The Routledge Handbook

of Educational Linguistics

The Routledge Handbook of Educational Linguistics provides a comprehensive survey of the core and
current language-related issues in educational contexts. Bringing together the expertise and
voices of well established, as well as emerging, scholars from around the world, the handbook
offers over 30 authoritative and critical explorations of methodologies and contexts of educa-
tional linguistics, issues of instruction and assessment, and teacher education, as well as coverage
of key topics such as advocacy, critical pedagogy, and ethics and politics of research in educational
linguistics. Each chapter relates to key issues raised in the respective topic, providing additional
historical background, critical discussion, reviews of pertinent research methods, and an assess-
ment of what the future might hold.
This volume embraces multiple, dynamic perspectives and a range of voices in order to move
forward in new and productive directions, making The Routledge Handbook of Educational Linguistics
an essential volume for any student and researcher interested in the issues surrounding language
and education, particularly in multilingual and multicultural settings.

Martha Bigelow is Associate Professor at the University of Minnesota. Her research focuses on
the language learning and cultural adaptation of immigrant youth in U.S. schools. She is co-author
of Literacy and Second Language Oracy, with Elaine Tarone and Kit Hansen, and author of Mogadishu
on the Mississippi: Language, Racialized Identity and Education in a New Land.

Johanna Ennser-Kananen is a Clinical Assistant Professor at Boston University. Her research

focuses on multilingualism, linguistic legitimacy, language ideologies, and culture learning in
educational settings.
Routledge Handbooks in Applied Linguistics

Routledge Handbooks in Applied Linguistics provide comprehensive overviews of the key topics in
applied linguistics. All entries for the handbooks are specially commissioned and written by
leading scholars in the field. Clear, accessible, and carefully edited Routledge Handbooks in Applied
Linguistics are the ideal resource for both advanced undergraduates and postgraduate students.

The Routledge Handbook of Educational Linguistics

Edited by Martha Bigelow and Johanna Ennser-Kananen
The Routledge Handbook of Forensic Linguistics
Edited by Malcolm Coulthard and Alison Johnson
The Routledge Handbook of Corpus Linguistics
Edited by Anne O’Keeffe and Mike McCarthy
The Routledge Handbook of World Englishes
Edited by Andy Kirkpatrick
The Routledge Handbook of Applied Linguistics
Edited by James Simpson
The Routledge Handbook of Discourse Analysis
Edited by James Paul Gee and Michael Handford
The Routledge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition
Edited by Susan Gass and Alison Mackey
The Routledge Handbook of Language and Intercultural Communication
Edited by Jane Jackson
The Routledge Handbook of Language Testing
Edited by Glenn Fulcher and Fred Davidson
The Routledge Handbook of Multilingualism
Edited by Marilyn Martin-Jones, Adrian Blackledge, and Angela Creese
The Routledge Handbook of Translation Studies
Edited by Carmen Millán-Varela and Francesca Bartrina
The Routledge Handbook of Language and Health Communication
Edited by Heidi E. Hamilton and Wen-ying Sylvia Chou
The Routledge Handbook of Language and Professional Communication
Edited by Stephen Bremner and Vijay Bhatia
The Routledge Handbook
of Educational Linguistics

Edited by Martha Bigelow and

Johanna Ennser-Kananen
First published 2015
by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2015 Taylor & Francis
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The Routledge handbook of educational linguistics / Edited by Martha
Bigelow and Johanna Ennser-Kananen, University of Minnesota.
pages cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Language and education—Handbooks, manuals, etc. I. Bigelow,
Martha, editor of compilation. II. Ennser-Kananen, Johanna, editor of
compilation. III. Title: Handbook of educational linguistics.
P40.8.R68 2015
306.44—dc23
2014000880
ISBN: 978-0-415-53130-6 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-79774-8 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
To Samuel and Sofia, whose births accompanied the production of this book.
May you always find and give joy through your languages.
This page intentionally left blank
 Contents

List of illustrations xi
List of contributors xii
Acknowledgments xxii

Introduction: The Advocacy Turn of Educational Linguistics 1

Martha Bigelow and Johanna Ennser-Kananen

PART 1
Ways of Knowing in Educational Linguistics 7

1. Methodologies of Second Language Acquisition 9

Susan M. Gass

2. Ethnography in Educational Linguistics 23

Teresa L. McCarty

3. Methodologies of Language Policy Research 38

David Cassels Johnson and Thomas Ricento

4. Researching Identity Through Narrative Approaches 50

Christina Higgins and Priti Sandhu

PART 2
Advocacy in Educational Linguistics 63

5. Language Advocacy in Teacher Education and Schooling 65

Christian Faltis

6. Educational Equity for Linguistically Marginalised Students 79

Anthony J. Liddicoat and Kathleen Heugh

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Contents

7. Is There a Place for Home Literacies in the School

Curriculum? Pedagogic Discourses and Practices
in the Brazilian Educational Context 92
Elaine Rocha-Schmid

8. Non-Native Teachers and Advocacy 105

Enric Llurda

PART 3
Contexts of Multilingual Education 117

9. Established and Emerging Perspectives on Immersion Education 119

Siv Björklund and Karita Mård-Miettinen

10. Bilingual Education 132

Ofelia García and Heather Homonoff Woodley

11. The Intersections of Language Differences and

Learning Disabilities: Narratives in Action 145
Taucia Gonzalez, Adai Tefera, and Alfredo Artiles

12. Theory and Advocacy for Indigenous Language

Revitalization in the United States 158
Mary Hermes and Megan Bang

13. Visual Literacy and Foreign Language Learning 171

Carola Hecke

14. When Language Is and Not the Issue: The Case of

“AAVE” Literacy Research, Teaching, and Labov’s
Prescription for Social (in)Equality 185
Elaine Richardson

PART 4
Critical Pedagogy and Language Education 195

15. Reframing Freire: Situating the Principles

of Humanizing Pedagogy Within an Ecological
Model for the Preparation of Teachers 197
María del Carmen Salazar

16. Heritage Language Education: Minority Language Speakers,

Second Language Instruction, and Monolingual Schooling 210
Jennifer Leeman and Kendall A. King

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 Contents

17. Disentangling Linguistic Imperialism in English

Language Education: The Indonesian Context 224
Setiono Sugiharto

18. Immigrants and Education 237

Lesley Bartlett and Jill Koyama

19. Critical Pedagogy in Classroom Discourse 252

Loukia K. Sarroub and Sabrina Quadros

PART 5
Language Teacher Education 261

20. Teachers’ Beliefs About Language Learning and Teaching 263

Sun Yung Song

21. Chinese L2 Literacy Debates and Beginner Reading in the United States 276
Helen H. Shen

22. Language Teacher Identity 289

Jason Martel and Andie Wang

23. Corpus-Based Study of Language and Teacher Education 301

Alex Boulton and Henry Tyne

24. Second Language Acquisition and

Language Teacher Education 313
Sachiko Yokoi Horii

PART 6
Language Instruction and Assessment 325

25. Primary Language Use in Foreign Language Classrooms 327

Jennifer Dailey-O’Cain and Grit Liebscher

26. Language Assessment in the Educational Context 339

Dina Tsagari and Jayanti Banerjee

27. Analyzing Classroom Language in CLIL 353

Do Coyle

28. Heritage Language Education in the United States:

The Chinese Case 370
Yun Xiao

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Contents

29. Learner Language 383

Sisko Brunni and Jarmo Harri Jantunen

PART 7
Ethics and Politics in Educational Linguistics 395

30. “Who Gets to Say?” Political and Ethical Dilemmas

for Researchers in Educational Linguistics 397
Kristen H. Perry and Christine A. Mallozzi

31. Education and Language Shift 414

Leanne Hinton

32. Looking Back, Sideways, and Forward:

Language and Education in Multilingual Settings 428
María E. Torres-Guzmán and Ester J. de Jong

33. Addressing Dialect Variation in U.S. K–12 Schools 446

Julie Sweetland and Rebecca Wheeler

Name Index 459

Index 479

x
 List of Illustrations

Figures
5.1. Language Advocacy Dimensions 71
23.1. Concordance Extract for however (Leeds Internet Corpus) 302
27.1. Pedagogical and Theoretical Influences on CLIL Classroom Language 355

Tables
11.1. Top Ten Languages Most Spoken by Emergent
Bilinguals at Home, 2009–2010 146
15.1. Curriculum Alignment to Ecological Theory and
Humanizing Pedagogy 203
15.2. Negative Terms Used to Describe Feelings Resulting
From Submersion Experience 205

xi
 List of Contributors

Alfredo Artiles is the Ryan C. Harris Memorial Endowed Professor of Special Education at
Arizona State University. His scholarship examines the consequences of educational inequities
related to the intersections of disability, race, social class, gender, and language.

Jayanti Banerjee is the Research Director for CaMLA, an Ann Arbor-based testing organization
that is a not-for-profit collaboration between the University of Michigan and the University of
Cambridge. She oversees research and development activities for all of CaMLA’s international
testing programs. Her previous research activities include a study to document the linguistic
markers of different levels of language proficiency and an investigation of differential item func-
tioning on the Michigan English Test. She has published in the areas of language testing and
English for academic purposes and is on EALTA’s membership committee.

Megan Bang is an Assistant Professor of the Learning Sciences and Human Development at the
University of Washington. Megan’s research is focused on understanding culture, cognition, and
development broadly, with a specific focus on the complexities of navigating multiple meaning
systems in creating and implementing more effective science learning environments with Indig-
enous students, teachers, families, and communities, both in schools and in community settings.
She conducts research that encompasses early childhood education, K–5, middle school, and
inter-generational programs in “informal learning environments.” Through community-based
methodologies, Dr. Bang is working to build community capacity to improve and transform
teaching and learning; revitalize culture, language, and well-being; ensure more Indigenous people
are engaged in critical research endeavors in the educational world; and contribute to the growth
and health of Indigenous communities.

Lesley Bartlett is an anthropologist and Associate Professor in the Department of International and
Transcultural Studies at Teachers College, Columbia University. Her research and teaching interests
include multilingual literacies, im/migration, and international education. She is the author,
co-author, or co-editor of several books, including: Teaching in Tension: International Pedagogies,
National Policies, and Teachers’ Practices in Tanzania; Refugees, Immigrants, and Education in the Global
South: Lives in Motion; Additive Schooling in Subtractive Times: Bilingual Education and Dominican Immi-
grant Youth in the Heights; and The Word and the World: Cultural Politics of Literacy in Brazil.

Martha Bigelow is Associate Professor at the University of Minnesota. Her research focuses on
the language learning and cultural adaptation of immigrant youth in U.S. schools. She is co-author
of Literacy and Second Language Oracy, with Elaine Tarone and Kit Hansen, and author of Mogadishu
on the Mississippi: Language, Racialized Identity and Education in a New Land.

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 List of Contributors

Siv Björklund is Professor in Swedish immersion at the Centre for Immersion and Multilingualism
at the University of Vaasa, Finland. She was a member of the pioneer research team evaluating the
first two Swedish immersion classes in Finland in the late 1980s and has been involved in teacher
preparation and professional development for immersion since the 1990s. For over 25 years, she
has worked with second and multiple language acquisition and immersion teaching focused on
successful integration of content and language learning. Currently, her main research interest includes
sociolinguistic, psycholinguistic, and pedagogical perspectives on multiple language acquisition. She
has published extensively on both national and international levels and is founding co-editor of the
new Journal of Immersion and Content-Based Language Education (first issue published in spring 2013).

Alex Boulton (Crapel–ATILF, CNRS & University of Lorraine) is researching uses of language
corpora in teaching and learning (‘data-driven learning’), and in exploring ways to make corpora
accessible in a wider range of situations for ‘ordinary’ language learners and teachers.

Sisko Brunni (Lic.Phil.) works as a university teacher in the University of Oulu, Finland. She
works in the Finnish as a Second Language Programme in the Department of Finnish Language.
Before coming to Oulu, she taught Finnish as a foreign language for nearly 15 years at the insti-
tutions of the European Union in Luxemburg. Her research interests focus on corpus linguistics,
phraseology, and lexical priming, and she is writing a PhD dissertation on phraseology in foreign
language learning and teaching.

Do Coyle is Professor of Learning Innovation at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. Specific

research interests include plurilingual learning, cross-disciplinary networks, teacher professional
learning, pupils as researchers, and visual learning. Current research involves teacher–learner
networks for analyzing effective CLIL practice using digital tools and the trans-European theo-
retical construction of a Framework for Pluriliteracies.

Jennifer Dailey-O’Cain is a Professor of German Applied Linguistics with a specialization in

sociolinguistics at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. Alongside her work on
code-switching in the classroom, her research includes work in language, migration and identity
in both Germany and German-speaking Canada; language attitudes in post-unification Germany;
and the differential use of English in online communication among German young people, on the
one hand, and Dutch young people, on the other.

