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Shifting in the Zone: Latina/o Child

Language Brokers and the Co-construction

of Knowledge

H. Julia EksnerMarjorie Faulstich Orellana

Abstract In this article we offer a new look at the dynamic nature of teaching and learning as we investigate

everyday language-brokering events in immigrant families. We consider how children and adult interlocutors

collaborate in the construction of knowledge and examine language-brokering activities as socially situated

learning tasks that take place in dynamic zones of proximal development in which knowledge and authorityare dynamically reassigned among participants. We present a mixed-method analysis of everyday cognition

entailed in language brokering engaged in by three children from Mexican families living in the Midwestern

United States. [Zone of Proximal Development, language brokering, bilingualism, childhood]

In this article we offer a new look at the dynamic nature of teaching and learning through an

investigation of everyday translating and interpreting in immigrant families. This practice,

which has variously been called language brokering (Tse 1995; V asquez et al. 1994), family

interpreting (Valdes 2002), natural translation (Harris 1976), culture brokering (Trickettand Jones 2007) and para-phrasing (Orellana et al. 2003b) is examined as socially situated

learning tasks that take place in dynamic zones of proximal development.1

Our analyses of how children and adults engage together in these events illustrate how

knowledge and authority are shared and negotiated among participants and how teaching

and learning in everyday contexts contradict common assumptions about zones of proximal

development that presume authority is primarily vested in age status. The case of child lan-

guage brokers who occupy shifting positions of authority and power during brokering events

exemplifies that learnerteacher and childadult roles during development are not as staticas often supposed. Further, we show how that learning is supported by contextual supports

including the tools and strategies that participants deploy. In this article we then have two

main concerns: to conceptualize language brokering through theories of socially situated

and distributed cognition, and to contribute a critical elaboration of current developmental

understandings of the positions taken up by adults and children in everyday cognition.

In the following we will present both qualitative and quantitative data on how children

as language brokers engage in complex cognitive routines, employing metacognitive tools

and drawing on distributed sources of knowledge to construct meaning across languages.

ETHOS, Vol. 40, Issue 2, pp. 196220, ISSN 0091-2131 online ISSN 1548-1352. C2012 by the American AnthropologicalAssociation. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1352.2012.01246.x

Journal of the Society for

Psychological Anthropology


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CHILD LANGUAGE BROKERS AND KNOWLEDGE CONSTRUCTION 197

Further, these data provide initial insight into how children use cognitive, cultural, social,

and linguistic strategies in their efforts to translate text and spoken language.

Child Language Brokering: More Than a Bilingual Language Practice

The various labels that have been used to name this practice illuminate its complexities, as

do the attempts to define the practice. Lucy Tse was one of the first to use the term language

brokering, which she defined as interpretation and translation between linguistically and

culturally different parties. She noted that language brokers should be differentiated from

interpreters and translators because they influence the messages they convey and may act

as a decision maker for one or both parties (Tse 1995:180). Trickett and Jones (2007)

expanded the construct to include cultural brokering as embedded in such transactions andthus situating language work within its ecological context (Trickett et al. 2010). Hall and

Guery (2010) emphasize the literacy brokering that is similarly embedded in such tasks,

outlining a constellation of brokering activities that vary as a function of the abilities of the

speakers to read, write, speak and sign a given language.

Through ethnographic work in several immigrant communities over more than a decade

we documented a myriad of ways in which the children of immigrants use their knowledge

of two languages to speak, read, write, listen as they do things for (and with) their families,

and we proffer this as our own definition of brokering practices (see, e.g., Orellana 2009;Orellana et al. 2003b). In short, what we are studying is not a singular practice at all, but a

set of ways in which children use their linguistic and cultural skills to do things in the social

world.

Child language brokering is embedded in the everyday routines of immigrant communities.

Almost all first- and second-generation children and youths engage in at least some language

brokering activities for their parents and other relatives, and many do so with regularity

(Dorner et al. 2007). These are language and literacy practices involving the command of

two languages as well as pragmatic and social skills. As we have noted, bilingual children ofimmigrants use their knowledge of at least two languages and cultures to assist their families

in a wide range of ways. They read and decipher a variety of written texts, including medical

and insurance information, sales receipts, letters, news articles, advertising, applications,

report cards, signs, and instructional manuals. They make and answer phone calls, and

interpret movies, television shows, and oral texts. They interpret during interactions between

family members and doctors, dentists, teachers, lawyers, government officials, and many

other people.

Despite its ubiquity in immigrant communities, language brokering has only recently beendiscovered as a phenomenon worthy of study. The focus of early research investigating

language brokering was on presumed negative effects of this practice, such as increased

levels of stress (Buriel et al. 1998; Parke and Buriel 2006; Weisskirch and Alva 2002) and

detrimental inversions of proper relationship boundaries referred to as parentification or


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adultification (Minuchin 1974; Morales and Hanson 2005; Su arez-Orozco and Suarez-

Orozco 2001). This continues to be a focus of much discussion in the field (e.g., Bucaria

and Rossato 2010; Guske 2010; Weisskirch 2010), but more recent attention has gone to

understanding cognitive benefits as well as to revealing the complex linguistic and socialnegotiations that children use to support both family activities and livelihood (Cohen et

al. 1999; del Torto 2010; Diaz-Lazaro 2002; Dorner et al. 2007; Garca-Sanchez 2010;

Halgunseth 2003; Hall and Sham 2007; Meyer et al. 2010; Morales and Aguayo 2010;

Orellana 2001, 2009; Orellana et al. 2003a, 2003b; Shannon 1990; Umana-Taylor 2003;

Valdes 2002; Valenzuela 1999; Weisskirch 2005; Weisskirch and Alva 2002). Still, beyond

examining brokers own understandings of the strategies they employ (e.g., Bucaria and

Rossato 2010), the cognitive processes involved in brokering work have been little examined.

Studies of language brokering are based in a range of disciplines, including sociologicalstudies of how the practice takes shape in families and communities (Cohen et al. 1999; del

Torto 2010; Orellana et al. 2003a; Song 1999; Valenzuela 1999; Vasquez et al. 1994) and

psychological studies of its emotional and cognitive impact (Acoach and Webb 2004; Buriel

et al. 1998; Chao 2006; Diaz-Lazaro 2002; Mart nez et al. 2009; McQuillan and Tse 1995;

Parke and Buriel 2006; Tse 1995; Weisskirch 2005, 2007; Weisskirch and Alva 2002). Given

mutual influences among this set of expanding and diverse approaches, language brokering

is now addressed as simultaneously a social, cognitive, cultural, and linguistic phenomenon.

