The home–school connection, the development of Spanish repertoires, and the school adaptation process in Latino children: a dynamic ecological understanding

1 Introduction

The vast majority of Latino children in the United States are socialized in Spanish by their families (Pew Research Center 2013), even when this trend declines as their immigrant connections become distant (López et al. 2018). Latino children form affective bonds in the language (Suárez-Orozco and Suárez-Orozco 2001; Vélez-Ibáñez 1996) and learn how to become linguistically and culturally competent members of their communities (He 2011; Ochs and Schieffelin 2011). Spanish is a significant part of their ethnolinguistic identity, central to building their sense of belonging and key to strong developmental processes (Marks et al. 2013). Nevertheless, research shows that once Latino children enter school, they need to learn new socialization patterns in English to integrate into the social life of the school and learn academic content (Portes and Rumbaut 2001; Rumbaut and Massey 2013). Spanish use tends to weaken at that point, with significant affective and mental health consequences for children as some lose their primary means of communication with and connections to family members and community (Suárez-Orozco and Suárez-Orozco 2001).

The transition from home to school is a milestone for any child, but it is particularly important for immigrant Spanish-speaking children (García-Sellers 1996; Paulick et al. 2021; Suárez-Orozco et al. 2015) since the new English-speaking environment imposes significant linguistic and cultural discontinuities (Baquedano-López and Mangual Figueroa 2011; Suárez-Orozco et al. 2015). Therefore, language continuity between home and school has been considered a key factor for immigrant children to succeed in these transitions and their overall school adaptation process. Bilingual programs aim to provide Latino children with such continuity and access to Spanish academic content (Valentino and Reardon 2015).

Nonetheless, immigrant children’s success or failure to transition, adapt, and succeed at school is not determined solely by language continuity or the language the child speaks at home (Brizuela and García-Sellers 1999; García-Sellers 1996). Research has shown that many other factors come into play, such as parents’ levels of education, immigrant status, expectations and beliefs, parental involvement and disposition, socioeconomic status, and peer pressure (Akçinar 2013; García-Sellers 1996).

This consideration has a twofold implication for young Latino children: on the one hand, from a developmental and educational standpoint, support for young Latinos transitioning from home to school should be understood beyond the use of Spanish; on the other hand, from a linguistic perspective, although we know that many variables influence language development and maintenance – number of speakers, language vitality, social prestige, affinity to the native country, degree of family connections and identification, power relations, among others (He 2011) – in this paper, we argue that Spanish use and development in children cannot be fully understood if we consider it as an individual ability instead of as an intrinsic component of broader dynamic socialization, emotional, and academic processes – of which English is also a part – and in which parents and teachers participate.

Therefore, if we want to understand and support Latino children’s use of their Spanish repertoires at critical developmental and linguistic moments, such as the transition from home to school, we need to approach language development from an interdisciplinary and ecological perspective that allows us to identify the circumstances and mechanisms that foster or hinder Spanish use at the micro and the meso^[1] levels implicated in such transition (García-Sellers 1996; Marks et al. 2013; Suárez-Orozco et al. 2015). Ensuring a good transition between home and school, including Spanish, is particularly important for the socio-emotional well-being, identity development, and academic future of young Latino children, identified as the most underserved group in the United States (Gándara and Mordechay 2017; García and Jensen 2009). Research has shown that children who better adapt to school during their early ages have higher academic achievement, higher self-esteem, form better peer relations, and are less likely to drop out of school (Akçinar 2013; Haynes et al. 2003; Reynolds 1989).

Drawing from interdisciplinary (ethnographic, sociolinguistic, developmental psychology) and ecological perspectives (Bronfenbrenner 1979; García-Sellers 1996; Marks et al. 2013; Super and Harkness 1986), this paper presents the analysis of a one-year longitudinal study of four Latino children who were starting school at a transitional bilingual kindergarten in the Boston area, and participated in the Home–School Connection Program (García-Sellers 1996) that partnered with the public school where the bilingual program was housed. Each case study illustrates examples of ecologies in which each child followed different paths in their adaptation process, use of Spanish, learning English, and academic performance. Aware of the immense variability that bilingual development entails (Escobar and Tamis-LeMonda 2017), the goal of the analysis is to identify trends that integrate information from the individual, the micro, and the most levels to provide us with an understanding of children’s Spanish use in organic relationships with other speakers and as part of broader socialization contexts and processes (García and Alonso 2021: 10).

