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Perspectives on Practice: Preparing Teachers to Recognize and Expand Children’s Linguistic Resources: addressing Language ideologies and Practices
Abstract
Exploring language ideology and pedagogy, this article details two approaches utilized to bridge theory and practice in a class on second language acquisition for preservice teachers.
... Diverse languages are heard there, and the classrooms are linguistically complex. Children speak two or more languages and divide their time between two worlds: one -the receiving societythe language of the place is also dominant as the language of instruction in the school, the other -the home or informal networks in which the mother tongue is used (Athanases et al. 2018;Franco et al. 2020). ...
This article traces the actions and perceptions of preservice teachers who cope with cultural heterogeneity. The study used an interpretative qualitative method, which allowed us to examine the portfolios of 12 participants. Findings indicate that authentic experiences exposed the students to the reality of the pupils, enriched their knowledge, fostered intercultural competence, and allowed them to teach according to culturally relevant pedagogy. Findings have implications for the teacher training process, which must include experiences outside the school walls that will help teachers integrate cultural heritage into the classroom, preserve the students’ languages of origin, promote multicultural dialogue, and enhance the visibility of the other.
In this manuscript we report on a curriculum design project in which we worked with students in an urban immigrant community to study their own language practices in different contexts. We gathered videotaped data of students in the classroom as well as videos they took of their language practices in other settings. We focus on one student's engagement in this project, and ask how he uses language as a communicative tool in two different activity settings: filling out a form at home with his father, and filling out a form at school. We illuminate variations in this boy's use of language as a communicative and meaning-making tool across these activity settings, finding that he drew on a broader set of communicative tools in interactions with his father at home, including multi-modal communicative strategies, than he did in a similar activity in school. We use these data to complexify discussions of continuities and discontinuities in everyday and school language practices. We conclude with suggestions for how schools can support students’ use of language as a tool for thinking and acting in diverse contexts.
This article examines a variety of work currently going on across the country in newly created hybrid spaces to more closely connect campus courses and field experiences in university-based preservice teacher education. It is argued that the old paradigm of university-based teacher education where academic knowledge is viewed as the authoritative source of knowledge about teaching needs to change to one where there is a nonhierarchical interplay between academic, practitioner, and community expertise. It is argued that this new epistemology for teacher education will create expanded learning opportunities for prospective teachers that will better prepare them to be successful in enacting complex teaching practices.
This article addresses the relationship between the call for authenticity, its relocalization in other contexts, and the use of English. Hip-hop forces us to confront some of the conflictual discourses of authenticity and locality, from those that insist that African American hip-hop is the only real variety and that all other forms are inauthentic deviations, to those that insist that to be authentic one needs to stick to one's “own” cultural and linguistic traditions. The global spread of hip-hop authenticity provides an example of the tension between a cultural dictate to keep it real and the processes that make this dependent on local contexts, languages, cultures, and understandings of the real. Looking at various contexts of localization, this article suggests that the horizons of significance that constitute what counts as locally real open up useful perspectives on the local and global use of languages. The multiple realities of global hip-hop challenge ortholinguistic practices and ideologies, relocating language in new ways that both reflect and produce local language practices.
This article conceptualizes community cultural wealth as a critical race theory (CRT) challenge to traditional interpretations of cultural capital. CRT shifts the research lens away from a deficit view of Communities of Color as places full of cultural poverty disadvantages, and instead focuses on and learns from the array of cultural knowledge, skills, abilities and contacts possessed by socially marginalized groups that often go unrecognized and unacknowledged. Various forms of capital nurtured through cultural wealth include aspirational, navigational, social, linguistic, familial and resistant capital. These forms of capital draw on the knowledges Students of Color bring with them from their homes and communities into the classroom. This CRT approach to education involves a commitment to develop schools that acknowledge the multiple strengths of Communities of Color in order to serve a larger purpose of struggle toward social and racial justice.
Language ideologies are cultural representations, whether explicit or implicit, of the intersection of language and human beings in a social world. Mediating between social structures and forms of talk, such ideologies are not only about language. Rather, they link language to identity, power, aesthetics, morality and epistemology. Through such linkages, language ideologies underpin not only linguistic form and use, but also significant social institutions and fundamental nottions of person and community. The essays in this new volume examine definitions and conceptions of language in a wide range of societies around the world. Contributors focus on how such defining activity organizes language use as well as institutions such as religious ritual, gender relations, the nation-state, schooling, and law. Beginning with an introductory survey of language ideology as a field of inquiry, the volume is organized in three parts. Part I, “Scope and Force of Dominant Conceptions of Language,” focuse on the propensity of cultural models of language developed in one social domain to affect linguistic and social behavior across domains. Part II, “Language Ideology in Institutions of Power,” continues the examination of the force of specific language beliefs, but narrows the scope to the central role that language ideologies play in the functioning of particular institutions of power such as schooling, the law, or mass media. Part III, “Multiplicity and Contention among Ideologies,” emphasizes the existence of variability, contradiction, and struggles among ideologies within any given society. This will be the first collection of work to appear in this rapidly growing field, which bridges linguistic and social theory. It will greatly interest linguistic anthropologists, social and cultural anthropologists, sociolinguists, historians, cultural studies, communications, and folklore scholars.