This includes a growing recognition that all language practices are social practices. Yet the

cognitive work involved in bilingualism, in general, and language brokering, in particular,is still frequently treated as an individual processsomething that happens inside individual

brains, divorced from the social context. This reductionistic view of language is one of the

assumptions that we challenge here.

Language Brokering as Situated and Distributed

The conceptualization of language brokering as an individualized cognitive skill may come

as no surprise, because this represents the dominant research paradigm for studying cog-nition in general. An implicit model underlying research concerned with translating is the

inputoutput model. Reddy (1993) refers to this as the conduit metaphor for translation.

Translating via this model is seen as a linear process, in which the translator hears or reads

information in the first language (input), proceeds to translate in his or her head (a process

in which the surrounding social world does not partake), and then passes the information in

the second language (output) through a spoken or written conduit to the other person who

takes in the ideas. Translating, in this view, is conceptualized as an activity comprising the

interpretation of the meaning of a text in one languagethe sourceand the production,

in another language, of a new, equivalent textthe target text, or translation.

Haviland (2003) calls this the verbatim theory of translation entailing the assumptions

that messages are passively received, rather than actively constructed and that equivalence

across language forms is possible. Crucially, the activity of translating in this theory happens


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within the translator, who then simply transmits the translation to a recipient2a person

who receives the product but has no part in its production. In this view, the text is also

treated as a mere object of the translation.

We argue that the actual phenomenon is more complex than can be accounted for by this

model, as research on situated and distributed cognition during the last 20 years suggests

(Brown et al. 1989; Chaiklin and Lave 1996; Hutchins 1995a,1995b; Rogoff and Lave 1984).

As this line of research shows, when people engage in cognitive tasks, they draw on a

variety of social supports and tools to help them, including the texts that structure the tasks.

Further, these tasks are often accomplished in collaboration with others. In the following we

will discuss how language brokering may be considered in terms of situated and distributed

cognitive processes. Language brokering involves multiple negotiations of meaning during

which the brokers make use of different kinds of mediational aids and strategies, and draw oninformation provided by coparticipants. As our research demonstrates, inputoutput models

of brokering are not supported by the empirical data from child language brokers.

Within families, language-brokering events are fundamentally social. We will show that

knowledge youths draw on during these events resides in the social context (outside of the

youths heads) and often is negotiated with their supposedly monolingual interlocutors,

particularly parents. This conceptualization draws on sociocultural theory (Cole 1996; En-

gestrom et al. 1999; Leontev 1981) that centers learning and cognition naturally in the

world and with others. According to this sociocultural theory, learning occurs through thecollaboration of a more competent person (usually presumed to be the adult or an older

child) with a less competent person, such as the child broker, to help the latter accomplish

tasks within his or her zone of proximal development (ZPD). Scaffolds, in this perspective,

are provided by the more accomplished individual. These scaffolds may include prompts,

clues, modeling, explanation, leading questions, discussion, joint participation, encourage-

ment, and control of the novices attentionactivities that help a child or a novice to solve

a problem, carry out a task or achieve a goal that would be beyond his or her unassisted

efforts (Barron et al. 1998). The apprentice grows skillful and appropriates knowledge

through a process of internalization. And within a Vygotskian paradigm, the concept ofinternalization is used to define the sociocultural origins of individual mental functioning. 3

In extension of this paradigm, our research advances the sociocultural framework through

analyses of child brokering tasks demonstrating that brokering events are jointlyconstructed

occasions in which children and interlocutors collaborate and mutually scaffold one another

by pooling various linguistic, cognitive, and social skills. This includes all of the scaffolds

noted above, which may be provided by the adult coparticipant; it includes as well the ways

parents help the child to work with the text to scaffold the childrens learning.

In the introduction we have discussed the ways in which child brokers are understood to

contribute their social efficacy to their communities through their linguistic and cultural

competence. In other work, we have highlighted childrens agency and the responsibilities


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that they take on in doing this work (Orellana 2009; Orellana et al. 2003a, 2003b). In this

article we want to focus mostly on the ways in which parents of child language brokers con-

tribute their knowledge of the social world, skills in the home language, emerging abilities

in English, and problem-solving skills to help their children accomplish meaning-making,transforming brokering events into activities during which learning and development hap-

pens. We also look at how the context supports the activities. As we will demonstrate for

the child brokers in this study, a close look at the data from brokering activities shows

that, rather than relying only on knowledge inside their heads, child brokers arrive at the

meaning of what they are brokering with the support of their interlocutors, and often with

the help of the very people for whom they are brokering. Although we do not focus on the

complementary process for parents here, we do introduce the possibility that the brokering

experience serves to scaffold parents acquisition of language and culture as well.

We suggest that the difference between a linear model and a view of brokering as co-

constructed is tied to framing of the unit of analysis. Situating our work in the sociohis-

torical tradition, we propose that a shift from studying the individual child to studying the

child-in-cultural-context will be efficacious for understanding the unfolding of language

brokering events. The shift in perspective from a focus on individuals to a focus on contex-

tual dynamics is mirrored historically in the difference between Piagetian and Vygotskian

approaches to cognition: while Piaget (1975) analyzed the interaction between children and

their environments (e.g., the internalization of motor actions associated with physical ob-

jects), for Vygotsky (1978) the individual and the environment are inseparable. Vygotskystheoretical innovation was to see individual cognition as mediated by social context in the

shape of interlocutors and tools in the environment (Wertsch 1991). From a Vygotskian per-

spective, the individual child is not an adequate unit of analysis when trying to understand the

moment-to-moment unfolding of immigrant family brokering (Granott 1998). Rather, we

need to consider interactions, interlocutors, and tools to view the child-in-context-in-activity

(Cole 1996; Engestrom et al. 1999; Leontev 1981).