In doing so, we aim to contribute to research and policy that supports Latino children in early education (Escobar and Tamis-LeMonda 2017: 90) in two main ways: first, following recent research calls (i.e. Marks et al. 2013; Paulick et al. 2021) by highlighting the importance of making mesosystems – in particular the relations and transactions between parents and teachers – sites of further research and program design to support Latino bilingual children; and second, by underscoring that, as Macías (2014) and Otheguy (2021) propose, the future of the Spanish language has to be thought of in terms of the future of its speakers. It is only by building solid ecologies that strengthen parent–teacher connections, provide access to bilingual programs and support young Latinos and youths’ overall well-being that the Spanish language will continue to be used in future generations.

2 Language, ecological transitions, and the school adaptation process

Pioneers of the language socialization field, Ochs and Schieffelin (2011: 1) state that “Language is a fundamental medium in children’s development of social and cultural knowledge and sensibilities”. Children develop their linguistic repertoires within meaningful interactions with significant others (Halliday 1975), learning a broad range of linguistic affordances and socialization practices that they can take ownership of as members of their communities. Such interactions extend to several settings – home and school are among the most important.

In monolingual environments, families and schools tend to share the linguistic repertoire, sociocultural values, and expectations (García-Sellers 1996). The ecological transition between home and school – understood as a change in the child’s position within her environment as the result of a change in setting, role, or both (for example, becoming a kindergartener) (Bronfenbrenner 1979: 26) – has a strong level of linguistic and cultural continuity that sets the basis for children to be more likely to have a successful adaptation process, leading to more stable conditions for academic achievement and success. Things are different in multilingual and multicultural environments where families and schools do not share language and socio-cultural values. Children must make significant, if not monumental, efforts to build a sense of belonging and maintain their ethnolinguistic identity (Silverstein 2003) as they juggle the pressures of assimilating into the mainstream through English while trying also to maintain their home culture and language (Baquedano-López and Mangual Figueroa 2011; Parra 2016; Suárez-Orozco and Suárez-Orozco 2001).

Suárez-Orozco and Suárez-Orozco (2001) have proposed three patterns or styles of adaptation that children of immigration may follow as they transition into school and English-speaking environments: (1) embrace total assimilation and identification with American culture; (2) develop a new ethnic identity that selects aspects of both cultures; (3) develop an “adversarial” identity in their struggle to adapt to the mainstream society, increasing the stakes for dropping out of the school system. Another dynamic perspective on school adaptation is also offered by García-Sellers (1996). Based on systemic and ecological perspectives and providing an alternative approach of acculturation and academic achievement to explain school adaptation, García-Sellers (1996) conceptualizes the optimal school adaptation process as a multiway accommodation process by the parties involved – child, parents, and teachers – rather than a one-way acculturation process by the individual child. Thus, for García-Sellers (1996), children’s adaptation to school varies according to their abilities along with the kind of networks of support parents and teachers can build around them. In this model, academic and social success is considered a triangular enterprise between parents, children, and teachers (Brizuela and García-Sellers 1999; García-Sellers 1996; Parra Velasco and García-Sellers 2005).

The model is dynamic in that it proposes four general patterns of adaptation through which an immigrant child can move over the school year: non-adapted (the child remains under the influence of family culture and language); transferred (the child makes the transition to school but the effort entails rejecting their family’s culture and language); adapted (the child learns both languages and navigates both environments’ values and norms), and adapted with support (where parents and teachers work together to build continuity between home and school). Non-adapted and transferred patterns present more internal and external conflicts that the child tends to deal with alone. The adapted pattern can be a sign of a child’s independence and ability to navigate the demands of different environments by themself. The adapted with support pattern brings the most benefits to children as parents and teachers come together to build common ground for the child’s development.

Bronfenbrenner (1979: 6) proposed that the effective functioning of settings as contexts for development depends on the existence and nature of social interconnections with and between other settings and whether their members embark on joint participation, communication, and search for information about the other. That is why children’s adaptation processes and overall development, including linguistic growth and academic achievement, benefit from strong connections between parents and teachers where they accommodate each other and build a support network for the child through continuity, common goals, and communication about how to achieve them (Brizuela and García-Sellers 1999; Shapiro and García-Sellers 2003).

As language is the most salient difference between immigrant homes and schools, the tendency is to assume that if parents, children, and teachers share the same language, good transitions and school success are guaranteed. Nevertheless, for some authors (Brizuela and García-Sellers 1999: 346), “focusing on the language discontinuities merely in terms of school success reflects a narrowness in the understanding of children’s adaptation to school and an attention to only one factor that could possibly affect this process”. At the same time, from a language development perspective, analyzing language development in a single setting (home or school) or decontextualizing it from the complex socialization processes it is part of, such as transitions and school adaptation, narrows our perspective and understanding of how children’s Spanish repertoires unfold (or not) along the social and academic demands in the dominant language and between settings.

