The University of Rhode Island Becomes Ground Zero for the Next Wave of Bilingualism Research

You’ll hear it before you see it if you drive down Providence’s Broad Street on a Saturday afternoon. Spanish floating out of a doorway in a bakery. Two voices overlapping in Portuguese on a cell phone. A handwritten sign in a window with Spanish punctuation and English grammar.

This stretch, known to the locals as La Broa’, is a sort of linguistic fingerprint where two languages have been pressing against one another for so long that the seam has developed into something unique. In a way, the new Translanguaging Lab at the University of Rhode Island is attempting to read that section of pavement like a text.

The lab was quietly introduced inside the Feinstein College of Education last fall, and Dean Danielle Dennis isn’t trying to hide the fact that it’s the first of its kind in New England. She believes it has the potential to become a national model. Although it’s a significant assertion from a tiny state, it makes sense. Despite its size of about 37 by 48 miles, Rhode Island is home to more than 100 different languages. Just the number is startling. The fact that it has historically gotten so little attention is even more startling.

Laura Hamman-Ortiz, the lab director, has worked with multilingual students in the United States and overseas for nearly twenty years. She does not discuss translanguaging in the same way that scholars typically discuss new frameworks. Jargon-armor does not exist. According to her, it’s a means of witnessing and hearing how bilinguals truly navigate the world by blending, switching, and layering languages without seeking permission. It is a pedagogy as well as a practice. As you listen to her, you get the impression that she is fed up with bilingualism being viewed as an issue that schools must resolve rather than as an obvious asset.

That framing is more important than it may appear. For many years, bilingual students in American classrooms were frequently viewed through what scholars kindly refer to as a deficit lens—that is, as children who lacked English rather than as children who simultaneously carried two systems. The timing of Hamman-Ortiz’s and her colleagues’ push in the opposite direction is deliberate. The population of multilingual students is expanding at the fastest rate in the nation, and Rhode Island is expanding more quickly than most.

The bench in the lab is deep. The master’s program in TESOL and Dual Language at URI was created by Amy Correia. Before coming to Kingston, Nicole King worked as a multilingual teacher in South Carolina, Louisiana, and Italy. Steve Przymus, who moved from Texas last summer, brings with him thirty years of advocacy experience and a recent paper published in Bilingual Review/Revista Bilingüe that highlights surprising similarities between the linguistic landscape of Rhode Island and the border region between the United States and Mexico. He discovered something that most people overlook: towns, rivers, and schools all throughout the state still use the Narragansett language, which was almost completely eradicated before being revived following the tribe’s federal recognition in 1983. 30,000 years ago, layer by layer.

It’s difficult to ignore how peculiar that combination is. Putting Rhode Island on the Map is a literal mapping project, an advocacy arm, a research hub, and a teacher-training engine all operating simultaneously. Bilingual children’s books are the subject of eye-tracking research. Geomapping of language clusters is available. For working teachers who are in dire need of new resources but lack the time to read journal articles, there is professional development.

It’s still unclear if it scales as Dennis hopes. Announcing national models is simpler than building them. However, observing this from the outside gives the impression that something genuine is being put together in Kingston, something that takes into account how people actually speak rather than how textbooks say they should. It’s the kind of detail that usually matters later, for a state this small to be doing this much linguistic work.