Ester J. de Jong is Associate Professor of ESOL/Bilingual Education in the School of Teaching

and Learning at the University of Florida in Gainesville, Florida. Her research interests include
language policy, bilingual education, and mainstream teacher preparation for bilingual learners.
Her book, Foundations of Multilingualism in Education: From Principles to Practice (Caslon Publishing),
focuses on working with multilingual children in K–12 schools. Her work has been published in
the Bilingual Research Journal, the International Journal of Bilingualism and Bilingual Education, Language
Policy, Language and Education.

Johanna Ennser-Kananen is a Clinical Assistant Professor at Boston University. Her research

focuses on multilingualism, linguistic legitimacy, language ideologies, and culture learning in
educational settings.

Christian J. Faltis is the Dolly and David Fiddyment Chair in Teacher Education, Director of
Teacher Education, and Professor of Language, Literacy, and Culture in the School of Education

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List of Contributors

at University of California, Davis. He has also been Professor of Education at Arizona State
University. He received his PhD in Bilingual Cross-Cultural Education from Stanford University.
A long-time advocate for bilingualism in society, his research interests are bilingual learning in
academic contexts, immigrant education, and critical arts-based learning. His recent books are
Arts and Emergent Bilingual Youth (Chappell & Faltis, 2013), Implementing Language Policy in Arizona
(Arias and Faltis, 2012), and Education, Immigrant Students, Refugee Students, and English Learners
(Faltis & Valdés, 2011). He also published “Art and Living Inquiry into Anti-Immigration Dis-
course,” in the International Journal of Multicultural Education, 2012. He is an oil painter whose
work focuses on issues of Mexican immigrants, education, and the border.

Ofelia García is Professor in the PhD Programs in Urban Education and Hispanic and Luso-
Brazilian Literatures and Languages at The Graduate Center, CUNY. She has also been Professor
at Columbia University’s Teachers College and Dean of the School of Education at Long
Island University. García is the author of numerous books and articles on bilingual education,
bilingualism, and sociology of language. She is the Associate General Editor of the Interna-
tional Journal of the Sociology of Language.

Susan M. Gass is University Distinguished Professor at Michigan State University, where she serves
as Director of the English Language Center, Director of the Second Language Studies PhD program,
Co-Director of the Center for Language Education and Research, and Co-Director of the Center for
Language Teaching Advancement. She has published widely in the field of second language acquisi-
tion (more than 30 books and more than 100 articles, with works translated into Russian, Korean, and
Chinese) and is the co-author (with Jennifer Behney and Luke Plonsky) of Second Language Acquisi-
tion: An Introductory Course (Routledge) and Second Language Research: Methodology and Design with
Alison Mackey (Routledge). She is the winner of many awards, including the AAAL Distinguished
Scholarship and Service Award and the ACTFL-MLJ Paul Pimsleur Award for Research in Foreign
Language Education (1996 and 2012). She has served as the president of AAAL and of AILA.

Taucia Gonzalez is a doctoral student in Arizona State University’s Mary Lou Fulton Teachers
College with an emphasis in Special Education Leadership for School-Wide Equity and Access.
Her research focuses on how language ideologies mediate the intersections of culture, language,
and ability differences.

Carola Hecke teaches English and Spanish at St. Ursula-Schule, Hanover. Her dissertation is on
visual literacy in the foreign language classroom (2012). From 2006 to 2011, she worked in the
area of English Teaching Methodologies at the University of Goettingen. She is the author of
various articles.

Mary Hermes (Waabishkimiigwan) “Fong” has worked for about 17 years in Indigenous language
revitalization. She is a mixed heritage native person, and a long-time resident near the Lac Courte
Oreilles Reservation in Northern Wisconsin. She was a co-founder of the Waadookodaading Ojibwe
Immersion School there. Currently, she is an Associate Professor in Second Languages and Cultures
and the Culture and Teaching Program within the Department of Curriculum and Instruction
at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.

Kathleen Heugh is a socio-applied linguist whose research has focused on language policy and
planning and multilingual education in sub-Saharan Africa, particularly South Africa. More
recently, she has engaged in collaborative research in India and among migrant communities in

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 List of Contributors

Australia. She has led several large-scale studies of literacy, mother-tongue and multilingual
education, and large-scale assessment of students in multilingual settings. She teaches English
to international students at the University of South Australia, using pedagogical practices
informed by research and theories of multilingualism and multilinguality emerging from
Africa and South Asia.

Christina Higgins is an Associate Professor in the Department of Second Language Studies at

the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa. Her research explores the relationship between language
and identity with reference to local and global forces, resources, and affiliations. She has made
use of narrative analysis to study the identities of language learners in Tanzania and South Korea.
She is the author of English as a Local Language: Post-Colonial Identities and Multilingual Practices
(Multilingual Matters, 2009), co-editor (with Bonny Norton) of Language and HIV/AIDS
(Multilingual Matters, 2010), and editor of Identity Formation in Globalizing Contexts: Language
Learning in the New Millennium (Mouton de Gruyter, 2011).

Leanne Hinton is active in training, consultation, and writing about language revitalization of
endangered languages. She is a professor emerita of the linguistics department at the University
of California at Berkeley and a founding member of the board of the Advocates for Indigenous
California Language Survival. She has written numerous books and articles on language revital-
ization. Her books on the topic include Flutes of Fire: Essays on California Indian Languages (Heyday,
1994), The Green Book of Language Revitalization in Practice (Academic Press, 2001; now distributed
by Brill Press), How to Keep Your Language Alive (Heyday, 2002), and Bringing Our Languages Home:
Language Revitalization for Families (Heyday, 2013).

Sachiko Yokoi Horii is Assistant Professor of the School of Language and Culture at Osaka
University, Japan. Her research interests include language education policy, language teacher
education, and second language acquisition.

Jarmo Harri Jantunen is a Professor in the Department of Languages with a specialization in

Finnish Language at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. He received an MA (1996) and a PhD
(2004) in Finnish Language from the University of Joensuu, Finland. He is interested in corpus
linguistics, corpus methodology, and language learning. More specifically, his work examines
phraseology in language variants, especially multiword items in translations and learner language.
At the moment, he leads the International Corpus of Learner Finnish (ICLFI) project. Professor
Jantunen is the author of over 40 publications on the empirical and methodological issues in the
field of translation studies and language learning. He has organized several symposia and
conferences—most recently, the Learner Language, Learner Corpora Conference held in Oulu,
Finland, in 2012.

David Cassels Johnson is Assistant Professor of education at the University of Iowa in Iowa City,
IA. He investigates, teaches, and consults on the interaction between language policy and educa-
tional opportunity for minority language users from a sociolinguistic perspective. Recent journal
publications appear in TESOL Quarterly, Applied Linguistics, and Language Policy (among others)
and he is the author of Language Policy (2013), published by Palgrave Macmillan.

Kendall A. King (PhD, University of Pennsylvania) is Professor of Second Languages and Cul-
tures Education at the University of Minnesota, where she teaches and does research in the areas
of applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, and language policy. Her work appears in journals such as

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List of Contributors

Journal of Child Language, Applied Linguistics, and Journal of Language, Identity and Education.
Dr. King is also editor of the international journal Language Policy (Springer).

Jill Koyama is an anthropologist and Assistant Professor of Educational Policy Studies and Prac-
tice in the College of Education at the University of Arizona. Her research centers on three
integrated strands of inquiry: the productive social assemblage of policy; the controversies of
globalizing educational policy; and the politics of language policy and immigrant and refugee
education. Her book, Making Failure Pay: High-Stakes Testing, For-Profit Tutoring, and Public Schools,
was published in 2010 by The University of Chicago Press. Her work also appears in several
journals, including Journal of Educational Policy, Educational Researcher, Anthropology and Education
Quarterly, British Journal of Sociology of Education, Urban Review, and International Journal of Bilingual
Education and Bilingualism.

Jennifer Leeman is Associate Professor of Spanish at George Mason University and Research
Sociolinguist at the U.S. Census Bureau. Her research interests include discourses of language,
race, ethnicity, and nation in the United States; language policy; and critical approaches to Spanish
heritage language education. She has published in journals such as Heritage Language Journal,
Modern Language Journal, Journal of Sociolinguistics, and the Journal of Language and Politics, as well
as in numerous edited volumes. Recent publications have analyzed the racialization of Spanish
in the U.S. Census, accent discrimination in Arizona, language ideologies in Spanish heritage
language instruction, the commodification of language minorities in the Standards for Foreign
Language teaching, and the nature of evidence in U.S. language policy.

Anthony J. Liddicoat is Professor in Applied Linguistics at the Research Centre for Languages
and Cultures at the University of South Australia. His research interests include language and
intercultural issues in education, conversation analysis, and language policy and planning. In
recent years, his research has focused on issues relating to the teaching and learning of culture
through language study. His publications include Language-in-education Policies: The Discursive
Construction of Intercultural Relations (2013); Intercultural Language Teaching and Learning (2013, with
Angela Scarino); Linguistics and Intercultural Education in Foreign Language Teaching and Learning
(2013, with Fred Dervin); Introduction to Conversation Analysis (2011); Languages in Australian
Education: Problems, Prospects and Future Directions (2010, with Angela Scarino); Language Planning
in Local Contexts (2008, with Richard Baldauf); Discourse Genre and Rhetoric (2008); and Language
Planning and Literacy (2006).

Grit Liebscher is an Associate Professor of German at the University of Waterloo in Canada, and
she is a sociolinguist with a focus on interactional sociolinguistics and conversation analysis. Her
research interests include language use among German-Canadians and language and migration
in post-unification Germany. She has also co-edited (with a team of scholars from the Univer-
sity of Waterloo) a book on Germans in the North American diaspora.

Enric Llurda is a lecturer at Universitat de Lleida (Catalonia, Spain). He teaches courses on

English, applied linguistics, and intercultural communication, both at graduate and undergrad-
uate levels. His areas of interest are bilingualism, language attitudes, internationalization of higher
education, language awareness and language teaching, with a strong emphasis on non-native
teachers in TESOL. In 2005, he edited Non-Native Language Teachers: Perceptions, Challenges and
Contributions to the Profession (Springer, 2005), which was translated into Arabic in 2012 (King
Saud University). Enric Llurda has co-authored two books in Spanish: La conciencia lingüística en

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 List of Contributors

la enseñanza de lenguas (Graó, 2007) on the promotion of language awareness in language

education; and Plurilingüismo e interculturalidad en la escuela: Reflexiones y propuestas didácticas
(Horsori, 2010) on the development of multilingual and intercultural competence in second-
ary education. He has also published around 60 articles in edited volumes or specialized
journals, and his work has drawn invitations to participate as plenary speaker in national and
international conferences.

Christine A. Mallozzi is an Assistant Professor of literacy education in the Curriculum and

Instruction Department at the University of Kentucky, USA. She was awarded the 2009 Carol J.
Fisher Award for excellence in research from the University of Georgia and the 2007 Outstanding
Student Research Paper from the Georgia Educational Research Association. Dr. Mallozzi’s
research interests include gender and teacher education, middle grades reading education, feminist
theories, and discourse analysis. Her work involves studies of women teachers’ bodies and gender
issues among teachers.

Karita Mård-Miettinen is Associate Professor in Swedish immersion at the Centre for Immer-
sion and Multilingualism at the University of Vaasa, Finland. She has been involved in research,
teacher preparation, and professional development for immersion since the early 1990s, focusing
especially on immersion education in the early years. Currently, her main research interests include
sociolinguistic, psycholinguistic, and pedagogical perspectives on multiple language acquisition
and bilingual pedagogy. She has cooperated and published extensively on both national and
international levels. She is a member of the editorial board for the new Journal of Immersion and
Content-Based Language Education.

Jason Martel is an Assistant Professor of Language Teaching at the Monterey Institute of Inter-
national Studies. His research interests include language teacher identity construction and
content and language integration.

Teresa L. McCarty is the George F. Kneller Chair in Education and Anthropology at the Uni-
versity of California, Los Angeles. Her research, teaching, and outreach focus on educational
language policy, Indigenous/multilingual education, youth language, critical literacy studies, and
ethnographic studies of education. Her books include A Place to Be Navajo – Rough Rock and the
Struggle for Self-Determination in Indigenous Schooling (Erlbaum, 2002), Language, Literacy, and Power
in Schooling (Erlbaum, 2005), “To Remain an Indian”: Lessons in Democracy from a Century of Native
American Education (with K. T. Lomawaima, Teachers College Press, 2006), Ethnography and Language
Policy (Routledge, 2011), and Language Planning and Policy in Native America – History, Theory, Praxis
(Multilingual Matters, 2013).

Kristen H. Perry is an Associate Professor at the University of Kentucky and director of the Cultural
Practices of Literacy Study. Her work focuses primarily on literacy and culture in diverse commu-
nities, investigating everyday home/family and community literacy practices, particularly among
African immigrant and refugee communities. She also researches educational opportunities with
respect to ESL, literacy, and higher education for adult refugees. Perry is the 2012 recipient of the
Literacy Research Association’s Early Career Achievement award and their 2007 J. Michael Parker
Award for research in adult literacy. Her university teaching experience includes undergraduate and
Master’s-level teacher education courses in literacy, doctoral-level seminars, and student teacher
supervision; her other teaching experience includes teaching in multi-grade classrooms in Colo-
rado, teaching in Africa through the U.S. Peace Corps, and teaching adult refugees in the U.S.