In what follows, I will briefly describe the home–school connection program that served the four children who are the focus of this article. I will then describe and compare these cases to illustrate four patterns of the interplay between the school adaptation process, Spanish development, English learning, and academic performance.

3 The home–school connection program

The Home–School Connection Program (H-SCP, Elliot-Pearson Department of Child Development, Tufts University)^[2] served the immigrant Latino community that attended a transitional bilingual program in the Boston Metropolitan area. Based on García-Sellers’ model of school adaptation (1996), the H-SCP had three main goals: first, to facilitate children’s transition from home to kindergarten; second, to strengthen communication between parents and teachers through common goals; and third, to support children’s academic success.

4 Case studies

Santos was a quiet, shy, and healthy five-year-old boy. He was born in the United States, but soon after, his parents, Elisa and Raúl, went back to El Salvador for three years. They returned to the United States with no plans to return to El Salvador. Elisa attended elementary school in El Salvador until second grade, and Raúl had no formal education. They both had jobs that required no literacy in Spanish or English. Elisa said they were reasonably satisfied with their lives in the United States. They shared their household with extended family and communicated in Spanish. Elisa expected Santos to learn English soon and speak both languages. However, Elisa said that Santos was “too shy to speak English at the time”. She expected Santos to go to college and become “somebody”. Santos and the mediator interacted in Spanish while doing several activities to assess school readiness.

Krissia was a healthy, active, and talkative five-year-old girl who was prone to bad colds and ear infections. She was born in the United States and lived with her mother, Norma, from Honduras, her father, Roberto, from El Salvador, and her 10-year-old sister. Norma finished middle school in Honduras and worked as a paraprofessional at an elementary school. When she moved to the United States, she completed her GED and opened a daycare center in the basement of their home (the family owned the house). Roberto worked in landscaping. Norma reported being very satisfied with their lives and was planning to stay in the United States. Both Norma and Roberto spoke English; however, they spoke Spanish to their children. The children spoke Spanish to the adults and both Spanish and English to each other. Krissia’s mother expected her children to speak Spanish when they grew up and had high academic expectations for her (i.e. attend college and become independent). Krissia and the mediator interacted in Spanish.

Leonard was a healthy, quiet six-year-old boy. He was born in Peru and lived with his mother, Raquel, his father, Leonardo, his sister Kelly (10), and a baby brother. They lived in one room within a house with five other families. Despite being college-educated, Raquel and Leonardo had to leave Peru for economic reasons. They came to the United States first, leaving behind their two children with their grandmother and an aunt. A year later, they brought both children to the United States, but Leonard and Kelly were very attached to their relatives and did not want to leave Peru. Once in the United States, they first arrived in California. Subsequently, the family moved three times (coast to coast) in over a year and a half, which was very difficult for the children, especially Leonard. Raquel said they were satisfied with their lives and were looking forward to moving to a larger place. Raquel and her husband and other adults in the household spoke Spanish to their children, and the children spoke English among themselves. When asked about expectations for Leonard’s future, Raquel said: “Whatever he wants to be, I will support him”. The mediator and Leonard interacted in Spanish.

Bryan was an active and healthy six-year-old boy. Both his mother, Lilian, and his father, Carlos, were from Honduras, where Bryan was also born. Bryan arrived in the United States when he was two years old. Bryan also had a one-year-old brother. Lilian had a bachelor’s degree in accounting but never worked, and Carlos finished high school and enrolled in the navy in Honduras. Carlos worked in a lab making special equipment, and Lilian stayed home to take care of the baby. Since their arrival in the United States, they have lived with relatives. Overall, they were satisfied with their lives in the United States. The adults spoke Spanish to their children, but Lilian said the children used more English. Speaking Spanish and English at home was not a problem for her. She expected Bryan to continue speaking Spanish, and she wanted Bryan to go to college. The mediator and Bryan spoke in Spanish, but Lilian encouraged Bryan to answer the mediator’s questions in English if he needed to.

To summarize, all mothers were satisfied with their lives in the United States. All four were socializing their children in Spanish. Three of them mentioned having college expectations for their children. Leonard’s mother was less specific but supportive. At the same time, their home ecologies were different in housing situation, parental occupation, and language usage: Santos was the only one living in a “Spanish only” household. Krissia, Leonard, and Bryan were already using English with older siblings, cousins, and other relatives. Their mothers were not concerned about it and still expected their children to maintain Spanish while learning English.

