LAUSR

Abstract This study uses the framework of space and scale (Blommaert et al., 2005) and construct of “enregisterment” (Agha, 2005) to examine how bilingual Spanish-English Mexican heritage children in California engage with and explore registers in multilingual play with peers. Children's spontaneous pretend play at a bilingual Spanish-English Head Start preschool at which teachers used local diversified bilingual educational practice, but were also preparing children for English-only public school education in California, was followed through video-ethnography over two years. Children challenged state policy imperatives of English-only education through negotiating Spanish and heteroglossic Spanish-English resources as indexical of “reading voice” (Gumperz and Cook-Gumperz, 2005), a discourse typically seen as decontextualized and indexing higher scales. Another way in which children incorporated the Spanish registers into their discourse and challenged state policy imperatives was to use Papa and Compadre voices during play at the preschool, indexing these as powerful peer registers appropriate for school and influencing even students not dominant in Spanish to adopt the registers. Examples illustrate how central to understanding children's practices of scaling different sets of language resources in particular ways is the role that these practices play in moment-to-moment frame dynamics and as grounds for legitimizing entry into, and assuming authoritative footings in, peer play (Goodwin, 1990, 2006; Goodwin and Kyratzis, 2012, 2014).