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List of Contributors

Sabrina Quadros is a graduate of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and currently serves as

program coordinator for education in the Karen state of Myanmar/Burma. Her research interests
include literacy practices, ESL/EFL teaching, and critical and cultural studies in education.

Thomas Ricento is Professor at the University of Calgary, Canada, where he holds the first
North American Research Chair in English as an Additional Language. His PhD is in Applied
Linguistics from UCLA. He was a Fulbright Scholar in Colombia (1989) and Costa Rica (2000),
and has held visiting professorships at universities in Spain, Switzerland, and Chile. He has
received research funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Russell
Sage Foundation (USA) and from the Confucius Institute in Edmonton (Canada), among other
funders. He has published widely in the field of language policy in journal articles, books, and
book chapters, and his 2006 edited volume, An Introduction to Language Policy: Theory and Method
(Wiley Blackwell), has recently been translated and published in China. His forthcoming book,
Political Economy and Language Policy: English in a Global Context, will be published by Oxford
University Press.

Elaine Richardson is a native of Cleveland, Ohio, having earned her bachelor’s and master’s
degrees in English Studies from Cleveland State University (1987–1993) and her PhD from
Michigan State University (1996) in English and Applied Linguistics. She has held posts at The
University of Minnesota and Pennsylvania State University before accepting her current post as
Professor of Literacy Studies in the College of Education at The Ohio State University.

Elaine Rocha-Schmid is a freelance writer and an adult education tutor in London. Her main
research interests are in the areas of language and literacy, especially the relations of power struggle
through language between dominant and minority language groups and across social classes.

María del Carmen Salazar is an Associate Professor in Curriculum Studies and Teaching and
the Director of Teacher Education at the University of Denver Morgridge College of Educa-
tion. Her doctorate is in bilingual and multicultural foundations of education. Dr. Salazar’s
research and scholarship center on transformational teacher preparation for diverse learners.
Her research and teaching fields include teacher education, linguistically diverse education, and
college readiness for Latina/o students. Dr. Salazar has authored numerous U.S. and interna-
tional academic journal articles and book chapters, and given over 100 scholarly presentations
on her research areas. In addition, she is the lead author of a widely circulated policy document
titled, The State of Latinos 2008: Defining an Agenda for the Future. This document was presented
to members of the U.S. Congress in Washington, DC, and distributed to all members of the
U.S. Congress. Dr. Salazar served for three years on the Colorado Quality Teachers Commis-
sion to design a teacher identifier system for the state of Colorado. She has also served on the
Interstate Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium (InTASC) and has revised model
content standards and designed learning progressions for teacher licensing, assessment, and
development.

Priti Sandhu is an Assistant Professor in the TESOL Program of the English Department of
the University of Washington. She received her PhD in Second Language Acquisition
from the University of Hawai’i at Manoa. Her doctoral research analyzed the interactional
narratives of Indian women as they related the impact of medium of education on their lives.
She works with oral narratives using conversation analysis and membership categorization

xviii
 List of Contributors

analysis. Her research interests include gendered identities of women in patriarchal societies,
medium of education in postcolonial contexts, the accomplishment or destabilization of class-
based hierarchies in interactional data, the creation of empowered identities in narratives of
sex workers, the narration of English and its salience in the lives of language learners and
instructors, and TESOL. Her articles have appeared in Applied Linguistics and the Journal of
Language, Identity, and Education. She is currently developing her doctoral dissertation into a
book manuscript.

Loukia K. Sarroub is an associate professor of education at the University of Nebraska-

Lincoln, and her work is at the nexus of literacy studies, linguistic anthropology, and cross-cultural
and youth studies in and out of schools. She is the author of All American Yemeni Girls: Being
Muslim in a Public School and has published her research in journals such as Harvard Educational
Review, Reading Research Quarterly, Ethnography and Education, and Theory into Practice.

Helen H. Shen is a Professor of Chinese in the Department of Asian and Slavic Languages and
Literature, The University of Iowa. Shen’s primary research areas are Chinese as a second language
acquisition and teacher training with a focus on literacy development and reading education. She
has conducted a series of empirical studies in the areas of orthographic knowledge development,
Chinese L2 instructional methodology and strategy, and learning and reading strategies, and has
published extensively. Her research is rooted in the problems and questions that she has encoun-
tered during her undergraduate and graduate teaching practice. She is the lead author of the
teacher training book, Teaching Chinese as a Second Language:Vocabulary Acquisition and Instruction, and
three undergraduate Chinese language textbooks. She has also co-edited Research among Learners of
Chinese as a Foreign Language.

Sun Yung Song is a doctoral candidate in Foreign and Second Language Education at the Ohio
State University. She has worked for a federally funded teacher education program called
“ESL-Content Teachers Collaborative (ECTC),” which focuses on teacher collaboration to better
serve English language learners enrolled in K–12 public schools. She has also taught college-level
second language (L2) students in an intensive English program and tutored college students at a
writing center. Her research interests include pre-service and in-service teacher education, online
education for teachers’ professional development, professional development for non-native English
speaking teachers, and L2 academic literacy development. She has published papers in international
journals, such as Language Awareness.

Setiono Sugiharto is an Associate Professor in the English Department at the Faculty of Educa-
tion at Atma Jaya Catholic University, Jakarta, Indonesia. He has published in ASIA TEFL
Journal, TEFLIN Journal, and PERTANIKA Journal. He has also written hundreds of Ed-Opinion
in The Jakarta Post (Indonesia’s English leading newspaper), several of which have been reprinted
in The New Straits Times, The Pakistan Observer, and The Malaysian Insider.

Julie Sweetland is Director of Learning at the FrameWorks Institute, where she leads the trans-
lation of communications research findings into learning experiences for nonprofit leaders. Pre-
viously, she served as the Director of Teaching and Learning at Center for Inspired Teaching and
launched a graduate teacher preparation program for the University of the District of Columbia.
Her past research has focused on the intersection of language and race, on the role of language
variation and language attitudes on student learning, and on effective professional learning for

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List of Contributors

teachers. Julie completed her undergraduate work at Georgetown University, and her MA and
PhD in Linguistics at Stanford University.

Adai Tefera is a postdoctoral scholar at the Equity Alliance at Arizona State University’s Mary
Lou Fulton Teachers College. Her research focuses on the politics of educational policy, with a
particular focus on high stakes education policies and students of color with disabilities.

María E. Torres-Guzmán, Professor Emeritus of Bilingual/Bicultural Education at Teachers

College, Columbia University, holds a PhD from Stanford University. She has been a Visiting
Professor at the University of Helsinki, University of Waikato, Universidad del Pais Vasco (San
Sebastian/Donosti), Universidad de Puerto Rico (Rio Piedras), Universidad Complutense and
Universidad Autonoma (Madrid), and Michigan State University. Her work with teachers and
parents has been extensive, nationally and internationally. She has published 5 books, over
65 journal articles and book chapters, and edited 3 special topic journals. Her latest book is
Freedom at Work: Language, Professional and Intellectual Development.

Dina Tsagari is Lecturer in Applied Linguistics/TEFL at the Department of English Studies,

University of Cyprus. Her main interests are EFL/ESL testing and assessment, teaching/learning,
teacher education, materials design and evaluation, and adult education. She has conducted
research in Hong Kong, Cyprus, Greece, and other European countries and is the author of sev-
eral articles, book chapters, and edited volumes. She has given papers and plenary presentations
in several countries and is the coordinator of the Classroom-based Language Assessment SIG,
affiliated to EALTA.

Henry Tyne (University of Perpignan and VECT research group) is researching variation in
second language acquisition. He is interested in the use of corpus data to describe L2 (in particu-
lar, variation) and in the teaching of L2 French.

Andie Wang is a PhD candidate in Second Languages and Cultures in Curriculum and
Instruction, University of Minnesota. Her research interests include international students’
learning-to-teach experiences in teacher education, teaching Chinese as a second language,
and second language acquisition of Chinese.

Rebecca Wheeler, Professor of English Language and Literacy at Christopher Newport Uni-
versity in Newport News, VA, specializes in teaching Standard English in dialectally diverse
classrooms. Wheeler, a literacy consultant and spokesperson for the National Council of Teachers
of English, has consulted for public schools K–14 from New York to New Orleans, and from
Chicago and Baltimore to Arkansas. Recent publications include Code-Switching Lessons: Grammar
Strategies for Linguistically Diverse Writers (Heinemann, 2010), “Fostering Linguistic Habits of
Mind: Engaging Teachers’ Knowledge and Attitudes toward African American Vernacular
English” (Language and Linguistics Compass, 2010) and “Factoring AAVE into Reading Assessment
and Instruction” (Reading Teacher, March 2012).

Heather Homonoff Woodley is a PhD candidate in Urban Education at The Graduate Center,
CUNY. She is Adjunct Instructor in Bilingual Education and TESOL at The City College of
New York, CUNY, and Research Assistant with the CUNY-New York State Initiative on Emer-
gent Bilinguals.

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 List of Contributors

Yun Xiao is Professor of Chinese and Chair of the Department of Modern Languages at Bryant
University. Her research interests are second language acquisition and pedagogy, heritage lan-
guage learning, and Chinese syntax and discourse. She has published more than 20 journal
articles and book chapters. She also co-authored/abridged a four-volume Readings in Chinese
Literature Series (2008–2010) and co-edited/authored three research volumes: Chinese as a Her-
itage Language: Fostering Rooted World Citizenry (2008), Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language:
Theories and Applications (2008, 2011), and Current Issues in Chinese Linguistics (2011).

xxi
 Acknowledgments

It was only when one of our contributors called it a “Herculean task” that we realized that editing
a handbook is exactly that. In contrast to Hercules, however, we were fortunate to be able to
count on the support of a large number of people.

First and foremost, we could not be more grateful to our contributors for all the well researched,
beautifully written chapters we received. Not only did they lighten our workload as editors, but
reading these contributions also reminded us why we work in this field and for an advocacy turn
within it. Thank you!

Of course, this handbook would not exist without the initiative and support of Routledge and its
always helpful and eternally patient staff. Thank you for creating an opportunity for us to share
and promote our view on educational linguistics through an advocacy lens. Thank you for sup-
porting the process of compiling the book with your advice and answers to the gazillion ques-
tions that we as beginning editors had. And thank you for your patience when the deadlines came
faster than we had hoped.

A couple of friends lent their time generously to help us copyedit and format the manuscript for
this handbook. For this, we thank Yichen Li, Nicole Pettitt, Abigail Yoder, and Marko
Kananen.

xxii
 Introduction
The Advocacy Turn of Educational Linguistics
Martha Bigelow and Johanna Ennser-Kananen

The papers in this volume collectively show the many ways in which education and linguistics
intersect. The naming and definition of educational linguistics as a field is credited largely to
Bernard Spolsky in the 1970s (Spolsky 1974, 1978) out of recognition of the significance of
language-related issues in education and out of dissatisfaction with efforts to define applied lin-
guistics. Hult (2010) traces the roots of the field back further: as far as 1948, in a journal entitled
Language Learning: A Quarterly Journal of Applied Linguistics. Since then, many scholars identify
educational linguistics as their disciplinary home, and there are programs in educational linguis-
tics at major universities in the United States (e.g., Stanford University, University of Pennsylvania,
University of New Mexico, Monterey Institute of International Studies). Scholars from the Uni-
versity of Pennsylvania, such as Dell Hymes, Nessa Wolfson, Teresa Pica, and Nancy Hornberger,
have been crucial to shaping and championing educational linguistics as a field in its own right,
while negotiating spaces for educational linguistics in journals and professional associations that
identify with the broader field of applied linguistics.
Spolsky noted that the term educational linguistics is necessarily ambiguous. He says, “it includes
those parts of linguistics relevant to educational matters as well as those parts of education con-
cerned with language” (Spolsky 2010, 2). As seen in Spolsky’s work, across many decades, his
rationale for distinguishing educational linguistics from the broader field of applied linguistics has
always been to draw attention to critical and often politically charged issues of language in edu-
cational contexts. Spolsky has also held firmly to the position that educational linguistics should
take a problem- and practice-oriented approach that is solidly grounded in “principles and
practices derived from the relevant theoretical and empirical disciplines” (Spolsky 1978, 175).
Nancy Hornberger, in her historical account of the field and of the program at the University of
Pennsylvania, concludes that there have been continual emphases in educational linguistics “on
the integration of linguistics and education, close relationships among research, theory, policy and
practice, and a focus on language learning and teaching” (2001, 5). Later, in 2011, Hult and King
explain that

the field is problem-centered as it was formed—and continues to be shaped by—pressing

real-world questions, many of which concern how best to provide equitable access to lan-
guage and education for all students, and for linguistic and cultural minority students in