Language Brokering as Dynamic Zone of Proximal Development

In Vygotskys conceptualization, and in most sociocultural research, there is an implicit

assumption that children emulate adults examples and gradually, through mimicry or trial

and error, develop the ability to do certain tasks without help or assistance. In other words,

adults are seen as the experts, and children are apprenticed into communities of practice that

adults have mastered. In popular conceptions of language brokering, as in much research

today, the assumption is that this is reversed. Now children are viewed as the experts, and

parents as the novices.

But in fact language brokering challenges the theoretical model of expertnovice relation-

ships in another way, pushing beyond a simple role reversal. As we will show, in language

brokering events, knowledge is located both within and between the brokering child and the

parentinterlocutor. Language brokers do not do all the work of meaning making while the


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people for whom they translate act as passive recipients. Language skills are not as clearly

distributed between active and passive participants as the traditional model of translation

presupposes. In contrast to the idealtypical model of a bilingually competent speaker bro-

kering for a monolingual speaker, in reality, all participants often have varying degrees ofproficiency in each language. Among Spanish speaking immigrants from Mexico a child lan-

guage broker is generally positioned as the expert in English, even while his or her English

skills are still under construction, and non-English-speaking adults often have greater En-

glish competency than is generally assumed. Parents also have adult speakers native ability

in the home language, while the child is still in the process of mastering that tongue, and

parents have life experience that creates a fund of contextual knowledge of how things work

that children have yet to build. The roles of expert (the one who provides knowledge and

has authority) and novice or learner flow back and forth between participants involved in

the brokering activity, and the respective domains of learning simultaneously vary as well(see also Paradise and Rogoff 2009). The ZPD, hence, does not consist of statically defined

participants, roles, and domains of knowledge, but is dynamically adjusted during the inter-

action over the task. Thus, in some ways, as more competent English speakers and perhaps

as more proficient in the ways of the familys second culture, children are the experts in these

activities, and they support their parents not just in accomplishing tasks that need doing,

but also in the acquisition of English skills. In this sense, we build on a growing body of

work that shows children taking the lead in family interactions and using their skills to teach

others (see, e.g., Gregory et al. 2004; Paradise and Rogoff 2009).

Yet children are novices in other ways. Parents support their children in managing brokering

tasks, and in further developing their skills in two vernaculars. Moreover, children and

parents mutually scaffold each others learning and understanding during these events and

together coparticipants advance their second and first language development, literacy skills,

and knowledge about the social world.

The Data: Three Cases

In this article, we present three cases of immigrant child language brokers engaged in

brokering activities with their parents at home. We will focus the first part of our exploration

on how child language brokers draw on social resources, such as distributed knowledge

to accomplish language-brokering tasks. Secondly, we consider how in this process the

situational zones of proximal development are dynamically reconstructed as parents and

children both provide authoritative knowledge and engage in learning.

We selected these cases from a larger study that involved 18 child-language brokers, involv-

ing observations of these youth in a variety of contexts including home, school, and otherpublic settings in which we collected data through interviews, audiotapes of live brokering

encounters, journal accounts of language brokering, and other means of tapping into youths

perspectives on their experiences. Fieldwork for this study was carried out by the second

author at Northwestern University where the study was based and incorporated a team


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of both bilingual (EnglishSpanish) and monolingual (English) undergraduate and gradu-

ate research assistants. Data gathering for this study required a long process of building

rapport with each family to be present, with audio recorders, for translation episodes as

they arose spontaneously at unpredictable moments. We were able to record more than80 live language-brokering episodes, but these were distributed unevenly across the 18

cases, and involved a range of settings including homes, stores, clinics, and schools. De-

tails of the ethnographic data gathering and its challenges are described in Orellana (2009,

2010).4

For the purpose of the present article, we concentrated on the three children for whom

we had the most extensive corpus of data, one that was built up over more than two years

of regular weekly contact with the families. We wanted to work with cases where we had

multiple examples of similar kinds of episodes, and in particular to focus on home languagebrokering episodes involving the child and his or her parent. We wanted to see language

brokering as it unfolded in established working relationships in safe, familiar contexts, rather

than how it was negotiated in diverse encounters in public space, where we would expect

more variability in the roles that adults might play.

The three youth on whom we focus may be considered active language brokers, using

criteria established in the larger study (see Dorner et al. 2007 for more details of the cat-

egorization process). That is, they each engaged in language brokering almost every day

for close family members, including tasks that might be considered hard, or nontriv-ial, such as filling out applications for credit. Each had begun doing this work when they

were very young, but had reached an age that allowed them to take on more serious and

more regular responsibilities (Valenzuela 1999).5 All three were the eldest in families who

had moved to the Midwestern United States from farming communities in Guanajuato,

Mexico. Living in a mostly Euro American and African American suburban community

in the Chicago area, where there are few public resources for Spanish speakers, the fam-

ilies depended on their children to act as language brokers in wide variety of everyday

contexts.

We begin with brief descriptions of the youth, using pseudonyms they selected for them-

selves: Mara, Estela, and Junior.

Mar a

Mara was nine years old when we first met her in 2000. Mara had been enrolled in bilingual

education classes through third grade, only recently transitioning to all English instruction.

Language brokering was one of many home responsibilities that Mara assumed as the oldestof three children, with two younger brothers. Both parents had limited English skills, so

they depended on Mara in a variety of situations. Some of the brokering events that Mara

reported on included brokering for her father when buying paint at Home Depot; for her

mother in helping her read and write English stories for her adult education classes; for both


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parents in making and answering phone calls, and brokering letters, report cards, and other

written information from school.

Estela

Estela was ten years old at the time we met her, and the oldest of three girls. Two years

later, another sister was born. Estela was considered la mano derecha (the right hand)

of the family (her parents words), with brokering as one of her primary responsibilities. We

watched Estela as she translated for her parents when they received a letter from the family

insurance company regarding a car crash; for her mother when she came to several parent

teacher conferences; and for her father when he attempted to rent a musical instrument at

a local music storejust a few of the many translation situations that Estela encountered in

her daily life. Estela also taped herself brokering a number of English stories as she read themto her younger sister. Estela never attended bilingual classes, but learned enough English in

Head Start preschool to begin kindergarten in the regular track of a mostly Euro American

mainstream U.S. school that serves many high-income suburban families.

Junior

Junior was 11 years old when he joined our project. Junior started school in a bilingual

program, and then transferred into a monolingual English program in fifth grade, a change

he did not like. As the oldest of three children, Junior helped with a variety of languagebrokering tasks, much like the ones that Estela and Mara assumed. We watched him translate

school letters and work with teachers and parents during parentteacher conferences. He

also reported a variety of other everyday language brokering tasks.

