Emergent Bilinguals: Framing Students as Statistical Data?

Immigrant youth who are designated as English language learners in American schools—whom we refer to as “emergent bilinguals”—are increasingly framed by numerical calculations. Utilizing the notion of assemblage from actor-network theory (ANT), we trace how emergent bilinguals are discursively constructed by officials, administrators, politicians, and the media through the manipulation and publication of school test scores, district data, and state reports. Drawing upon two overlapping, complementary qualitative studies conducted in New York City, we reveal the ways in which this places burdens on emergent bilinguals and their schools and narrows important discussions of bilingual education pedagogies to ones centered on numerical data.