1
Martha Bigelow and Johanna Ennser-Kananen

particular. The field is global in the sense that it takes an international, often comparative
approach to these problems, but also one that is locally grounded and culturally informed.
(2011, 5)

Educational linguistics, and the field of educational linguistics, has been and continues to be
activist, practical, and outwardly engaged, by definition.
The breadth of topics included in the field of educational linguistics can be seen in previously
published books, articles, chapters and edited volumes that claim educational linguistics as their
base (Alatis 1994; Brumfit 1997; Freeman 1994; Hornberger 2004; Hult and King 2011; Spolsky
2010; Stubbs 1986; van Lier 1994). However, it is notable that many scholars (including us) are
doing the work of educational linguistics, as defined by Spolsky, Hornberger, Hult, and King, but
doing so without claiming the label or in the absence of a formalized program named as such.
In other words, there are scholars doing the work of educational linguistics who identify with
and draw from a wide range of theories and disciplines. Educational linguistics has a tradition of
producing knowledge that contributes to public debates, that translates research for many differ-
ent stakeholders, and engages in dialogue with stakeholders in order to be action oriented. The
present volume seeks to continue in this tradition and aims to contribute to the field of educational
linguistics in two ways: (1) by expanding the community of scholars thought to do educational
linguistics to include more international voices and to include the voices of emerging scholars
together with those who are well established, and (2) by explicitly focusing on advocacy. We
believe that the field of educational linguistics is still in the process of discovering how to leverage
scholarship for advocacy aims, and this handbook offers many interesting and useful examples of
advocacy. One need not look far to find a crisis in education that is linked to language learning,
language loss, or educational policy. It seems almost impossible for educational institutions to
keep pace with the need to sustain and produce multilingualism, as well as educate students of
many different dialect backgrounds. Education plays an essential role in global societies. On the
one hand, schools are sites of production and reproduction of culture (Bourdieu and Passeron
1977); on the other hand, research in educational contexts that adopts a critical lens, and a goal
for social justice, can result in institutional and individual permeability and consciousness raising
(Freire 1985). Many of the chapters in this volume show that research in educational linguistics
can produce knowledge that can give agency to educators, students, and families, and thus create
streams of resistance and action that can effect change in arenas where education and language
intersect. For this reason, the role of advocacy in language-related scholarship that works within
the contexts of education is critical.
This volume aims to take stock of the field of educational linguistics almost five years after
Spolsky and Hult’s comprehensive Handbook of Educational Linguistics, which was published in
2010. Contributors to the present volume were carefully chosen based on their expertise, but also
because they represent diverse methodological approaches, geographic regions of the world, and
inter- or trans-disciplinarity in their approach to inquiry in educational linguistics. Our intent is
to welcome new voices, perspectives, and topics into dialogues that center on addressing critical
issues in education, through the dynamics of language use, choice, policy, learning, and teaching.
Each chapter offers an overview of an issue that should serve as a valuable entry point for some-
one new to the field, as well as a useful compass for a colleague who is familiar with the topic.
The first part of this book includes chapters focusing on research methodologies in educa-
tional linguistics. This section represents various epistemological roots of educational linguistics,
including cognitive second language acquisition (Gass), anthropology (McCarty), and language
policy (Johnson and Ricento). Higgins and Sandhu’s chapter takes readers into two areas not
necessarily associated with educational linguistics: identity and narrative analysis. One might

2
 Introduction

argue that neither identifier has an obvious connection to education, yet this chapter outlines
many new and fruitful directions for researchers. Together, these four chapters underline the
importance of maintaining methodological rigor through established methodologies, as well as
encouraging the use of new methodologies, both of which are needed for the research to con-
tribute to changes in educational contexts.
Part Two asked authors to explore the issue of advocacy in their respective areas of expertise:
teacher education and schooling (Faltis), linguistically marginalized students (Liddicoat and
Heugh), home and school literacy (Rocha-Schmid), and non-native teachers (Llurda). The chap-
ters in this part make a powerful argument that an advocacy turn in educational linguistics is
needed to move away from deficit-oriented perceptions of L2 learning and teaching once and
for all, and to firmly root the field in sociocultural and sociopolitical aspirations that take a clear
stance toward equitable multilingual education.
The purpose of Part Three of the book is to assure the inclusion of various educational con-
texts. Immersion education (Björklund and Mård-Miettinen), bilingual education (García and
Woodley), foreign language learning (Hecke), and indigenous language revitalization (Hermes
and Bang) are represented, as well as advocacy for minoritized learners in mainstream settings
(Gonzalez, Tefera, and Artiles, and Richardson). As the authors of these chapters outline the spe-
cific needs and assets of emergent multilingual students, they also emphasize that change towards
a normalization of “heteroglossic language practices” (García and Woodley) must and can occur
in classroom contexts as well as on systemic levels, and in practice as well as theory.
Part Four extends the discussion by focusing on a variety of issues through the lens of critical
pedagogy. This section begins with a refresher on Freire that is applied to teacher education
(Salazar). Leeman and King explore the definitions, ideologies, and politics and practices of her-
itage language education. English language education in Indonesia (Sugiharto) illuminates the
powerful ways educational policy can result in linguistic imperialism. Bartlett and Koyama’s
chapter highlights the utility of interdisciplinarity to address urgent issues in language education
of (im)migrants that have the potential to promote multilingualism. Sarroub and Quadros return
to Freire to discuss theoretical and practical issues of critical pedagogy in classroom discourse. In
all, this part intends to reactivate and reconfigure a critical pedagogy approach for the purpose of
promoting multilingualism in education.
Part Five offers a section entirely devoted to language teacher education, an area of educational
linguistics that has been neglected. This section explores teachers’ beliefs (Song) and identities
(Martel and Wang), as well as more specific topics, such as the dilemmas Chinese teachers face as
they develop their students’ literacy (Shen), how corpora can be used in teacher education
(Boulton and Tyne), and how teachers learn to analyze learner language (Horii). As these authors
work rigorously to contribute to the field of educational linguistics, many of them also note a
dearth of research in their areas of expertise. Our hope is that their contributions will inspire
more research that is needed in the area of language teacher education for the promotion of
multilingualism and linguistic equity.
Part Six addresses language instruction across different educational settings: foreign language
classrooms (Dailey-O’Cain and Liebscher), settings where students experience content and lan-
guage integrated learning (CLIL; Coyle), and Chinese heritage language education (Xiao).
Tsagari and Banerjee explore language assessment and education broadly and Brunni and Jantu-
nen offer a useful overview of learner language that draws on multiple traditions and research
programs in second language acquisition. With their analyses of critical issues in language
instruction and assessment, the authors of this section give concrete examples of the challenges
and successes of multilingual education and, based on these, offer future paths for the field of
educational linguistics to take.

3
Martha Bigelow and Johanna Ennser-Kananen

Part Seven concludes this collection with chapters focusing on ethics and politics in educa-
tional linguistics. Perry and Mallozzi’s chapter speaks specifically to researchers who are doing
work in educational linguistics. Hinton’s chapter on language shift explores the frequent tensions
between educational institutions and language maintenance/revitalization. Torres-Guzmán and
de Jong’s chapter analyzes issues of language and education in multilingual settings and, finally,
Sweetland and Wheeler’s chapter explores ethical and political issues related to dialect variation
in U.S. schools. By dedicating a whole section to these important ethical topics, we aim to under-
line the importance of dealing with ethical questions when doing research in educational linguis-
tics. Only if we remain self-critical and committed to high ethical standards can we truly claim
to be advocates for multilingualism and equity in education.
To further orient readers, we would like to point out that each chapter in this volume con-
forms roughly to the following structure:

Historical Perspectives—This section locates the chapter in the field through a historical lens and
indicates how the topic may have arisen from other disciplines or through interdisciplinary
inquiry.
Core Issues and Key Findings—This section names assumptions related to the research on the
topic and offers a review of the most important contributions to the current state of the
discussion.
Research Approaches—This section outlines the traditional epistemologies employed on their
topic.
New Debates—The most important current dilemmas of the topic are presented.
Implications for Education—In this section, authors link their chapters to issues in education and
offer their views about future directions for research in educational linguistics.
Further Reading—In this section, authors list the most important historical and recent books and
articles on their topic.

We hope that readers will find it interesting and important to note how different researchers
balance or situate their work within and between contexts of education, language/linguistics, and
social change. It is a continual challenge to remain relevant to education and educators while
continuing to create new, theoretically-grounded, disciplinary knowledge that is difficult
(or irresponsible) to apply immediately. It is our hope that this volume will inspire thinking,
theorizing, and action among new and established researchers.

References
Alatis, J. E. (Ed.) 1994. Educational linguistics, crosscultural communication, and global interdependence. Washington,
DC: Georgetown University Press.
Bourdieu, P., and Passeron, J. C. 1977. Reproduction in education, society, culture. Beverly Hills: Sage.
Brumfit, C. 1997. The teacher as educational linguist. In L. van Lier and D. Corson (Eds.), Knowledge about
langauge (Vol. 6, pp. 163–172). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Freeman, D. 1994. Educational linguistics and the knowledge base of language teaching. In J. E. Alatis (Ed.),
Georgetown University round table on languages and linguistics 1994 (pp. 180–196). Washington DC: George-
town University Press.
Freire, P. 1985. The politics of education: Culture, power and liberation. Translated by Donaldo Macedo. MA:
Bergin and Garvey Publishers.
Hornberger, N. H. 2001. Educational linguistics as a field: A view from Penn’s program on the occasion of
its 25th anniversary. Working Papers in Educational Linguistics, 17(1, 2), 1–26.
Hornberger, N. H. 2004. The continua of biliteracy and the bilingual educator: Educational linguistics in
practice. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 7(2–3), 155–171.
Hult, F. M. 2010. The history and development of educational linguistics. In B. Spolsky and F. M. Hult
(Eds.), The handbook of educational linguistics (pp. 10–24). New York: Wiley-Blackwell.

4
 Introduction

Hult, F. M., and King, K. (Eds.) 2011. Educational linguistics in practice: Applying the local globally and the global
locally. Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters.
Spolsky, B. 1974. The Navajo reading study: An illustration of the scope and nature of educational linguis-
tics. In J. Quistgaard, H. Schwarz, and H. Spong-Hanssen (Eds.), Applied linguistics: Problems and solutions:
Proceedings of the Third Congress on Applied Linguistics, Copenhagen, 1972 (Vol. 3, pp. 553–565). Heidelberg:
Julius Gros Verlag.
Spolsky, B. 1978. Educational linguistics: An introduction. Rowley, MA: Newbury House.
Spolsky, B. 2010. Introduction: What is educational linguistics? In B. Spolsky, and F. M. Hult (Eds.), The
handbook of educational linguistics (pp. 1–9). New York: Wiley-Blackwell.
Stubbs, M. 1986. Educational linguistics. New York: Blackwell Publishers.
van Lier, L. 1994. Educational linguistics: Field and project. In J. E. Alatis (Ed.), Georgetown University round
table on languages and linguistics 1994 (pp. 197–209). Washington DC: Georgetown University Press.

5
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 Part 1
Ways of Knowing in
Educational Linguistics
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 1
Methodologies of Second
Language Acquisition
Susan M. Gass

Historical Perspectives
One can only examine historical perspectives if one has a sense of when “history” begins. For
the purposes of this chapter, I take the 1960s as the beginning of the field of second language
acquisition (see Thomas 1998; Gass, Fleck, Leder, and Svetics 1998 for a debate on the field’s
appropriate early date). At that time and even slightly prior to that time, most work in the field
was based on a need to find a pedagogical means to help people learn a language beyond their
first. Hence, the “methodology” in the early part of the 20th century was a pedagogical meth-
odology, not a research methodology, the latter being the focus of this chapter. This chapter is
further restricted primarily to quantitative methodology, given space limitations, although differ-
ences in quantitative/qualitative approaches are discussed at the end of the chapter.
In order to place research methodology in context, I looked at articles that were published in
the early days of the field. To do that, I considered research published in one journal, Language
Learning. This journal was selected because it was the only journal that existed during the time-
frame of interest that was specifically devoted to the discipline of language learning, as is made
clear in the journal title. I looked at the issues from 1967 through 1979 to get an idea of trends
in research, coding the articles into five specific categories: pedagogy, descriptive, data analysis,
testing, and position papers, with an additional category (other) for articles that were not easily
classifiable into one of the five main categories. The category most relevant to this chapter is
“data analysis” because that is the category for which data were collected and analyzed, the sine
qua non of empirical research. It is important to note that prior to this time, there was little elicited
data used in SLA research; many publications focused on teaching and did not present data based
on learning. Further, early research in SLA was based on research from either linguistics or from
child language acquisition, in terms of theoretical questions posed and research tools used.
What I found was that in this 17-year period, of the 237 articles considered, most fell into two
categories: pedagogy (55) and data analysis (57). A closer look reveals a major shift in emphasis
in the early 1970s. In particular, 1972 appears to be a watershed year for data analysis. In that year,
five articles contained original data with analysis (compared to four in the other dominant cate-
gory of pedagogy), whereas in the previous two years combined (1970 and 1971) there had been
16 in the pedagogy category and only one in the data analysis category. To further this point, in

9
Susan M. Gass

1972, the five data analysis articles were nearly as many as had appeared in the prior five years
combined (which was six). Additional evidence for the importance of this period in the use of
original data and original analyses is the fact that in the subsequent six-year period (1973–1979),
there were 46 articles in that category. In other words, in the early 1970s, and even more precisely,
around 1972, the field appears to have taken an important shift in emphasis.
Because data analysis was limited during the time leading up to the 1970s, research methods
were not a focus of attention and one is hard-pressed to find discussions on the topic. Gass and
Polio (2014) posed the question as to why this shift in focus occurred. We suggested that the issue
of types of data for analysis was problematized in the 1972 Interlanguage article by Selinker. In that
article, he made numerous claims that relate to what data are allowable; the most well-known of
these is presented below:

. . . observable data to which we can relate theoretical predictions: the utterances which are
produced when the learner attempts to say sentences of a TL . . .
(Selinker 1972, 213–214)

According to this claim, only utterances produced in meaningful performance situations are
of use in understanding how languages are learned. In particular, research is limited to three types
of data:

a. utterances in the learner’s native language produced by the learner,

b. interlanguage utterances produced by the learner, and
c. target language utterances produced by native speakers of that target language.