In analyzing language brokering for these three children, we draw on field notes based on

observations in each of the three homes, transcripts of interviews with the children and

their parents, and transcripts of nine language brokering activities occurring at home (three

involving each of the three youths). All of these events involved the children working with a

parent to translate naturally occurring speech as well as written text.

For each of the youths our larger data corpus includes brokering events that took place

outside of the home with other interlocutors, not just their parents, such as parentteacher

conferences at school. We chose not to include these events in our analyses because power

relations characterizing these events would vary, especially in relation to teachers who are

received as authority figures by many parents. As we know from our ethnographic research,

language brokering involves a wide range of tasks, set in different relationships and contexts.

We selected from the larger data corpus a set of brokering events that were similar enough

to examine patterns of childadult interaction.

The objective of the current data analysis was to examine whether and how children relied

on distributed and situated knowledge during language brokering events. Future analyses

will build on these findings and explore particular patterns that may occur across different


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contexts and tasks. We employed a theory-driven coding scheme based in situated cognition

(Brown et al. 1989; Lave et al. 1984; Lave and Wenger 1991; Rogoff 1998; Saxe 1991) and

distributed cognition (Hutchins 1995a, 1995b; Moll et al. 1993), as well as participation

frameworks (Erickson and Mohatt 1982; Goffman 1967; Gumperz and Hymes 1964).6

We use the term brokering eventto refer to the overarching task based setting in which youth

performed as language brokers, such as brokering a letter, a phone call, or at a parentteacher

conference. Each such brokering event was a unit of analysis used for coding, and it was

further refined by the unit in which the child or interlocutor broke up the taskat the word,

sentence, paragraph, or discursive level, as well as by what was subsequently involved in

negotiating the meaning of this unit and helping the listener to understand. We consider

this segmental unit of meaning making a brokering episode. A brokering episode might

involve one or more turns of talk, as the child and parent worked to make meaning of asegment of the text. The brokering episodes represent a wide variety of kinds of source data

(both relatively easy and relatively more difficult speech or text), and as we will see, the youth

chunked these texts in different ways when they translated them. Thus, the unit of analysis

coded as episode ranged from one line to 1.5 pages of transcribed speech.

Analytical Procedures

A brokering event consists of many such episodes in which meaning is negotiated. For

instance, the following two examples represent translation tasks that Est ela and Mara re-spectively were faced with during language brokering events. In the first case, a salesman

explained the store credit procedure for long stretches of time expecting Est ela to translate

along for her father. Est ela inserted her translation as it was possible into the ongoing dis-

course. In contrast, Mara alternately read out in English and then translated a letter from

the school to her mother. She broke up the original text into single sentences to translate,

thereby predefining relatively small brokering episodes.

Example 1

Salesman: Um, and its. . . You fill this out

Estela: Dice que = He says=

Salesman: =And I call it in . . . and then uh, we can pay them in

three months. Thats how some of the instruments

that um Jos e uh: has, has gotten from here

Estela: Dice que um, um aqu? Um.. lo llenas? Y despu esel lo

pone en la computadora, as? Y despues ya lo puedes

hacer pero, y dice que Jose tambien ha hecho eso.

He says that um, um, here? Um . . . you

fill it out? And then he puts it in the

computer, like this? And then after

you can do it, but, and he says that

Jose has also done that.

Salesman: Let me give you a pen to fill this out.Estela: Heres one

Salesman: Ill give you a board to write that.

Estela: Dice que ahorita te va a traer un lapiz y un un de este

para que pa que te apoyes.

He says that now he will bring a pencil

and a, one of those for support.


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Example 2

Mara (reading out loud

letter from school)

Did you know [?] [2second pause] that your

children are able to have field trips um to

the local museums because Investprovides buses.

Mara: Dice que nosotros va, vamos a tener no los

ninos que est an en la escuela van (a)

tener, um este Paseo al m::useum,

museo. Pero van a ir en buses.

He says that we are go- going to have, no,

the kids who are in school are going to

have, um, a Trip to the museum

(English), museum(Spanish). But

they will go in buses.

Data coding was oriented toward identifying support and scaffolding (Barron et al. 1998)

during brokering events. Scaffolding was coded both when parents offered help and at

those times when children explicitly solicited it. We then reduced the qualitative data by

counting the number of total brokering episodes and the number of these episodes that were

scaffolded. We finally returned to the qualitative data to focus analysis on strategies child

language brokers used, and how and where these were located in their environments.

Scaffolding during Language Brokering Events

During language brokering events parents and other adults scaffolded child language brokers

in their tasks. Parents sometimes structured the translating tasks by breaking up stretchesof their naturally occurring speech into smaller segments. They provided knowledge about

how to proceed with the translation task, for example by insisting on not omitting words

in written documents. Parents also often had knowledge about the world and about the

social and practical meaning of the translation tasks that they shared with their children.

Although not always, parents would at times, for example, provide background information

about issues to be discussed at a visit to the doctor or they explained the context of official

letters that child brokers were asked to translate such as about the topic of a letter about

insurance liability thus indicating for their child the semantic field connected to the letter.

Although more comfortable in Spanish, the parents we worked with had varying degrees ofcompetency in English. They made use of this understanding during language brokering

events. They also had adult native speaker command of Spanish and generally had high

expectations for their childrens linguistic correctness in both Spanish and English. Because

of this, they also provided linguistic knowledge, for instance, knowledge about correct syntax

and word forms in Spanish or their own knowledge of specialized or adult vocabulary in

English. This information potentially served both as scaffolding for the task at hand (i.e.,

translating the material) and as more general support for childrens learning (i.e., using the

translation events as opportunities to enhance childrens Spanish-language skills).