5 Discussion

Analyzing the four cases we presented allows us to identify some trends that can shed some light on the dynamism of the home–school mesosystem and the factors behind the growth of the children’s Spanish and English repertoires within the broader process of school adaptation (cf. Table 2).

The child that was able to transition most successfully from home to school, maintain and strengthen his Spanish repertoire while also learning English, and had the strongest academic performance with no concerns for the following academic year was Santos. His household was primarily Spanish-speaking. His teacher was also a Spanish speaker, and his mother and teacher connected well and often throughout the school year. They had a relationship of trust and mutual respect (Paulick et al. 2021). Their perceptions of Santos’ language use and academic performance were aligned, and both were proud of his academic progress and growth in both languages. This home–school mesosystem provided Santos with the support he needed to grow on all fronts. Interestingly, of the four families analyzed here, Santos’ parents had the lowest formal education and socioeconomic resources, which shows that having parents with lower SES and education is not necessarily a predictor of school failure in children.

Krissia’s home was already bilingual by the time she started kindergarten. English was part of her daily life at home and her first schooling experience in the Head Start program. English was also present in Ms. Peterson’s classroom. Krissia’s knowledge of the two languages and her sociable and talkative personality interested her in translation, which could point to her awareness of the advantages of knowing Spanish and English equivalents (Otheguy 2020) to more easily engage with different interlocutors in different contexts. We could say that Krissia represented the adapted pattern; she seemed to have figured out how and when to use both languages to move easily between home and school environments. However, she was not navigating school challenges alone. Her mother strove to align with both of Krissia’s teachers in matters of discipline and academic concerns and had good communication, especially with Ms. Díaz, giving Krissia another level of support. The fact that her mother knew the first-grade teacher and was planning to talk to her was essential to building continuity between kindergarten and first grade.

Leonard and Bryan had more difficulty with transitions and school adaptation. Although for different reasons, both were situated in the non-adapted pattern at the beginning of the year. Even when English was already part of their daily lives – something that could have helped their transitions to school – the transition brought significant levels of anxiety to both boys: for Leonard, due to challenging life circumstances and continuous transitions and changes at home, and for Bryan due to the challenges of being in a classroom where he struggled with the language. Both needed evaluations and extra support from school and their teachers and mothers. Their mothers struggled to connect with their children’s teachers, and Leonard’s was disappointed with the bilingual program. Moreover, it is important to point out that in Leonard’s case, a challenge was the misalignment of the mother’s, teacher’s, and mediator’s perceptions of the boy’s language use and behavior. The role of the mediator was key in bringing all parties together to align such perceptions as much as possible and in identifying common goals for parents and teachers to support Leonard in the second part of the academic year. In Bryan’s case, the teacher’s comments in the interview with the mediator showed that she assumed that Bryan’s issues were home-related (according to her, his parents needed to set more limits at home), which created an uncomfortable and unproductive situation with the mother, not uncommon in multilingual settings where power dynamics play an important role (Ochs and Schieffelin 2011; Pavlenko and Blackledge 2004). In both cases, the mediator, parents, and teachers could come together to identify strategies to support the boys, and progress in adaptation was made. However, both teachers had concerns for the following year. We could say that the children identified at the beginning of the school year within the non-adapted pattern had more difficulty transitioning and had greater academic challenges throughout the year (García-Sellers 1996).

6 Final remarks and recommendations

The data presented in this chapter aim to offer an integrated perspective on Spanish use within the school adaptation process and along with English learning in four young Latino children transitioning into kindergarten. Such a perspective allowed us to identify possible trends and patterns that show that the ecology that supported Spanish growth, English learning, and academic success (Santo’s) had the following characteristics: a bilingual program was available in the community; there were stable and dignified living conditions for the child; the household was Spanish-speaking;^[9] parents believed in the benefits of bilingual education; the teacher was also Spanish-speaking from a Spanish-speaking country with cultural patterns of interaction similar to those known by the child; there was good, respectful, and continuous communication between mother and teacher; the expectations and perceptions the adults had of the child’s behavior were aligned; they valued, acknowledged, and praised the child’s language use, behavior, and academic accomplishments. The child was healthy and did not suffer from anxiety.