Much attention is now given to academic language, particularly in content areas such as science, amid persistent achievement disparities between students classified as English Language Learners, and more recently, Long Term English Learners, and their English-proficient peers. This attention has fueled debate about the precise features of such language and the best ways to help students develop them. This work uses data from ethnographic observation and recordings of student interactions of a fifth grade cohort in a bilingual education program to show that by allowing students ample use of their full bilingual repertoires, extensive collaboration, and authentic experience and exposure to target language varieties, they are supported in their learning of new content and linguistic forms. The paper argues for a translanguaging perspective to teaching, whereby language and language acquisition are framed as social meaning-making processes and standardized forms are questioned, such that students can leverage familiar communicative practices and develop a critical awareness of target discourses including the so-called language of science. The paper closes with a precaution about oversimplifying translanguaging pedagogies to a linguistic free-for-all, stressing the importance of authentic input in target forms if these are expected outcomes.
This research provides an insight into how deficit perspectives about everyday language practices can be challenged and offers possibilities for both enhancing classroom teaching and learning and building on students’ everyday language skills and experiences in service of learning. In this study, nine teachers and 105 students in grades 5, 6, 7 and 8 collaboratively explored students’ everyday language practices, skills and experiences. As co-researchers and ethnographers of their own language practices, these students who spoke 31 different languages and dialects and engaged in wide ranging multimodal activity were given the opportunity to explicitly recognise and use their ‘repertoires of linguistic practice’ (Gutiérrez & Rogoff, 2003) as tools for thinking and acting in their study of English Language Arts. Teachers used this knowledge to design National English curriculum linked lessons and activities. Qualitative analysis reveals positive influences on classroom culture, student identity and confidence and a very noticeable shift in teachers’ expectations of their students’ abilities.
This article reports findings from a qualitative study of Spanish-English code-switching- or Spanglish- among bilingual Latina/Latino sixth graders at a middle school in East Los Angeles. Analysis of the data revealed significant parallels between the skills embedded in students' everyday use of Spanglish and the skills that they were expected to master according to California's sixthgrade English language arts standards. In particular, students displayed an impressive adeptness at (1) shifting voices for different audiences, and (2) communicating subtle shades ofmeaning. It is argued that this skillful use of Spanglish could potentially be leveraged as a resource for helping students to further cultivate related academic literacy skills. The article concludes with a discussion of specific implications for how teachers might begin to leverage Spanglish as a pedagogical resource by helping students to recognize, draw on, and extend the skills already embedded in their everyday use of language. Copyright © 2010 by the National Council of Teachers of English. All rights reserved.
In this essay, Jennifer Keys Adair aims to clarify the concept of agency as a tool for improving the educational experiences of young children in the early grades. She conceptualizes agency in the context of schooling as the ability to influence what and how something is learned in order to expand capabilities, drawing on economic theories of human development, agency, and capability as they might be applied to early learning in schools. An understanding of early childhood education aimed at expanding children's capabilities stands in contrast to the currently prevalent emphasis on preparing children for the knowledge and skills tested in elementary grades. Through her classroom-based examples of student agency and her call to bring cultural and varied perspectives into the discussion, Adair hopes to encourage dynamic, agentic learning experiences for all children, not just those of privilege.
This article draws on scholarship in educational and linguistic anthropology to explore awareness of Spanish-English code-switching among bilingual Chicana/o and Latina/o students in a sixth-grade English Language Arts classroom. Analysis of qualitative data gathered via participant observation, video/audio recording, and semistructured interviews reveals that students articulated practical and discursive forms of awareness and that these forms of awareness were also sometimes embodied in their language use. It is argued that viewing awareness as a continuum affords a clearer understanding of the full range of their awareness by allowing for embodied reflections of awareness and shifts in individual speakers’ awareness across contexts.
The language used to construct knowledge, beliefs, and worldviews in school science is distinct from the social language that students use in their everyday ordinary life. This difference is a major source of reading difficulty for many students, especially struggling readers and English-language learners. This article identifies some of the linguistic challenges involved in reading middle-school science texts and suggests several teaching strategies to help students cope with these challenges. It is argued that explicit attention to the unique language of school science should be an integral part of science literacy pedagogy.
Even casual observations of children's everyday lives reveal that they are constantly engaged in talk and other forms of social interaction. Dialogue and the Development of Children’s Thinking provides a clear, accessible and well-illustrated case for the importance of spoken dialogue for children’s intellectual development during the school years. The book draws on extensive research to provide a ground-breaking new account of this relationship, and closely relates the research findings to real-life classrooms, so that it is of practical value to teachers and parents concerned that their children are offered the best possible learning opportunities. Importantly, it provides hard evidence from original research to show that the quality of classroom talk improves the quality of children’s thinking and educational attainment. The book also provides a new and more educationally-relevant interpretation of sociocultural theory, based on the work of Vygotsky, which explains the fascinating relationship between engagement in dialogues and learning. By using evidence of how the collective construction of knowledge is achieved, and how engagement in dialogues shapes children's educational progress and intellectual development, the authors provide a text which will be essential for educational researchers, postgraduate students of education and teachers, and also of interest to many psychologists and applied linguists.