Shifting in the Zone: Latina/o Child Language Brokers and the Co-construction of Knowledge

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.