Quantitative analysis shows that scaffolding happened frequently, and it happened across

different tasks (text, spoken language) and situations (at home and at school). Figure 1 shows

the number of brokering episodes and scaffolding events across all cases and for each case

study. The full pie represents the total number of episodes, with the dark grey and black pie


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Figure 1. Brokering episodes and scaffolding events across cases and for each case study.

slices representing the percentage of episodes that were scaffolded through request (dark

grey) and offer (black). In total 204 brokering episodes were analyzed in this data set, and

among these episodes we observed 69 instances of scaffolding by interlocutors. This means

that in episodes where children were brokering for their parents, roughly a third of all

language brokering episodes were scaffolded by the parentinterlocutors, pointing to thesignificance of scaffolding during language brokering. In roughly two thirds of all brokering

episodes the child language brokers proceeded without explicit scaffolding, thereby taking

on the authority accorded to them through this role. However, although childrens author-

ity during brokering events is evidenced here, it should not be forgotten that in virtually

all of the brokering events analyzed child language brokers acted under the direct super-

vision of and in orientation toward their parents, even as they appeared to represent and

be the voice of their families. The negotiation of authority in language brokering events

requires careful consideration of unspoken participation structures that complicate the ap-

parently obvious surface of who carries voice and authority during language brokeringevents.

Scaffolding in the Zone

The three child language brokers discussed here accomplished their brokering tasks by

collaboratively constructing meaning together with their primary interlocutors (parents),

deploying particular strategies, and using a range of tools. We identified three main ways in

which child language brokers relied on outside knowledge during brokering events involvingtheir parents as primary interlocutors. As we will show in detail below, parents supported

children in the procedural dimensions of the tasks by prompting and guiding them, they

provided word meaning and grammatical knowledge, and they explained background in-

formation and context for the social world needed to understand the interactions being


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brokered. Children drew on the supports their parents provided and used the texts as addi-

tional supports for their work. They also solicited help, for example, by noting when they

did not understand something in the spoken or written texts at issue.

Guidance through the Task

Children did not always, or even usually, offer complete or exhaustive translations of a

text to their interlocutors. Because they often only brokered parts of the activity or text,

the parentinterlocutor quite frequently moved the child along and through the brokering

task, including by asking them to backtrack when they skipped something. These patterned

interactions can be considered scripts about how the event is expected to unfold.

In Excerpt 1 below, Mara was at home with her mother, interpreting her school report card

that had been sent home from school that day. The report cards used in the state of Illinois

at the time, illustrated in Figure 2 (see online supporting documentation), similar to those

in use in much of the United States, were highly complicated documents utilizing multiple

codes and categorization systems to evaluate students academic progress and behavior. In

this case, the reports operated with a standards-based system predicated on a developmental

logic in which students performance was judged as acceptable, strong, or unacceptable

for their age group. It was written using varied fonts and required that the reader interpret

a complex series of codes, as well as draw connections across information distributed across

the page. In addition, the report card included a short written narrative by the teacher.

In the language brokering event presented as Excerpt 1 we find several occurrences in

which Maras mother, Mrs. Gutierrez, provided scaffolding to Mara. While brokering,

Mara often mixed Spanish and English, perhaps assuming or hoping that her mother would

understand. Her mother, however, pushed Mara to find the appropriate terms in Spanish.

Then, her mother continued to guide Mara further along the report card, prompting her

with questions about what followed. Similarly in Excerpt 2 below Mara was prompted by

her mother to augment her initial translations.

One of the patterns that emerged from our analysis of the transcripts is this action of moving

the child along in the task. The parentinterlocutor prodded the child to the next sentence

or word, asserting his or her authority as a parent. This prodding kept the child focused on

Excerpt 1

Mara: Dice que tengo que practicar mas en drama. It says that I have topractice more for drama.

En music? Dice que tengo strong

performance,e tambi en que:: =

In music? It says that I have strong performance,

and also that:: =Sra. Gut errez: = Pero que es strong performance? But what is strong performance?

Mara: (Es) as cuando, um tienes muchas ideas ( ) Thats when, uh, I have many ideas, ( )

Sra. Gut errez: Y en espanol y en ingles? Que m as?

Que dice mas?

And in Spanish and in English? What else?

What else does it say?


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Excerpt 2

Mara: Y dice, en music, que soy ( ), que tengo muchas

ideas, y tambi en tengoacceptable work.

It says, in music, that I am, that I have many

ideas and alsohave acceptable work.

Sra. Gutierrez: Y que es acceptable work? And what isacceptable work?Mara: Es como, cuando, este, um::, haces trabajo?

Pero::, est a,acceptable. Que est a muy bien.

Thats like, when, um:: I do work? Because::

its,acceptable. That it is very good.

the whole of the text, and its meaning, rather than on its isolated components, and displayed

the parents awareness that there was more to be interpreted and unpacked than the child

initially rendered.

Scaffolding Word Meaning, Monitoring Linguistic CorrectnessParentinterlocutors also provided word meaning based on their understanding of the orig-

inal English text or spoken interaction, or based on their understanding of the childs

translation of the text to a certain point. In the following excerpt, Estela translated a letter

from the Secretary of State concerning a car crash that involved her family. Her mother

provided a specialized Spanish term for the Englishcash (en efectivo) as a substitute for Es-

telas invented termloose money,and additionally provided contextual information, drawing

on her experiences as a driver. Implicit in this activity is also Sra. Becerras knowledge about

language. For her, it was not enough to describe the word. She knew that there was a specific

term in Spanish, and she wanted Estela to use the proper term, which Estela did after being

prompted.

The same pattern is explicit in the following excerpt, which took place in Maras home,

as she and her mother discussed a homework assignment for the school break. In the

following excerpt (see Excerpt 4), Maras mother scaffolded her daughters translation work

by supplying a Spanish term for which Mara was searching. Just as the other presumed

monolingual Spanish-speaking parents did the same. Sra. Guti errez paid attention to the

text source. She then provided help as needed, based on her own understanding. In this case,

Sra. Gutierrez provided the Spanish word that Mara sought and attempted by constructing

a false cognate and pronouncing the word scientist using Spanish phonology (cientista).

Just as they provided correct terminology, parents also instructed their children in correct

grammatical constructions in Spanish (see Excerpt 5). As Estela translated the letter from the

Secretary of State concerning the car crash to her parents, she had difficulty with the correct

Excerpt 3

Estela: Do not mail cash. O que uh. . . Que notenemos que mandar por um, as dinero

suelto.

Do not mail cash. That, uh.. That we donthave, that we send, um, loose money.

Sra. Becerra: En efectivo. In cash.

Estela: En efectivo. In cash.