Important to this discussion is that theoretical predictions in a relevant psychology of second

language learning must be the surface structures of interlanguage sentences. As part of this,
Selinker explicitly highlights two data types that are unacceptable: grammatical judgment data
and nonce data. The former are not relevant because researchers “will gain information about
another system, the one the learner is struggling with, i.e., the TL” (213). And the latter are not
relevant because “behavior which occurs in experiments using nonsense syllables” does not pro-
duce meaningful performance (210), where meaningful performance is defined as “the situation
where an ‘adult’ attempts to express meanings, which he may already have, in a language which
he is in the process of learning” (210). In sum, “. . . data resulting from these latter behavioral
situations [including nonsense syllables] are of doubtful relevancy to meaningful performance
situations, and thus to a theory of second-language learning” (210). These statements provide an
important foundation for discussions of research methodology in second language acquisition by
making explicit claims of what data are possible and which are not.
During the 1960s and 1970s there were few discussions relating particularly to research meth-
odology. The few notable exceptions centered on issues of grammaticality/acceptability judg-
ments (Schachter, Tyson, and Diffley 1976; Corder 1973; Hyltenstam 1977), all of which took the
position, contra to Selinker’s claims, that their use was crucial in that certain questions about sec-
ond language knowledge (as opposed to use) could only be answered through forced data elicita-
tion, such as intuitional data. Within empirical studies, judgment data were typically collected
through a forced binary choice (grammatical versus ungrammatical) of a set of sentences, and
learners were often asked to modify the ungrammatical sentences to make them grammatical.
The tide began to turn as research methodology came into focus in the 1980s with the pub-
lication of a book specifically designed to address issues in research methodology and designed
for an applied linguistics audience (Hatch and Farhady 1982). In the mid-1980s, other books and

10
 Methodologies of Second Language Acquisition

treatises became more prevalent, with discussions focusing on a wide range of topics related to
research methods (Cook 1986, on experimental methods; Henning 1986, on quality in quantita-
tive research; Chaudron 1986, on the need for quantitative and qualitative research). This was
followed by general textbooks on research in second language learning (Brown 1988; Chaudron
1988; Seliger and Shohamy 1989; Hatch and Lazaraton 1991; Johnson 1992; Nunan 1992). At
about the same time as the appearance of general textbooks, there came a number of journal arti-
cles and books dealing with specific topics (e.g., t-tests, Brown 1990, Siegel 1990; power and effect
size, Lazaraton 1991, Crookes 1991; Varbrul, Young and Bayley 1996; analysis of frequency data,
Saito 1999, Young and Yandell 1999; classroom research, Nunan 1991; structural equation model-
ing, Matsumura 2003). These are early (and current) signs of the field’s attempt to create cogent
arguments about issues of methods and analysis, with a focus on quality, to which I turn below.
Throughout the history of research methods, there was an awareness of the lack of familiarity
by researchers and consumers of research with methods of research, the value of experimental
research, and techniques for data analysis (Ingram 1978; Cook 1986; Lazaraton, Riggenbach, and
Ediger 1987; Brown 1991; 1992; Lambert 1991). Becoming aware of shortcomings is a sign of
the field’s initial attempts to create standards relating to methods and analysis.
A final indication of the role of methods comes from statements from leading journals in the
field. In 1992, TESOL Quarterly, as part of their general guidelines for article submission, intro-
duced a section with the title “Statistical Guidelines” (see also Chapelle and Duff 2003, where
qualitative methods are included). They did this to ensure “high statistical standards” (794) for
publication in the journal. Among the topics considered important were issues of reporting
(see also Polio and Gass 1997), including an appropriate layout of results, along with a discussion
of assumptions underlying the use of particular statistical tests. In the following year, Valdman
(1993) included an editorial comment in Studies in Second Language Acquisition in which he brought
to the attention of the journal readership the importance of replication (related to the issue of
reporting mentioned earlier; see also Ellis 1999, editor’s statement). Valdman took the issue a step
further by introducing a replication section in the journal. Language Learning was also an early
leader with regard to rigor. In 1993, a new directive for contributors to the journal appeared
(“Instructions for Contributors,” 151): “Manuscripts considered for publication will be reviewed
for their presentation and analysis of new empirical data, expert use of appropriate research methods . . .”
(emphasis added). That same journal became even more stringent with issues of reporting and
stated in 2000 that all submissions to the journal were required to include effect sizes for all major
statistical comparisons. Other journals in the field have recently followed suit (e.g., Language Learn-
ing and Technology, The Modern Language Journal, Language Teaching, and TESOL Quarterly). With
regard to standards and reporting, the emphasis has been on quantitative methods, but qualitative
guidelines have also received attention (e.g., Chapelle and Duff 2003, as well as treatments in
various research methods books; Dörnyei 2007; Gass and Mackey 2007; Mackey and Gass 2005;
2012). When considering guidelines for research, a slightly different set must be acknowledged, as
well—that for ethical research, an early statement of which came in 1980 from a TESOL Research
Committee (Tarone 1980). All of these guidelines (see also Loewen and Gass 2009) form an
important part of the development of the field.
A major step forward in the field of SLA was the establishment in 1997 of a series of books
titled Monographs on Research Methodology by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates under the editorship of
Susan Gass and Jacquelyn Schachter. This series continues to this day (under the editorship of
Susan Gass and Alison Mackey) with books on communication tasks (Yule 1997), stimulated recall
(Gass and Mackey 2000), conversation analysis (Markee 2000), case study research (Duff 2007),
priming methods (McDonough and Trofimovich 2009), questionnaires (Dörnyei with Taguchi
2009), think-alouds (Bowles 2010), and reaction time research (Jiang 2011).

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Core Issues and Key Findings/Research Approaches

Research methods in the field of SLA have continued to evolve with greater statistical and elici-
tation sophistication as a result. Norris and Ortega (2003), in an article related to measuring
acquisition, asked the basic question of what counts as acquisition. They argued that SLA is not
a monolithic phenomenon and a definition of acquisition must be understood in the context of
the theoretical perspective being investigated. Not only does the basic question of a definition of
acquisition depend on one’s theoretical orientation, but data types and research methodologies
also differ depending on the questions asked and the theoretical perspective taken. For example,
those who have focused on the acquisition of morphosyntax have often relied on intuitional
judgments (either binary, as in grammatical or ungrammatical, or fine-tuned comparisons, as in
magnitude estimation, Bard, Robertson, and Sorace 1996). Those who have taken a sociolinguistic
perspective rely on natural data or, at times, survey data (e.g., interviews and/or questionnaires,
cf. Dörnyei with Taguchi 2009). Those involved with the role of interaction and corrective
feedback make use of tasks to elicit appropriate data. Phonologists use acoustic measurements,
relying on instrumentation to assess perception and production, psycholinguists use a wide range
of techniques to better understand processing, and those concerned with on-line thought pro-
cesses have utilized a range of verbal report data. In sum, many tools are available to second lan-
guage researchers as they seek to better and more deeply understand how learning takes place.
As noted above, early research drew its elicitation tools primarily from linguistics and, to a
lesser extent, from child language acquisition. Linguistic-based research has become less preva-
lent, with current research methods relying to some extent on methods from other fields, such as
psychology/psycholinguistics, social psychology, and education (e.g., action research), and with
other methods developing out of second language questions themselves—for example, the line
of research known as input/interaction (see Gass and Mackey 2007 for a detailed discussion of
ways of conducting research in second language acquisition, along with assumptions underlying
research types). What stands out is the increased scrutiny of design and analysis, an area that I deal
with in the following section.

New Emphases and New Debates

This section reviews newer emphases in the field. There are two parts to this section: 1) new
techniques and 2) current emphases related to study quality. With regard to the first part, I focus
on issues related to eye-tracking and brain measures, namely Event-Related Potentials (ERP) and
functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). These are both newer technologies at least with
regard to research in second language acquisition. In the second part, I deal with broader issues,
such as dichotomies established by a quantitative/qualitative split, verbal reporting, and study
quality. In the latter, I discuss 1) replication and reporting, 2) meta-analysis, and 3) power and
effect size.

New Techniques
With increased interest in how second language learners put their evolving L2 knowledge to use
in real-time processing has come a concomitant emphasis on eye-movement research as a way of
making that determination (see Dussias 2010; Roberts 2012; Godfroid, Winke, and Gass 2013;
Roberts and Siyanova-Chanturia 2013, for overviews). This is done using an eye tracker, a
machine designed to measure and record one’s eye movements as an individual sees something
(text/pictures) on a screen. Included in these measurements are fixations (i.e., where and how
long an individual looks on the screen) and eye movements from one part of the screen to

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 Methodologies of Second Language Acquisition

another. Godfroid, Boers, and Housen (2013) argue for the significance of eye-movement research
in that knowing where someone looks and the movements of the eye reflect what is happening
in the mind (see Reichle, Pollatsek, and Rayner 2006, on the “eye-mind” link). Eye-movement
research provides the researcher with a glimpse of what learners are doing/thinking about as they
encounter language.
Eye-movement research has been used to investigate numerous research areas—for example,
lexical access and representation in bilinguals (e.g., Blumenfeld and Marian 2011; Duyck, Van
Assche, Drieghe, and Hartsuiker 2007; Felser, Sato, and Bertenshaw 2009; Flecken 2011; Van
Assche, Duyck, Hartsuiker, and Diependaele 2009; Van Assche, Drieghe, Duyck, Welvaert, and
Hartsuiker 2011); syntactic ambiguity resolution (e.g., Dussias and Sagarra 2007; Frenck-Mestre
and Pynte 1997; Roberts, Gullberg, and Indefrey 2008; see also reviews by Dussias 2010 and
Frenck-Mestre 2005); attention (Godfroid, Boers, and Housen 2013); and cognitive processes
during specific tasks, such as L2 testing (Bax and Weir 2012) and video-based L2 listening
(Winke, Gass, and Sydorenko 2010).
One common method is the visual-world paradigm in which eye movements are tracked as
participants respond to auditory input. Within this paradigm, researchers have investigated gram-
matical gender (Dussias, Valdés Kroff, Guzzardo Tamargo, and Gerfen 2013; see Dussias 2010; and
Huettig, Rommers, and Meyer 2011, for reviews) and ambiguity in subject pronouns (e.g., Ellert
2011; Ellert, Järvikivi, and Roberts in press; Wilson 2009). Participants see pictures on the screen,
and researchers are interested in which pictures are fixated on when hearing a particular input
stream. For example, when studying gender, if learners hear in Italian the sound la (feminine
article), are they more likely to focus on a feminine noun in a set of pictures that includes mas-
culine nouns, known as the competitors? In other words, the question is: What triggers lexical
activation?
The second common use of eye trackers is to understand processes involved in reading where
the concern is with processing difficulties (e.g., ambiguous sentence resolution). Processing dif-
ficulties are compounded by factors related to not only the L2, but also when considering L1-L2
differences (Dussias et al. 2013; Godfroid and Uggen 2013; Sagarra and Ellis 2013, Van Assche,
Duyck, and Brysbaert 2013). As with all new methodologies and adaptations of methodologies
to a new field, procedures for data elicitation need to be carefully thought out in response to new
questions being posed (see Spinner, Gass, and Behney 2013).
The second area to consider in this section is brain activity while using language. Neurocog-
nitive questions relate to processing and require research methodologies that go beyond behav-
ioral data, the latter of which have been prevalent to date in second language research. Because
questions have turned to understanding what underlies second language learning and second
language use and because brain-based research has matured to the point where there are reliable
measures, researchers have turned to these newer measures to complement extant behavioral data
and address theoretical questions. For example, Morgan-Short and Ullman (2012) present four
models of SLA and illustrate how two brain-related measures (both non-invasive), event-related
potentials (ERP) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), can be used to distinguish
among them.
ERPs represent electrophysiological responses to some stimulus (e.g., a word, a picture). Par-
ticipants wear a cap with electrodes that measure electrophysiological activity. As Morgan-Short
and Ullman (2012) point out, there is a significant body of L1 literature using ERPs, making
L1-L2 comparisons practical.
fMRIs enable researchers to understand the location of neuronal activity; one can see the brain’s
actual structure and can detect changes in blood oxygenation that reflect changes in cognitive
processing. In other words, blood oxygenation is a reflection of neuronal activity, which in turn

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Susan M. Gass

reflects cognitive processes. Given its emphasis on research methods, this chapter is not the place
for a discussion of findings. However, some of the areas of investigation are lexical, morphosyn-
tactic, and semantic processing—in some instances, as a function of proficiency, and in other
studies, addressing issues of implicit versus explicit learning (e.g., Morgan-Short, Sanz, Steinhauer,
and Ullman 2010; Morgan-Short, Steinhauer, Sanz and Ullman 2012). Because of the possibility
of pinpointing actual brain activity and because of the importance of understanding processing
and its relation to location of brain activity, brain-based studies may proliferate in the near future.
They do have two disadvantages, however. The first and the most obvious is the cost of the equip-
ment needed to conduct such research. The second, at least for fMRIs, is that participants must be
willing to put themselves through a session in which they must lie still and not move their heads.

