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. 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