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Excerpt 4

Mara: Tengo que escoger un nombre de ellos

que sea unscientist, sabes unscientist, un

scientista . . . how do you say scientist

I have to choose a name of those who would be a

scientist, you know a scientist, a

scientista . . . how do you say scientist?Sra. Guti errez: Cient fico Scientist

Mara: Yeah ( . . . ) Yeah ( . . . )

Excerpt 5

Estela: Aqu dice el, el nombre tuyo? um, uh, el

nombre de, de, del que: de la persona

que: que, que::

Here it says, your name? Um, uh, the name of,

of the:: of the person that:: that, that::

Sra. Balderas: De quien es el carro To whom the car belongs

Estela: Mhm, de quien es el carro? De la, el

n umero de las placas?

Mhm, to whom the car belongs? Of the

(feminine), the (masculine) number of the

plates?

grammatical construction in Spanish for the English phrase to whom the car belongs. Sra.

Balderas picked up on this communicative breakdown. She was not content with the fact

that she understood what Estela was trying to say. Instead, she insisted on teaching Estela

the grammatically correct way of saying this in Spanish: de qui en es el carro (to whom

the car belongs).

In this case, we note that Sra. Beccera did not offer Estela the vocabulary word that would

have simplified the translation of this sentence: the word for owner in Spanish is el

dueno. Instead, she helped Estela to complete the sentence that she had started, building

on the grammatical construction Estela had begun.

Thus, we can see that Sra. Beccera took different approaches to scaffolding, demonstrating

flexibility in following her childs lead as well as in leading her. Each approach arguably

facilitated the childs language acquisition, as it built on the childs existing knowledge.

Providing World Knowledge

Another kind of scaffold we want to highlight involves providing contextual knowledge and

knowledge about the world. Meaning is not located in words per se, but can only be generated

by understanding words in their context, that is, by drawing on pragmatic knowledge. Parents

provided contextual knowledge and knowledge about the world needed to make meaning

of events and texts. For instance, they provided background information about the contextof official letters that child brokers were asked to translate. Because language brokering

does not just involve rote translation, but the contextualization of words and ideas to create

meaningful utterances and accomplish practical goals, in doing this parents pushed their

children to think actively about what they were brokering.


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Excerpt 6

Estela: City? Tucity, pa. Tucity. Sucity! (shouts) City? Your city, dad. Your city. Your city! (shouts)

Sr. Balderas: Que es eso? What is that?

Estela: Um, su ciudad. Um, your city.Sr. Balderas: Pues Edmonville. No ves o que? Well, Edmonville. Dont you see or what?

Estela: Oh. Oh.

In the last event to be considered in this section (see Excerpt 6), Estela and her father were

filling out an application form for store credit. Sr. Beccera encouraged his daughter to rely

on her own knowledge. Sr. Beccera made explicit what he knew Estela to know and teased

her to use what she knew about the world, rather than to stick with rote back-and-forth

translation. This might have been prompted to some extent by Estelas impatience with her

father, as expressed in the first line of this excerpt; in a way he was rebalancing the status

and power relationship between them by pointing out that she should have known this

answer. This type of interaction is characterized by a back-and-forth movement, in which

responsibility for knowing is reassigned between father and daughter.

As these examples reveal, language-brokering encounters are complex events in which co-

participants work together to construct meaning by employing their respective sets of skills

and knowledge. Parents guide the process, provide word meanings, insist on standards for

linguistic and grammatical correctness, and point to relevant pragmatic knowledge. In other

words, parents participate in the translation process, building on what is offered by thechild and helping to supply missing information, even as they also scaffold their childrens

language development in both English and Spanish.

As we will elaborate in more detail in the concluding section, this shifting pattern among

participants over who has agency, who is guiding, and who is learning during these episodes

leads to our understanding of the Zone of Proximal Development as shifting and dynamic.

Although on the surface level, children may appear to act as linguistic and cultural experts

and to act with adultified agency, a closer look shows that they are in fact collaborating

with adults and are following the guidance of their parents as experts about adult life andthe meaning of the events and interactions that need to be negotiated and brokered by

the children. In the following, we focus on the strategies and tools that child brokers draw

on when acting as brokers. In the process we demonstrate not only the social but also the

distributed nature of these events, and point to the supporting role that texts (and strategies

for working with texts) can provide.

Strategies and Tools

In addition to drawing on distributed sources of knowledge and scaffolding provided by

their interlocutors in the processes of coparticipation and coagency just described, child

brokers also use cognitive and metacognitive strategies that are connected to artifacts and

structures in their environments to construct meaning across languages. In our effort to


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conceptualize language brokering through theories of socially situated and distributed cog-

nition, we want to point to one further dimension of the work of child language brokers:

the use of material and symbolic tools for cognitive work as theorized by Vygotsky (1978)

and Cole (1996). Vygotskys original formulation of tool-mediated cognition distinguishedbetween psychological tools used to regulate thought or behavior, and technological tools,

such as axes and plows, used to control nature. For Vygotsky, psychological tools were of

particular importance for the cognitive development of the child. In Zones of Proximal De-

velopment children engage with others in complex thinking tasks that make use of cultural

tools of thought that in turn enable them to appropriate and transform these cultural tools.

Cultural tools were not seen as fixed, but subject to change: they were thought to be both

inherited and transformed through time (Rogoff 2003). Vygotsky thought these psycho-

logical tools to be necessary to transform elementary mental functions into higher mental

functions. In other words, he saw them as important for the childs development towardabstract thought.

Contemporary cultural-historical theorists have elaborated Vygotskys theory of tool-

mediated cognition into a trilevel hierarchy of artifacts (Cole 1996). Coles conceptualization

differentiates primary, secondary, and tertiary artifacts involved in cognition. Primary ar-

tifacts are material tools as well as words and writing instruments; secondary artifacts are

representations of primary artifacts (such as recipes, norms, and constitutions). Tertiary

artifacts then color the way we see the actual world. (Cole 1996:121) They include our

ideas, works of art, processes of perception, ideologies, schemas, and scripts.