Ongoing Issues

Quantitative Versus Qualitative Research

The current chapter has focused on quantitative methodology because that is where the greatest
amount of debate has occurred over the past 40–50 years. This is not to say that qualitative meth-
ods have been ignored, for it has long been recognized that both quantitative and qualitative
methods add to a richer picture of learning (e.g., Chaudron 1986; Lazaraton, Riggenbach, and
Ediger 1987; Brown 2004). However, a major split in the field of SLA is between those who
conduct quantitative and those who conduct qualitative research. The debate began years ago and
continues today (see Hulstijn, Young, and Ortega in press), although it is becoming common in
today’s research climate to include both research types in a single study, which is then referred to
as a mixed methods study. It is important to point out that both of these research types are broad
and varied, and these monikers belie the complexity in each.
In general and broad terms, quantitative research relies on “counting” and statistically analyzing
data stemming from a research design that usually includes some or all of the following: pre-test,
treatment, post-test(s). It stems from what has been known as the scientific method, in which
questions are addressed objectively—that is, without a researcher’s bias. Quantitative studies in sec-
ond language research have dominated over the years with growing sophistication (see above and
below) in the tools used for collection and analysis of data. Typical in quantitative research is the
use of numbers and statistics, a large number of participants/surveys/questionnaires (necessary for
statistical analysis), data categorized as variables, and the importance of generalizability, the extent
to which results are valid in other contexts and/or participants (see Chalhoub-Deville, Chapelle,
and Duff 2006; Gass 2006).
With regard to qualitative research, Friedman (2012, 181) points out, “[a]lthough we speak of
qualitative methods, what distinguishes qualitative inquiry from quantitative or experimental research
goes beyond procedures used to collect or analyze data. Qualitative research is a distinct approach to
scholarly inquiry that may also entail a different set of beliefs regarding the nature of reality (ontology)
and ways of knowing (epistemology).” Qualitative research, in general, emphasizes learning as a social
process and, consequently, focuses inter alia on the context of learning. Within the overall umbrella
of qualitative research are studies conducted within the framework of sociocultural theory (Lantolf
2012), community of practice, language socialization, and even language identity (see Friedman 2012).
These studies are conducted using tools of ethnography and conversation analysis (see Gass 2004).
Friedman suggests eight characteristics: 1) open inquiry, 2) inductive, 3) naturalistic, 4) descriptive/
interpretive, 5) multiple perspectives, 6) cyclical, 7) attention to context, and 8) focus on the particu-
lar. In contrast to the scientific method that underlies quantitative research, qualitative research
involves researchers who interpret, describe, and have open minds about what they will find.

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 Methodologies of Second Language Acquisition

Mixed methods research usefully combines these seemingly disparate approaches (Creswell
2003; Dörnyei 2007). There are numerous ways of considering this combination (although to
date, mixed methods do not dominate second language research); I mention three obvious ones
here. One could begin with a quantitative analysis and then realize that questions remain that are
best answered with further qualitative probing; alternatively, one could take a qualitative study as
exploratory and then gather quantitative data to support what one initially found. Or, as is per-
haps more common, one could combine the two in one study even though they may be reported
separately (see Winke, Gass, and Sydorenko 2010 and in press; Winke, Gass, and Myford 2013;
Winke and Gass in press). Triangulation of data (namely, using multiple data sources/types to
better understand a particular phenomenon) is becoming more common and more accepted in
second language research.

Verbal Reporting
Verbal reports consist of a number of different methodologies, including retrospective and con-
current (see Bowles, 2010). Common to all of them is the elicitation of thought processes while
conducting a particular task. This type of methodology has become more common in the past
10–15 years. In fact, an LLBA search for verbal reports and second language and verbal reports and foreign
language yielded nearly 70% in the period since 1998 (with some overlap in the two categories).
An even stronger result came from a search for stimulated recall, a subset of verbal reports; 98% of
all such studies have appeared in the years since 2000.
Verbal reports can be either concurrent (often known as think-alouds) or retrospective (as in after-
the-fact reporting). The latter type is often used with some sort of stimulus (see Gass and Mackey
2000). In this mode, participants complete a task, and some stimulus from that task is used as a way
of prompting the participant’s memory as to the thought processes during the task. Stimuli can be
in the form of an audio/visual recording of the event or a written text resulting from the event.
There are controversies related to both. An overriding concern is the extent to which what is
being verbalized accurately reflects the thought processes one is trying to capture (veridicality).
With retrospective data, such as stimulated recall, an important issue is the time that elapses
between the event and the collection of retrospective thoughts. The longer the difference, the less
accurate the recall. For concurrent protocols, the issue of veridicality is less significant; what is more
important is reactivity. Does the mere fact of doing a task while at the same time talking about
what one is thinking about affect the results? The issue of reactivity is not settled; a number of
studies point in different directions (Bowles 2010). Bowles’ book is particularly useful in this
regard because she gives criteria for selecting tasks that are more or less amenable to appropriate
use of verbal reporting. She notes that issues of reactivity are complex and are dependent on
numerous variables (e.g., type of reporting, proficiency level, type of instruction provided).

Study Quality
The preceding issues have dealt with newer methodologies; the remaining three have to do with
overall issues of quality. A recent concern in the field is the issue of study quality. What precisely
is intended by study quality varies from researcher to researcher; Plonsky (2013) notes that “as
many as 300 measures” (657) have been proposed to cover this concept, including measures that
are easily remediable, such as reporting standard deviations along with means, and some that are
less remediable, such as including (delayed) post-tests or pre-tests.
One of the early publications to investigate this issue is that of Plonsky and Gass (2011) (see
also Plonsky 2011 and Plonsky 2013). The ultimate claim is that research quality represents the

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Susan M. Gass

underlying value of the field. Broadly, one can conceive of issues of design, implementation, and
reporting of studies. In order to understand how L2 learning takes place, one obviously must rely
on studies (quantitative and qualitative) that report on the phenomenon, but if these studies lack
in rigor, our foundation collapses, and our research findings have little validity. More serious is the
fact that readers do not always know that a particular study lacks in validity. Both Plonsky and Gass
(2011) and Plonsky (2011) review the L2 literature on input and interaction over time and note
positive changes as well as weaknesses. For example, they note a large number of delayed post-tests,
which are an important feature if we are to understand long-term treatment effects, and more
reporting of instrument reliability. Weaknesses include the lack of pre-testing, nonrandom assign-
ment to conditions, and incomplete reporting. This last element is crucial when considering
replication, the topic I return to next.

Replication and Reporting

As noted in the American Psychological Association’s Publication Manual, “the essence of the
scientific method involves observations that can be repeated and verified by others” (2010, 12).
In research with a quantitative base, replication is important for the issue of generalizability; in
second language research, this is even more significant in that there is more variation than there
is with monolingual research. For example, are findings from one study portable to a population
not directly investigated? In particular, with second language research, there are issues related to
proficiency, L1-L2 relationships, and age that might yield different results. Furthermore, there
are often a smaller number of participants than in other social science research. With small
numbers of participants, how can one generalize to the broader population (or should we even
generalize at all)?
Polio and Gass (1997) have argued for the importance of replication while at the same time
acknowledging that “exact replication” is impossible given that a replication study will deal with
different individuals. Replication is a crucial part of developing a discipline in which research results
are not static, but rather part of a continuing process of refining and sharpening research results and
future research questions. In other words, replication is one way in which a field extends itself and
verifies itself. Replication continues to be of significant concern in current research, with emphasis
placed on increased robustness of results and generalizability (see Polio 2012 for an historical over-
view). An indication of the future of replication studies can be seen in 1) the creation by journals
of separate sections for reporting replications (e.g., Studies in Second Language Acquisition in1993 and
Language Teaching in 2007), and 2) books focused on issues of replication (Porte 2012) and general-
izability (Chaloub-Deville, Chapelle, and Duff 2006).

Synthesis of Research Results: Meta Analyses

Replication is one way of verifying findings, but it is not the only way. In recent years, meta-analyses
(see Norris and Ortega 2000) have become common in the field, with more than 30 appearing in
recent years. Topics that have been addressed are feedback (e.g. Li 2010), motivation (Masgoret and
Gardner 2003), strategy instruction (e.g., Plonsky 2011), and interaction (e.g., Mackey and Goo
2007). Through meta-analysis, one can compare studies that address common questions. It is a
“systematic procedure for quantitatively synthesizing findings across studies” (Gass with Plonsky
and Behney 2013, 64). As they further point out, “this technique also involves combining a sample
of data points. However, in meta-analysis, the participants are not individual people, but rather
individual studies and their data points are averages or effect sizes (e.g., Cohen’s d, correlation coef-
ficients). Thus, a meta-analysis is, in its most basic form, an average of averages” (64).

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 Methodologies of Second Language Acquisition

Because meta-analysis is relatively new to SLA and meta-analyses are still rare, one cannot predict
the long-term impact on the field. However, we can take as an indication of the future significance
of meta-analyses the fact that since Norris and Ortega’s seminal article on meta-analysis and the
effects of instruction, nearly 30 such studies have been carried out (Plonsky 2013), nearly all of
which have appeared since 2006. Thus, it is likely that as the field continues to develop and increase
its emphasis on research quality, future meta-analyses will be greater in number and in scope.
In relation to meta-analyses, the issue of reporting becomes paramount. Without detailed
reporting of all aspects of one’s research study, including details of participants and methodology,
one cannot replicate and one cannot conduct meta-analyses. And, if these latter two do not occur,
we are left with an inability to generalize (see Plonsky 2012).

Statistical Power and Effect Sizes

These topics were first brought to light by Lazaraton (1991), who argued for the importance of
considering power, “the ability of a statistical test to detect a false null hypothesis” (760), and one
aspect of power: namely, the reporting of effect size. Despite Lazaraton’s plea to pay significant
attention to power and despite the mandate by some journals that effect sizes be included in
publications, the field still struggles with these concepts. Clearly, one aspect of power has to do
with sample size (Plonsky [2013] reports that the median group/sample size in studies he exam-
ined is 19), which is a perennial problem in the field for reasons that go well beyond the scope
of this chapter. This issue is less solvable than others are. The reporting of effect sizes is one that
can be addressed. Plonsky noted that only approximately 25% of the studies he sampled
(606 studies in a thirty-year period from 1990 to 2010) did not report effect sizes, although some
of those were reported only for significant, and not for nonsignificant, results. These issues remain
with us, and our ability to pay attention to them is an indication of the future vitality of the field.

Recommendations for Practice

It is always a bit uncomfortable to take theoretical research and move it into a classroom context.
This is especially the case with some of the newer machine-based methodologies, particularly
because we do not have experience in this regard. For example, just because we know about
neuronal activity, does that mean that we can take those results and translate them into any mean-
ingful classroom practice? Despite these misgivings, I take findings from both eye-tracking
research and brain-based research as a possible suggestion of how we might move forward in the
future. Winke (2013), in an input enhancement study, finds that, as would be expected, learners
do indeed spend more time fixating on enhanced as opposed to unenhanced forms. However,
fixation did not result in significantly more learning of forms (in this study, passivization in
English), nor did it significantly detract from comprehension. According to Winke, even though
visual enhancement may implicitly increase learner attention, it is also most beneficial when used
in combination with explicit instruction.
Another pedagogical use of eye-tracking research, combined with qualitative post viewing
interview data, can be found in a study by Winke, Gass, and Sydorenko (in press). Their study
investigated the use of captions by English-speaking foreign language learners (Arabic, Chinese,
Russian, Spanish). Using eye tracking, they considered the differential time spent on captions by
language and the interacting factor of content familiarity. They proposed that the use of captions
must be more nuanced than previously considered and cannot be applied wholesale to a class-
room context without considering L1-L2 relationships (including writing systems) and the con-
tent of the video material being presented (see also Ghia 2012).

