ABSTRACT
Having worked in neighborhoods known as ports of entry for immigrant and refugee children and families in Chicago, the authors learned that for immigrant and refugee communities, documentation holds a very different meaning. That is, having documentation implies having papeles to be in the United States. Consequently, documentation in the form of assessment and evaluation in school settings for immigrant and refugee children has been about defining who they are and who they are not using a monoglossic ideology that embraces what is termed in recent years academic English. This yields English spoken by whites as the default, the normal as it others, devalues, and labels emergent bi- and multilingual children as being deficient, at risk, and deviating from the norm. Therefore, using terms such as English proficient, English learners, and English language learners are rooted in the desire to uphold English as the norm. In their work on polylanguaging, other researchers emphasize the fluidity of language as they challenge the widely held notion that languages are separate entities. They take exception to the notion that languages can be counted, e.g. I speak two languages: French and German. Perhaps the concept of polylanguaging invites us to consider the dynamic and fluid nature of language and to abandon the antiquated notion that languages are independent and static. In the traditional view of languages, there is a hierarchy of languages in which many languages are seen as less than others or completely unrecognized as languages.
