196 ETHOS

Shifting in the Zone: Latina/o Child

Language Brokers and the Co-construction
of Knowledge
H. Julia Eksner
Marjorie 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 authority
are 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 (Vald es 2002), natural translation (Harris 1976), culture brokering (Trickett
and 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
exemplies that learnerteacher and childadult roles during development are not as static
as 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. C 2012 by the American Anthropological
Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1352.2012.01246.x
Journal of the Society for
Psychological Anthropology
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 dene the practice. Lucy Tse was one of the rst to use the term language
brokering, which she dened as interpretation and translation between linguistically and
culturally different parties. She noted that language brokers should be differentiated from
interpreters and translators because they inuence 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 and
thus situating language work within its ecological context (Trickett et al. 2010). Hall and
Gu ery (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 denition 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 rst- 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 of
immigrants 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 ofcials, and many
other people.
Despite its ubiquity in immigrant communities, language brokering has only recently been
discovered 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 parentication or
198 ETHOS
adultication (Minuchin 1974; Morales and Hanson 2005; Su arez-Orozco and Su arez-
Orozco 2001). This continues to be a focus of much discussion in the eld (e.g., Bucaria
and Rossato 2010; Guske 2010; Weisskirch 2010), but more recent attention has gone to
understanding cognitive benets as well as to revealing the complex linguistic and social
negotiations 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-S anchez 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; Uma na-Taylor 2003;
Vald es 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 sociological
studies 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; Martnez et al. 2009; McQuillan and Tse 1995;
Parke and Buriel 2006; Tse 1995; Weisskirch 2005, 2007; Weisskirch and Alva 2002). Given
mutual inuences 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 rst 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
CHILD LANGUAGE BROKERS AND KNOWLEDGE CONSTRUCTION 199
within the translator, who then simply transmits the translation to a recipient
2
a 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 drawon
information 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-
gestr om 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 the
collaboration 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 of
internalization is used to dene 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 jointly constructed
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 efcacy to their communities through their linguistic and cultural
competence. In other work, we have highlighted childrens agency and the responsibilities
200 ETHOS
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 efcacious 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. Vygotskys
theoretical innovation was to see individual cognition as mediated by social context in the
shape of interlocutors and tools in the environment (Wertsch 1991). Froma 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 viewthe child-in-context-in-activity
(Cole 1996; Engestr om 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
CHILD LANGUAGE BROKERS AND KNOWLEDGE CONSTRUCTION 201
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 of
prociency 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 ow 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 dened
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 procient 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 rst 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 rst 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 other
public 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
202 ETHOS
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 than
80 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 language
brokering 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 lling 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 rst 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 oldest
of 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
CHILD LANGUAGE BROKERS AND KNOWLEDGE CONSTRUCTION 203
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 them
to 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 fth grade, a change
he did not like. As the oldest of three children, Junior helped with a variety of language
brokering tasks, much like the ones that Estela and Mara assumed. We watched himtranslate
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 eld 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 gures 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 ndings and explore particular patterns that may occur across different
204 ETHOS
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 event to 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 rened 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 a
segment of the text. The brokering episodes represent a wide variety of kinds of source data
(both relatively easy and relatively more difcult 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 rst 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 predening relatively small brokering episodes.
Example 1
Salesman: Um, and its . . . You ll 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 es el lo
pone en la computadora, as? Y despu es ya lo puedes
hacer pero, y dice que Jos e tambi en ha hecho eso.
He says that um, um, here? Um. . . you
ll it out? And then he puts it in the
computer, like this? And then after
you can do it, but, and he says that
Jos e has also done that.
Salesman: Let me give you a pen to ll this out.
Estela: Heres one
Salesman: Ill give you a board to write that.
Estela: Dice que ahorita te va a traer un l apiz 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.
CHILD LANGUAGE BROKERS AND KNOWLEDGE CONSTRUCTION 205
Example 2
Mara (reading out loud
letter from school)
Did you know [?] [2 second pause] that your
children are able to have eld trips um to
the local museums because Invest
provides buses.
Mara: Dice que nosotros va, vamos a tener no los
ni nos 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 nally 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 stretches
of 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 ofcial
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 eld connected to the letter.
Although more comfortable in Spanish, the parents we worked with had varying degrees of
competency 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
206 ETHOS
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 the
signicance 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 brokering
events.
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 identied three main ways in
which child language brokers relied on outside knowledge during brokering events involving
their 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
CHILD LANGUAGE BROKERS AND KNOWLEDGE CONSTRUCTION 207
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 nd several occurrences in
which Maras mother, Mrs. Guti errez, 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 nd 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 m as en drama. It says that I have to practice 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. Guterrez: = Pero qu e es strong performance? But what is strong performance?