Child language brokers, together with their collaborators, use primary material artifacts

such as texts and dictionaries, as well as secondary and tertiary artifacts such as translating

strategies in their efforts to make meaning of text and spoken language and to communicate

their understanding to others. In translations involving written texts, children and their

interlocutors effectively transform text into an artifact that can be manipulated to facilitate

their own understanding. Participants in these events do this, for example, by breaking

the text to be translated into chunks of varying length, a strategy that can be considered a

secondary artifact. The length of the chunks, or episodes (e.g., words or short phrases, orsometimes sentences or extended text) is largely shaped by the linguistic level of difficulty

of the text (i.e., syntax and reading level) vis-a-vis the childs competence. Similarly, the

difficulty of the text (esp. in written texts) influenced the brokering strategy the child chose

as she or he translated. If the linguistic level was easy for the child, she or he might translate

immediately into Spanish without reading aloud the English text first, usually taking one

sentence or phrase at a time. When the text was more difficult, the child might proceed word

by word or phrase by phrase, first reading the text aloud in English, and then producing the

language brokering (often, as noted above, with assistance from the parent).

For our purposes hereto illustrate how the work of language brokering was distributed

not just across people and supported by adults, but also distributed by primary, secondary,

and tertiary tools, one example illustrating numerous occurrences of such differing strategies

will suffice: Consider how 11-year-old Junior chunked text-segments while brokering a very


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212 ETHOS

Excerpt 7

Junior: Check your child every day for, certain

symptoms of illness.

Chequea tu, tu:, hijos? cada da, por,senales?, sntomas, o, mal:, algo mal.

Check you, your, children? each day, for, signs?symptoms, or bad, something bad.

Watch for,

MIRA POR, Watch for

FEVER?

Fiebre. Fever.

Chequea? Con un term ometro. Check? With a thermometer.

Coughing and sneezing.

Tociendo? O estornudando. Coughing? Or sneezing.

Runny nose.

Moco agua(d)o. Wet mucous.

Very runny eyes.

Ojos rojos y llorosos. Red and crying eyes.

Excerpt 8

Junior: Pobre Sinderela. Ella? llora y llora. Sus amigos?

lloran tambien. Luego, una mujer, Chiquita:,

se aparece en una nube. Es la, es la madrina?

magica de Sinderela. Traeme una calabaza!,

ella dice. Yo arreglar e las cosas.

Poor Cinderella. She cries and cries. Her

friends cry too. Then a small woman

appears in a cloud. It is Cinderellas fairy

godmother? Bring me a pumpkin, she says.

Ill fix things.

difficult and an easy text (see Excerpts 78). The first, more difficult text excerpt is from a

school letter describing flu symptoms; it involves specialized medical terminology and other

complex vocabulary presented in an authoritative discourse style. The second excerpt shows

Junior reading and brokering an English-language childrens storybook, Cinderella, to his

younger sibling. This is a story and genre with which he was familiar, and the book was

written for beginning readers.

When brokering the difficult medical text (see Excerpt 7), Junior divided the text into very

short text fragments. As with the more difficult text, Junior first read the EnglishCinderella

story aloud, but he did so in longer stretches (see Excerpt 6). In fact, the childrens book

already provided very short sentences for beginning readers, and Junior actually pulled

together several sentences to translate together at once. In some other translations of easy

texts, Junior did not read the original aloud; we note that it is possible that reading the

English story version out loud in this case was not done to aid Juniors translation, but for

the benefit of his younger brother, who was learning English, hence including a language

lesson for his sibling in this brokering activity.

For more difficult written texts, child language brokers consistently used the text itself as

an aid, as by reading the text aloud in the original language (usually English) first. We

know from the literature that reading aloud helps to process information and encode textual


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meaning in short-term memory (Beck and McKeown 2001). This external representation

may allow the children time to move to the next episode of the language-brokering event,

putting ideas into the second language.

Among our case study participants, more experienced child language brokers, such as Junior,

often paraphrased the meaning of utterances in spoken interactions, instead of brokering

the exact utterance word by word. They utilized a range of strategies for tackling unfamiliar

words in reading and speaking. This included describing the word, pronouncing the English

word using Spanish phonology or the Spanish word using English phonology (smart strate-

gies given the common Latin roots of many words in both languages), guessing the meaning

of the word from its context, making up a meaning for the word, or asking an interlocutor

or audience member for help. Many of these strategies were accomplished in collaboration

with interlocutors, as discussed in this article.

Finally, children make meaning from text and utterances at the level of tertiary artifacts.

Meaning-making depends in part on metacognition, that is, the readers ability to think

about and control the process of engaging with texts or spoken language. This cognitive

self-regulation is in actuality also often collaborativeco-regulated (Efklides 2005)as

the example of Maras mother guiding her through the report card shows (see Excerpt

1). Further, the meaning of text is often not in the words on the page or in the literal

meaning of a statement. Meaning is constructed by making inferences and interpretations,

and therefore depends on the extent to which the reader relates these pieces of knowledge tohis or her own experiences, such as Estela and her father in their negotiation during filling

out a store-application form (see Excerpt 6).

The strategies and tools that child language brokers employ in their efforts to make meaning

of text and spoken language included primary material artifacts such as texts and dictionar-

ies, secondary artifacts such as translating strategies, as well as tertiary artifacts such as

metacognitive strategies. The data we have presented represent initial evidence for how

child language brokers employ complex linguistic, cognitive, and metacognitive strategies

in their efforts to translate text and spoken language. In conjunction with the collabora-tive nature of brokering events in which child brokers also draw on their parents diverse

knowledge to accomplish their brokering tasks, these data provide further insight into the

distributed nature of child language brokering activities.

Conclusions

We have employed in this article theories of situated and distributed cognition to under-

stand how language-brokering events unfold in immigrant households. We showed that

child language brokers often co-constructed translations, relying on distributed knowl-edge, with expertise both solicited and offered by adult coparticipants, and with support

from primary, secondary, and tertiary artifacts. With this, we offered a new look at the

dynamic nature of teaching and learning during translation tasks. Shifts in learning and

teaching roles corresponded with the complex shifting of domains of expertise of parents


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214 ETHOS

and children respectively, leading us to think of learning tasks as dynamic zones of proximal

development.