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Susan M. Gass

Morgan-Short and Ullman (2012) summarize brain-based research as the findings might
impact classroom instruction. They cautiously point out that learning under implicit contexts
(e.g., immersion) tends to result in higher levels of proficiency than explicit grammar-focused
lessons (Morgan-Short et al. 2012); furthermore, learning in contexts outside of the classroom
can lead to native-like neurocognition (Gillon Dowens, Vergara, Barber, and Carreiras et al. 2009;
Hahne, Mueller, and Clahsen 2006; Rossi, Gugler, Friederici, and Hahne 2006; Steinhauer, White,
and Drury 2009). This, of course, should not be taken to mean that immersion is the best way
to learn, for many other variables are at play. It does, however, help us understand the role that
brain-based studies may play in our further understanding of how learning takes place and what
the potential might be for understanding instructional contexts.
When thinking about research methods, before we consider how findings about language
learning might relate to educational contexts, it is crucial that we are confident in our results, and
this is where issues of study quality come into play. The field must take principles of study quality
seriously if we are to have confidence in interpreting results of empirical studies.

Conclusion: Where Do We Go From Here?

Issues related to research methodology will undoubtedly be with us for years and decades to come.
As Mackey and Gass (2012, 1) point out, “. . . research methods are not determined or decided
upon devoid of context; research methods are dependent on the theories they are designed to inves-
tigate. Thus, research questions are intimately tied to the methods used for determining an appro-
priate dataset.” In other words, there is an intimacy between the questions we ask and the way we
go about answering those questions. As Plonsky (2013) states, “methodological infirmity not only
hinders progress in the development of theory, but may also negatively affect the reputation and
legitimacy of SLA as a discipline and limit its potential to contribute to parent fields . . .” (656).
Thus, minding the “methodology store” is crucial as the field moves forward and we hope to pro-
vide insight into other disciplines.

Further Reading
Porte, G. 2002. Appraising research in second language learning: A practical approach to critical analysis of quantitative
research. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishers.
Mackey, A. and Gass, S. 2005. Second language research: Methodology and design. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum
Associates.
Chalhoub-Deville, M., Chapelle, C. and Duff, P. A. eds. 2006. Inference and generalizability in applied linguistics:
Multiple perspectives. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishers.
Dörnyei, Z. 2007. Research methods in applied linguistics. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Mackey, A. and Gass, S. eds., 2012. Research methods in second language acquisition. Oxford: Blackwell
Publishers.
Porte, G. 2012. Replication Research in Applied Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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 2
Ethnography in Educational
Linguistics
Teresa L. McCarty

[E]thnography finds its orienting and overarching purpose in an underlying

concern with cultural interpretation.
(Wolcott 2008, 72)
Because of my conception of ethnography, I see in this prospect a gain for a
democratic way of life.
(Hymes 1980, 89)

Introduction
The ethnographer of education Harry F. Wolcott (2008) described ethnography as a “way of
seeing” human behavior through a cultural lens, and a “way of looking” based on long-term,
situated fieldwork. The ethnographer of communication Dell Hymes (1980) argued that
ethnography also contains within it a moral stance toward social inquiry that is humanizing,
democratizing, and anti-hegemonic—what I will call a “way of being” a researcher. In this
chapter, I explore these three complementary facets of the ethnographic enterprise—seeing,
looking, and being—as ethnography has addressed issues in the field of educational linguistics. I
focus on ethnography as a particular form of qualitative inquiry because of its long and intimate
association with studies of language in education. As we will see, because of its genesis and
development within the discipline of anthropology, ethnography entails “both more and less
than” a general program of qualitative research (LeCompte and Schensul 2010, 4–5).

Historical Perspectives

A “Way of Seeing”: Epistemic Foundations

With its roots in anthropology, ethnography is both a social science and part of the humanities.
As Blommaert and Jie (2010, 6) point out, this means that “the basic architecture of ethnography . . .
already contains ontologies, methodologies and epistemologies” integral to the anthropological tradition.

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That tradition can be characterized, first, by a focus on culture. An admittedly slippery construct,
culture as originally conceived by anthropologists was something fixed, unitary, and bounded—a
set of shared traits organized along a racialized evolutionary hierarchy. Franz Boas, a German
Jewish immigrant who established the American school of anthropology at Columbia University
in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, challenged the racist science underlying early definitions
of culture, arguing for culture as learned rather than biologically inherited, and for cultural rela-
tivism, the notion that diverse cultural practices are understandable when viewed through their
own social ecologies. Boas’s student, Margaret Mead, popularized this principle in what can be
considered the first ethnography of education, a study of girlhood in American Samoa (Mead
1961 [1928]). Boas and his students applied the principle of relativity to languages as well, insisting
on analyzing each in terms of its internal categories.
Since these early developments, contemporary anthropologists have put culture “in motion”
(Rosaldo 1989), recognizing, as Heath and Street (2008) note, that “culture never just ‘is,’ but
instead ‘does’” (7). This has meant finding new language with which to talk about culture—as
processes, discourses, ideologies, and practices rather than as racialized groups or traits. This view
of culture expands “our vision . . . to include issues of power and legitimation, as well as the
language practices that constitute these” (González 1999, 434).
This dynamic, power-linked notion of culture carries with it ontological, epistemological, and
methodological entailments with particular relevance for studies of language in education. The
first is that, like culture, language is an open, dynamic system, inextricable from human social life
itself. Thus, the “study of language . . . is inseparable from a study of social life” (Hymes 1980, 70).
It follows that ethnographic studies of language in education must be deeply contextualized,
conducted in situ over extended periods of time (an orientation traceable to Franz Boas in the
U.S. and Bronislaw Malinowski in the EU).
A further entailment is a focus on the participants’ point of view and the meanings they make
of communicative events. Ethnographic accounts “are built around and told in the words,
views, explanations, and interpretations of the participants in the study,” LeCompte and Schensul
stress (2010, 16). This is often called an “emic” perspective, a reference to an analogy proposed
by the linguist Kenneth Pike (1967), which contrasted phonemics—the tacit knowledge of a
sound system possessed by native speakers—with phonetics—the study of sound systems. The
terms emic and etic are commonly understood to refer, respectively, to insider and outsider
knowledge.
Two additional qualities characterize ethnography as a “way of seeing.” The first is that
ethnographic knowledge is constructed inductively, “working from empirical evidence towards
theory, not the other way around” (Blommaert and Jie 2010, 12). This, too, is a hallmark of
Boasian anthropology. The goal for ethnographic studies in educational linguistics is to arrive at
“grounded theories about language as it is practiced in local contexts” (Canagarajah 2006, 153).
Secondly, while inductive theory building depends on the ethnographer’s ability to produce what
the anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1983) called “thick description” of a particular case, ethno-
graphic theory also relies on cross-case and cross-cultural comparisons. As Hymes (1980, 90)
emphasized, the validity and transferability of ethnographic accounts are greatly enhanced by
“contrastive insight” built cumulatively across time and space.

The Educational-Linguistic Anthropology Connection

These ontological and epistemological understandings undergird the linked subdisciplines of
educational and linguistic anthropology, both of which converge in the field of educational linguis-
tics. Just as anthropological understandings of language and culture must be contextualized,

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understanding this part of the disciplinary genealogy must be situated within the intellectual and
sociopolitical context of the time. On May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its
historic ruling in Brown v. Topeka, Kansas Board of Education, overturning legally sanctioned racial
segregation in U.S. schools. While actual desegregation would not come for many years, within
a decade Congress passed the most massive piece of federal education legislation in U.S. history—
the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA)—intended to redress the inequalities laid
bare by Brown. The ESEA was central to the Johnson administration’s metaphoric War on Poverty,
in which the twin notions of “cultural deprivation” and “culture of poverty” were guiding tropes
(Stein 2004).
Scholarship in educational and linguistic anthropology, particularly in the U.S., was united in
this discursive environment. The next decades of educational-linguistic research represent a
relentless empirical refutation of prevailing deficit views, with cultural analysis as an anchoring
construct and ethnography as the “factual core” (Spindler 2000, 57). From educational anthro-
pology came a view of education as “the process of transmitting . . . the culture of the human
being—where culture is used as a verb” (Spindler 2000, 56). From linguistic anthropology came
the ethnography of communication pioneered by John Gumperz and Dell Hymes (1972).
With the goal of illuminating diverse “ways of speaking” (Hymes 1980, 20), the ethnography of
communication reflected a “socially realistic linguistics” in which education became “a prime
arena for sociolinguistic research” (Hornberger 2003, 245–246).
Out of this paradigm emerged the seminal ethnographic treatments of language use in
practice: Cazden, John, and Hymes’s (1972) Functions of Language in the Classroom; Heath’s (1983)
Ways with Words; Philips’s (1993 [1983]) The Invisible Culture; Green and Wallat’s (1981) Ethnog-
raphy and Language in Educational Settings; and Gilmore and Glatthorn’s (1982) Children In and Out
of School. These and other sociolinguistically oriented studies (discussed in the next section)
demonstrated the culturally specific ways in which talk is organized, foregrounding the “subrosa
literacies” and “language prowess” of minoritized students that are often invisibilized in school
(Schieffelin and Gilmore 1986). Moreover, this emerging socioeducational linguistic tradition
was committed to “social justice and . . . the people for whom and with whom the ethnographic
work was done” (Gilmore, cited in Hornberger 2002, para 4).
A related line of ethnographic inquiry centered on bilingual education. In 1968, the U.S.
Congress passed the Bilingual Education Act (BEA) as a Title VII amendment to the ESEA.
Although the BEA opened up new possibilities for innovative programs that used children’s first
language as the medium of instruction, like the ESEA itself, the BEA was compensatory in
nature. Six years after its passage, the Supreme Court heard a class action suit brought against the
San Francisco School District alleging that 1,800 Chinese American students were being denied
an equal education because the district was not providing adequate second language support. The
Court’s ruling in Lau v. Nichols extended Brown, arguing that school integration does not ensure
equality of opportunity if students lack access to the medium of instruction. Subsequently, the
U.S. Department of Education issued the “Lau Remedies,” which included (but did not require)
bilingual-bicultural education programs.
In the post-Lau BEA era, educational and linguistic anthropologists joined in many fruitful
ethnographic endeavors that illuminated the possibilities for such education programs. Prime
examples include Trueba, Guthrie, and Au’s (1981) Culture and the Bilingual Classroom, the
California State Department of Education’s (1986) Beyond Language: Social and Cultural Factors
in Schooling Language Minority Students, Cazden and Leggett’s (1978) Culturally Responsive
Education: A Discussion of Lau Remedies II, and a 1977 theme issue of Anthropology and Education
Quarterly exploring the relationship between qualitative and quantitative research methodol-
ogies in education, including a section on language assessment (see Cazden et al. 1977; Hymes

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1977; Shuy 1977). This work demonstrated the fallacy of measuring the effectiveness of
bilingual education by looking narrowly at students’ English-language performance without
taking into account the culture of the classroom and community. As Foley (2005, 355) writes,
these ethnographic accounts highlighted “cognitive and sociolinguistic notions of culture
and . . . advocate[d] a sociolinguistic version of educational ethnography as innovative and
useful.”
In brief, this was the intellectual, political, and pedagogical firmament in which ethnographic
studies of language in education were seeded. Together, these braided strands of educational and
linguistic anthropology underpin what Hornberger (2001, 13) calls an “inclusive, sociocultural
view of language in education,” laying a theoretical and methodological foundation for educational
linguistics as a comprehensive field of studies.