Mara: (Es) as cuando, um tienes muchas ideas ( ) Thats when, uh, I have many ideas, ( )
Sra. Guterrez: Y en espa nol y en ingl es? Qu e m as?
Qu e dice m as?
And in Spanish and in English? What else?
What else does it say?
208 ETHOS
Excerpt 2
Mara: Y dice, en music, que soy ( ), que tengo muchas
ideas, y tambi en tengo acceptable work.
It says, in music, that I am, that I have many
ideas and also have acceptable work.
Sra. Guti errez: Y qu e es acceptable work? And what is acceptable 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 Correctness
Parentinterlocutors 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 English cash (en efectivo) as a substitute for Es-
telas invented term loose 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 specic
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. Guti errez 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 fromthe
Secretary of State concerning the car crash to her parents, she had difculty with the correct
Excerpt 3
Estela: Do not mail cash. O que uh. . . Que no
tenemos que mandar por um, as dinero
suelto.
Do not mail cash. That, uh.. That we dont
have, that we send, um, loose money.
Sra. Becerra: En efectivo. In cash.
Estela: En efectivo. In cash.
CHILD LANGUAGE BROKERS AND KNOWLEDGE CONSTRUCTION 209
Excerpt 4
Mara: Tengo que escoger un nombre de ellos
que sea un scientist, sabes un scientist, 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: Cientco 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 qui en es el carro To whom the car belongs
Estela: Mhm, de qui en 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 simplied the translation of this sentence: the word for owner in Spanish is el
due no. 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
exibility 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 context
of ofcial 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.
210 ETHOS
Excerpt 6
Estela: City? Tu city, pa. Tu city. Su city! (shouts) City? Your city, dad. Your city. Your city! (shouts)
Sr. Balderas: Qu e es eso? What is that?
Estela: Um, su ciudad. Um, your city.
Sr. Balderas: Pues Edmonville. No ves o qu e? 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
lling 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 rst 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 the
child 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 adultied 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 and
the 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
CHILD LANGUAGE BROKERS AND KNOWLEDGE CONSTRUCTION 211
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 distinguished
between 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 xed, 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 toward
abstract 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, or
sometimes sentences or extended text) is largely shaped by the linguistic level of difculty
of the text (i.e., syntax and reading level) vis-` a-vis the childs competence. Similarly, the
difculty of the text (esp. in written texts) inuenced 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 rst, usually taking one
sentence or phrase at a time. When the text was more difcult, the child might proceed word
by word or phrase by phrase, rst 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 sufce: Consider how 11-year-old Junior chunked text-segments while brokering a very
212 ETHOS
Excerpt 7
Junior: Check your child every day for, certain
symptoms of illness.
Chequea tu, tu:, hijos? cada da, por,
se nales?, 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 tambi en. Luego, una mujer, Chiquita:,
se aparece en una nube. Es la, es la madrina?
m agica 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 x things.
difcult and an easy text (see Excerpts 78). The rst, more difcult text excerpt is from a
school letter describing u 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 difcult medical text (see Excerpt 7), Junior divided the text into very
short text fragments. As with the more difcult text, Junior rst read the English Cinderella
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 benet of his younger brother, who was learning English, hence including a language
lesson for his sibling in this brokering activity.
For more difcult 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) rst. We
know from the literature that reading aloud helps to process information and encode textual
CHILD LANGUAGE BROKERS AND KNOWLEDGE CONSTRUCTION 213
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 to
his or her own experiences, such as Estela and her father in their negotiation during lling
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
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, knowledge
and 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 nd that
in 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 for
translation. 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 Western
models 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 reected in the term adultication that has been used by developmental psychologists
to label child translation as detrimental to childrens proper development (Su arez-Orozco
and Su arez-Orozco 2001). This view is based on the assumption that when children act for
their parents, parental authority is weakened; and that children should not be exposed to
adult medical, legal, and nancial 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.
CHILD LANGUAGE BROKERS AND KNOWLEDGE CONSTRUCTION 215
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 children
take 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 benet
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 mature
into roles reserved for adults (Rogoff 2003). These ndings 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 ndings 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
inuence who and what we study but also age status may inuence theoretical models. The
case of child language brokers who occupy shifting positions of authority and power during
brokering events exemplies that learnerteacher and childadult roles during development
might not be as static or neatly dened 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 children
and 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.
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) denes the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) as the distance between a childs actual
developmental level as determined by independent problemsolving 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 theses
Marx 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 rst used between adult
and child in activities is gradually internalized by the child into a means of thought (Vygotsky 1986). Vygotskys
genetic lawof 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: rst,
on the social level, and later, on the individual level; rst, between people (interpsychological), and then inside the
child (intrapsychological) (Vygotsky 1978).
4. This study was approved by Northwesterns Internal Review Board.
5. Our ethnographic work suggests 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 difculty, 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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