In Santo’s story of success, along with the case of Krissia and, to some extent, Leonard’s and Bryan’s, after all, parents and teachers came together to support the children, despite their initial struggles. However, Latino children’s stories of success continuously hang on a delicate balance, prone to become a story of ongoing academic, linguistic, and emotional struggle, given the socio-economic and educational challenges that most Latino families face in this country. Children’s ecologies portrayed in this work – particularly Santos’ – are the exception instead of the rule. First, even before the pandemic, around two-thirds (62%) of Latino children in the United States lived in or near poverty (Wildsmith et al. 2016). The Covid-19 pandemic has had, as Vargas and Sanchez (2020) state, a devastating impact on the economic well-being of Latino families, putting their well-being, education, and lives at constant risk. Given the demands of working long hours or several jobs, many parents struggle to find the time to support their children at home or to connect with teachers and be involved in school activities.

Second, Latino households are becoming bilingual (López et al. 2018). As we saw in the data, in three out of four families, English was already part of children’s life (older siblings and cousins were important players in this regard); by the end of the school year, Santos also mentioned he was speaking English with one of his uncles. Latino communities are changing their Spanish repertoires through emergent uses derived from their use of English and their interactions with other Spanish speakers, even if in uneven patterns (Moreno-Fernandez 2018) and even when they are not fully socialized (Otheguy 2020). As Ochs and Schieffelin (2011: 14) point out, “children’s linguistic and cultural production is influenced by [community linguistic] transformation, and children themselves contribute to this transformation”. This linguistic dynamism is already raising essential questions about the intergenerational continuity of Spanish and its meaning for young Latino identities (Valdés 2015).

This linguistic richness could be leveraged through accessible, equitable, and high-quality bilingual programs. Such programs could be the basis for engaging Latino students of all ages with creative ways of acquiring Spanish literacy skills and accessing grade-level content (López 2012; Valentino and Reardon 2015). But this would require addressing the lack of programs and professional development to make this happen. Bilingual teachers need continuous opportunities and new frameworks to question the old theoretical “apparatus” based on structural and monoglossic perspectives of bilingualism (García 2014; García and Alonso 2021; Valdés 2022). They need support in embracing new pedagogies, such as translanguaging (García and Li 2014; Prada 2021),^[10] critical pedagogy, and multiliteracies that are proven effective in working with bilingual children and youth at the linguistic and academic level (i.e. Carreira 2007; Parra Velasco 2021). Maybe under such new frameworks, the Leonards in our schools would be allowed to be perceived as translanguaging users instead of being assessed through monolingual standards and perceived as having difficulty with their expressive language. With more bilingual after-school opportunities, many families like Bryans’ may feel confident and motivated to enroll their children in these activities to strengthen and expand their Spanish repertoire without compromising their child’s English learning process.

Third, the analysis showed that Latino/bilingual teachers are a critical factor in the success of Latino children. Miss Díaz made a difference for Santos, Leonard, and Krissia. Therefore, addressing the massive shortage of [Latino] bilingual teachers (Gándara and Mordechay 2017) is imperative. The availability of Latino teachers is essential for girls like Krissia, as Gándara et al. (2013) found that Latinas are more likely to go to college if they have a Latino/a teacher as a role model. Moreover, as Paulick et al. (2021: 307) propose, it is imperative to support teachers in regular English programs – like Bryan’s teacher – to broaden their responsibility focus and become culturally competent individuals and asset-framed pedagogues, leaving aside deficient and biased beliefs about Latino families.

In sum, programs to support Latino families from an ecological perspective is an urgent need as more families of immigrant backgrounds rely on preschools^[11] (Karoly and Gonzalez 2011) and the Latino population increases in places where there is little infrastructure to support their educational needs (Gándara and Mordechay 2017). In particular, Nieto and Yoshikawa (2013) and Paulick et al. (2021) propose that programs for Latino families – or any family with immigrant background for that matter – should be developed at the mesosystemic level, like the H-SCP, in order to target the potential of the interactions between proximal settings.^[12] Ideally, such integral programs would include: some component or form of bilingual education with a strong presence of Latino educators; access to continuous professional development for bilingual teachers and professional development for main-stream teachers working with Latino families (or families of any immigrant background); and bilingual mediators or family liaisons that facilitate parental school engagement opportunities.

Research has shown that strong connections with Spanish leads to positive ethnic bilingual identities in Latino children that, in turn, foster academic achievement (Brown and Chu 2012; García-Sellers 1996; Marks et al. 2013) including high school completion (Carreira 2007) and college enrollment (Prada and Pascual y Cabo 2022). At the same time, a strong ethnic identity is also a key factor in the continued home language development (Lee 2002, cf. He 2011) that, in turn, will ensure transgenerational communication and the strengthening of the ties Latino children develop with their communities of origin and those in the U.S. Therefore, fostering ecologies that support Spanish use, beginning with the youngest members, can only bring positive outcomes.