing on audio and video data from a yearlong Study in a second-grade two-way classroom that shares this class gap between language groups, and using a methodology that fuses ethnography and discourse analysis, this article explores the ways English-speaking children can impact classroom conversational dynamics.