One objective of our analysis is to illustrate how, in language brokering events, knowledgeand authority are unevenly distributed across events, contexts, situations, domains, tasks,

and relationships, with both parent and child offering different kinds of expert skills even

as they are also positioned as novices in different ways. Parents monitor the sources with

which the child engages, and together the parent and child collaboratively co-construct

the meaning of these sources. A further objective has been to reveal how brokering events

depend on cognitive tools distributed in the environment and shared with other people

such as textual artifacts and linguistic strategies. The model of language brokering that we

present on the basis of our discussion has therefore little in common with the linear model

introduced as the dominant paradigm in the beginning of this article. Instead we find thatin naturalistic language brokering events, knowledge is located both within and between the

brokering child and the parentinterlocutor. Parents monitor the sources with which the

child engages, and together the parent and child collaboratively co-construct the meaning

of these sources.

We propose that language brokering is a sociocognitive practice that represents an impor-

tant zone of proximal development for children and perhaps also their parents. Translation

in these brokering activities does not happen in the heads of individuals, nor is knowl-

edge neatly transmitted between participants as suggested by the conduit metaphor fortranslation. Rather it is an often-scaffolded activity occurring in social settings. In language

brokering activities, child and adult mutually support each other by contributing to the

common goal from their respective domains of expertise, knowledge, and available skills.

Importantly, linguistic as well as metalinguistic and metacognitive skills are acquired in

collaboration with parents and family. But this is not the whole story.

A complicating factor in our understanding of this particular phenomenon lies in the fact

that Western notions of developmental roles (such as adult and child) do not clearly map

onto this kind of shifting of expertnovice distinctions between adult and child. In Westernmodels of learning and development, including in much of Vygotskian and neo-Vygotskian

theory, as we noted above, the adult is assumed to be the expert and the child the learner.

Language brokering thus can be seen to violate Western cultural norms. Indeed, much of

thealbeit limitedliterature on the topic of child translation assumes that brokering gives

children both more power and more responsibility than they should havethat there is

something wrong with the idea that children may be more expert than their parents. This

sense is reflected in the termadultificationthat has been used by developmental psychologists

to label child translation as detrimental to childrens proper development (Su arez-Orozco

and Suarez-Orozco 2001). This view is based on the assumption that when children act fortheir parents, parental authority is weakened; and that children should not be exposed to

adult medical, legal, and financial information, nor burdened with serious responsibilities

at too young an age. Further, it is based on the view that children are simply incapable of

taking on tasks or developing skills that adults have not been able to achieve or obtain.


20/25


We propose that scholars should rethink conceptualizations of these roles and consider

different cultural pathways in human development as well as the participation of children

in mature activities as alternative developmental pathways (see also Paradise and Rogoff

2009; Rogoff 2003). The data we present above suggest that many immigrant childrentake on presumably adult roles as translators on behalf of their families and participate

routinely in mature community activities. The parents and children participating in this

study generally treated childrens contributions to translation as unremarkable. Children

are expected to help their families; people are expected to use their skills for the benefit

of others; and family members are morally bound to work together for the collective good

(Nsamenang 1992; Orellana 2009; Reese 2001). When asked how they felt about brokering,

the child language brokers themselves more often than not said they liked it. Most indicated

that they felt needed and valued, not burdened, and not overly powerful. This points to

alternative pathways vis-a-vis many standard Western models by which children matureinto roles reserved for adults (Rogoff 2003). These findings also show that, because parents

monitor brokering events closely, children are not always left alone with the responsibility

of brokering information pertaining to adult lives and concerns. Hence, child language

brokers are brokering, but still learning; they are agentive, but also still supported by their

families.

The findings presented here extend the critique of cross-cultural researchers regarding cul-

tural biases in cultural settings and participant recruitment in research, as well as topics

deemed worthy of study (Serpell 1990). Research with children and adolescents is increas-ingly pointing to the fact that not only do distinctions of class and cultural membership

influence who and what we study but also age status may influence theoretical models. The

case of child language brokers who occupy shifting positions of authority and power during

brokering events exemplifies that learnerteacher and childadult roles during development

might not be as static or neatly defined as often supposed. Prevalent ideologies about the

role of children and adolescents in households in non-Western, but increasingly also in

Western households and communities, must be reconsidered in light of this work (Orellana

2001, 2009). One implication is to reconsider the Zone of Proximal Development as dy-

namically shifting. Another implication is to reconsider the questions we ask about childrenand adolescents and their participation in society, and the models we build based on these

questions.

H. JULIA EKSNER is Post-Doctoral Fellow in the School of Education at the Hebrew Univer-

sity of Jerusalem. Writing of this article was supported by a Foundation for Psychological

Research (FPR) postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, Los Angeles.

MARJORIE FAULSTICH ORELLANA is Professor, Graduate School of Education and Infor-mation Studies, University of California Los Angeles.


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216 ETHOS

Notes

Acknowledgments. This research was supported by the Spencer FoundationNational Academy of Education

and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (5RO3 HD3951002). Thanks to the

anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback on earlier versions of this manuscript, and to Janet Dixon

Keller for her editorial guidance and support. Thanks also to the children and families who participated in this

study.

1. Vygotsky (1978:86) defines the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) as the distance between a childs actual

developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the higher level of potential development

as determined through problem solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers.

2. For a notable exception please see Risku 2002.

3. Vygotskys analysis of cognitive development was grounded in an attempt to apply the insights of Marxs

Theses on Feuerbach (Marx 1967) to the psychological realm (Veresov 2005; Vygotsky 1978). In his thesesMarx formulated the idea that object-oriented human activity transcends both idealism and materialism, that is,

individuals are both the product of the structure that surrounds them, and they at the same time create the structure

by engaging in action and with objects. Vygotskys theory poses that language that is first used between adult

and child in activities is gradually internalized by the child into a means of thought (Vygotsky 1986). Vygotskys

genetic law of cultural development, fundamentally a theory of the relationship between ontogeny and phylogeny

is summarized in an oft-quoted statement: Every function in the childs cultural development appears twice: first,

on the social level, and later, on the individual level; first, between people (interpsychological), and then inside the

child (intrapsychological) (Vygotsky 1978).

4. This study was approved by Northwesterns Internal Review Board.

5. Our ethnographic worksuggests that families made more effort to secure outside language brokersfor example,

neighbors or older cousinsfor specialized encounters when their own children were young, but as children grew

they assigned more responsibility to them, because their own children were more available and deployable than

outsiders.

6. Codes included task difficulty, setting, interlocutors, constraints, and affordances of the tasks, tools used, as well

ascentrallyscaffolding offered and received as well as communication breakdowns.

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