Core Issues and Key Findings

When Bernard Spolsky introduced educational linguistics in 1978, he cited the “language barrier”
as a core issue for the emerging field. Drawing on his work with the Navajo Reading Study at
the University of New Mexico, Spolsky wrote that, “A major portion of any child’s education is
concerned with modifying [his/her] language, enriching, adding, or suppressing a variety”
(1978, 7). Working in Philadelphia’s urban public schools, Dell Hymes and his colleagues at the
University of Pennsylvania framed the issues in a slightly different, but complementary, way. “A
latent function of the educational system is to instill linguistic insecurity, to discriminate linguis-
tically, to channel children in ways that have an integral linguistic component, while appearing
open and fair to all” (Hymes (1996 [1975], 84). These statements foreground a major artery of
ethnographic research: investigating how linguistic diversity is constructed as a resource or a
problem in schools and society.
For discussion purposes, I organize this section into “micro” and “macro” frames of reference,
recognizing, as Philips (1993 [1983], xv) points out, that macroanalysis and microethnography
“are commonly carried out together.” Microethnographic research has addressed “the ways in
which dominant-subordinant relationships are formed in face-to-face interaction” (Philips 1993
[1983], xvi). Macroethnographic research has focused on sociolinguistic processes at the level of
groups, institutions, and polities. As we will see, both approaches are co-dependent, and both
situate “the exercise of power in practice” (Philips 1993 [1983], xvi).
Heath’s (1983) Ways with Words—extending Hymes’s notion of ways of speaking—was among
the first book-length ethnographic accounts to address these issues. Prior to Heath’s fieldwork,
research had begun to point out differences between the structures of “Black English Vernacular”
(BEV) and so-called “standard” English. Based on long-term fieldwork with African American
and working and middle class White families in the Piedmont Carolinas, Heath argued that the
disjunction between the socialization processes in which BEV is acquired and the communicative
practices within the culture of the school simultaneously blind teachers to their African American
students’ language competencies and leave those students unprepared for the communicative
practices they encounter in school.
Heath (1986) subsequently examined language socialization among Chinese American families
and recent immigrants from Mexico. Among Chinese American parents, the question-asking
routines (factual questions and control of topics) and other cultural expectations reinforced those
their children encountered in schools. Among families from Mexico, adults tended not to give
sequential orders or ask “children to verbalize what they are doing as they work” (Heath 1986,
161)—practices privileged in school-based pedagogies. Heath glossed these practices as
genre—larger discursive units into which smaller units such as conversations and directives are

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subsumed. The challenge Heath posed for language educators was to critically examine how
closely the genres of the home approximate those of the school.
Philips (1993 [1983]) reached similar conclusions about Warm Springs Indian students in
Oregon, using long-term, in-depth participant observation and interviewing to document child-
adult interaction patterns, which she called participant structures, inside and outside of school.
Warm Springs children, Philips maintained, are socialized in culturally distinctive ways that
emphasize listening and observing over talking and speaking up, sharing control versus hierarchi-
cal structures, and voluntary versus involuntary participation in group activities. These “invisible”
cultural differences in the regulation of talk, as well as dialect differences, caused teachers to
misunderstand their Indian pupils, or to define what they heard as unacceptable (Philips 1993
[1983], 127).
Erickson and Mohatt (1988) tested Philips’ hypothesis, using direct observation, videotaping,
and interviews of a Native and White teacher on a Northern Ontario reserve. These researchers
found significant differences in the pacing of classroom activities, time allocated to teacher- versus
student-directed activity, and the timing and pitch of communication, and tied these patterns to
differential “interactional etiquette” in the Native community and the school. More than “formal,
explicit patterning,” Erickson and Mohatt argued, culture involves the tacit rules and “ways of
acting in everyday life” (1988, 167).
Researchers from the Kamehameha Early Education Program (KEEP) took this work a step
further, using ethnographic data on Native Hawaiian child language socialization to design an
English language arts program modeled after an Indigenous Hawaiian oral narrative style called
“talk story,” which emphasizes cooperative participation structures and co-narration (Vogt,
Jordan, and Tharp 1993). These pedagogical changes led to dramatic improvements in Native
Hawaiian students’ English language learning and academic achievement, despite the fact that
the language of the classroom did not match the Hawaiian Creole spoken at home. KEEP
researchers subsequently implemented the same approach with Navajo students at Rough
Rock, Arizona, where they found that KEEP strategies required significant modification to
accommodate Navajo children’s discursive styles. The inference from these studies is that edu-
cational interventions based on ethnographic knowledge must be context specific, and that
such “specific cultural compatibility contributes to [a program’s] educational effectiveness”
(Vogt et al. 1993, 63).
In Tucson, Arizona, the Funds of Knowledge for Teaching project illustrated the power of
teachers’ ethnographic research to transform education practice. The project began in the late
1980s as a collaboration between university-based anthropologists and school-based educators to
study literacy practices within Mexican American households. Conducting interviews with
parents and participating in the everyday life of households, the research team elicited household
knowledge essential for household functioning. In after-school study groups, teachers engaged
in critical reflection on their research, applying these insights to develop curricula that incorpo-
rated the linguistic and cultural capital their students brought to school. The research process
itself also established more trusting relationships between households and schools, as parental
knowledge and skills became the foundation for teaching innovations (González, Moll, and
Amanti 2005).
These are just a few examples of the influential microethnographic studies that have addressed
the ways in which power relations are constructed through linguistic practice in and out of
school. A complementary body of macroethnographic scholarship has focused on how explicit
and implicit language education policies reflect and reproduce those power relationships. In
1988, Hornberger published a case study of bilingual education policy and practice in Puno,
Peru. Focusing on the relationship between official policy and local language practices, she

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Teresa L. McCarty

explored whether schools can be effective agents for language maintenance. At the center of the
analysis were local language uses and ideologies that positioned Quechua as the extra-school or
home-community language, and Spanish as the language of schooling. At the same time, the
decreasing isolation and low social status of Quechua speakers mitigated against the ayllu or
community-level language transmission nexus, while problems of local implementation and gov-
ernment instability undermined macro-level policies for Quechua maintenance. This study was
among the first to demonstrate that while official, macro-level policies can open up what Horn-
berger (2006) later termed “ideological and implementational spaces” for bi/multilingual edu-
cation, those policies are not unproblematically adopted by local social actors and may fail
without local-level support.
Building on Hornberger’s work, King (2001) used ethnography to examine revitalization
prospects for Quichua in Ecuador. Adopting an ethnography of communication approach, King
compared two Quichua communities, one (urban) in which a shift to Spanish was advanced, and
another (rural) that was rapidly moving from Quichua to Spanish. Despite Ecuador’s official
policy of bilingual-intercultural education, for members of both communities, “Quichua
remain[ed] on the periphery of their daily lives” (King 2001, 185). The school affords “an impor-
tant foothold” for Quichua maintenance, King concluded, but is insufficient to overcome the
extreme economic and social pressures favoring Spanish.
Based on ethnographic research conducted over a 20-year period in the Navajo community
of Rough Rock (discussed above), my own research analyzed the interaction of federal Indian
policy with bilingual-bicultural program implementation in the first American Indian
community-controlled school (McCarty 2002). Through a fortuitous (and fleeting) alignment
of top-down government legislation and grassroots Indigenous political activism, Rough Rock
emerged as the first Native American community to take charge of the local school and to
embrace the Indigenous language and culture as both a right and a resource for children’s
learning. Highlighting the realities of the Indigenous self-determination movement as it confronts
a powerful neocolonial federal bureaucracy, this work has shown that bilingual-bicultural
schooling can be a critical resource in local communities’ fight for educational, linguistic, and
cultural self-determination.
Over the past two decades, numerous other studies have taken an ethnographic approach to
the study of language and literacy policy: Davis (1994) conducted an ethnography of communica-
tion in multilingual Luxembourg; May (1994) researched Māori educational reform at Richmond
Road School in Aotearoa/New Zealand; Freeman (1998) undertook a discourse-analytic study of
the successful Oyster Bilingual School in Washington, DC; Aikman (1999) explored intercultural
education and mother tongue literacy among the Arakmbut in the Peruvian Amazon; Heller (1999)
presented a sociolinguistic ethnography of French-speaking adolescents in English-speaking
Canada; Jaffe (1999) examined language politics in Corsica; Patrick (2003) investigated
Indigenous-language persistence in a quadrilingual Inuktitut-Cree-French-English community
in Arctic Québec; Ramanathan (2005) undertook a critical ethnography of vernacular-medium
education in Gujarat, India; Meek (2010) conducted an ethnography of language revitalization in
a Canadian Northern Athapaskan community; and Wyman (2012) analyzed Yup’ik youth culture
and language endangerment in Alaska. Multiple edited volumes using ethnographic approaches
have provided what Hymes called “contrastive insight” to these individual case studies: Hornberger
(1996) examined “bottom-up” language planning in the Americas; Henze and Davis (1999)
explored language planning and identity in the Pacific Rim; and Cangarajah (2006), Heller and
Martin-Jones (2001), Street (1995), and García, Skutnabb-Kangas, and Torres-Guzmán (2006)
offered comparative studies of language planning and policy (LPP) in multilingual settings around
the world.

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Research Approaches

A “Way of Looking”: Ethnographic Methods

The English word ethnography derives from the Greek ethos (people) and grapho (to write). Eth-
nography is “writing about people.” As the previous sections have stressed, however, ethnography
is more than “mere description”; it is “description in specific, methodologically and epistemo-
logically grounded ways” (Blommaert and Jie 2010, 6). Wolcott (2008) refers to this as a “way
of looking.” A central expectation is that the researcher is the primary research instrument, not
in the sense of an antiseptic tool, but by being there in person, over an extended period of time,
as a learner and an interpreter of situated human activity.
As a way of looking, ethnographic methods can be described as experiencing (participant obser-
vation), enquiring (interviewing), and examining (analyzing documents and artifacts) (Wolcott 2008,
48–50). Participant observation—“learning through . . . involvement in the day-to-day . . .
activities of participants in the research setting”—is the starting point of ethnographic research
(Schensul and LeCompte 2013, 83). Participant observation involves engaging appropriately in
the social situation; observing the activities, people, and physical aspects of the situation; and
recording those observations in a systematic way, typically in field notes supplemented by audio
and video recordings (Spradley 1980). Hymes (1974) proposed this SPEAKING mnemonic for
recording observations of communicative interaction:

• the physical and psychological Setting or Scene,

• the Participants
• the Ends or goals of the communicative act,
• the Act sequence or order,
• the Key or tone,
• the Instrumentalities or forms and styles of speech,
• the Norms governing communicative interaction, and
• the Genre or category of communication (e.g., oration, lecture, joking, etc.).

Ethnographers typically have multiple participant observer roles, as illustrated in Meek’s

(2010) study of language revitalization in a Yukon Kaska community. Working as an educator
and child development specialist in the local Aboriginal Head Start program, a teaching assistant
in Kaska language workshops, and a student of the Kaska language, her research “emerged from
these multiple positions, in dialogue with bureaucrats, language professionals, local individuals,
and families” (Meek 2010, xviii). Ethnographers may also participate as cultural insiders, as
exemplified by Ramanathan’s (2005) study of classed and gendered language pedagogies in three
colleges within Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India; Nicholas’s (2014) study of language ideologies and
practices among Hopi youth in Arizona; and Lee’s (2014) study of “critical language awareness”
among Navajo and Pueblo young adults in New Mexico. Such roles evolve over months and
even years, as illustrated by Heath’s involvement with the Carolina Piedmont families she began
following in 1969. As she wrote in a follow-up study published more than four decades later, this
long-term involvement means that ethnographic accounts differ “with each passing moment,
new purpose, and favored vantage point” (Heath 2012, 7). Hence, there is never a “finished”
ethnographic story or single “true account” (Toohey 2008, 182); all ethnographic accounts are
situated, perspectival, and partial.
Whereas participant observation attends “to the flow of natural activity” (Wolcott 2008, 49),
interviewing is a more direct data collection strategy. Ethnographic interviews often include

29
Teresa L. McCarty

casual conversations recorded in the course of participant observation; they may also be framed
as structured or semi-structured protocols carried out one-on-one with key individuals or in
small groups. Ethnographic interviews are typically open-ended, allowing for flexibility, dialogue,
and the possibility of unexpected findings. Interview data are recorded in field notes and by
audiotaping and/or videotaping, and are transcribed in written form.
The third “way of looking”—examining—involves the collection of document or archival
data. In a recent study of Indigenous youth language practices and ideologies, for example, my
co-researchers and I collected school mission statements, teachers’ lesson plans, school curriculum
documents, student writing samples, and school-community demographic records (McCarty
Romero-Little, Warhol, and Zepeda 2013).
Experiencing, enquiring, and examining may be further supplemented by surveys or ques-
tionnaires, censusing, social mapping, quantitative measures such as student achievement data,
and elicitation techniques. In a study of Welsh vocational college students’ biliteracy practices,
for instance, Martin-Jones (2011) asked the students to compile diaries of their literacy prac-
tices and to take photographs of literacy events in the college and in their workplaces. Using
these artifacts as prompts, participants were then interviewed about their reading and writing
practices in the different settings. Finding through these methods a “mismatch between college
and workplace literacies,” Martin-Jones worked with the students’ tutors “to harness . . . the
characteristics of the young people’s out-of-college literacies” in the tutors’ teaching practice (2011,
249). In another study of language use among teens attending a large multilingual-multiethnic
high school in London, Rampton employed an omni-directional microphone to record lessons,
later replaying the recordings in interviews with students “to elicit retrospective commen-
tary . . . on what had been happening, said and done” (2006, 32). He also asked four students
to wear radio microphones for several hours each day over 11 days. This data “trawling”
enabled Rampton to engage in “extensive listening” and generated an abundance of “contras-
tive insights” into the official classroom talk and students’ more informal discursive practices
(2006, 32–33).
Ethnographic analysis begins the moment the ethnographer enters the field and continues
through the writing of the final report (LeCompte and Schensul 2013). Regardless of the
analysis strategy employed—narrative analysis, thematic analysis, within-case or cross-case
analysis, discourse analysis, or other approaches—the goal is to situate linguistic and educa-
tional processes within the larger sociocultural context of which they are part. In their exam-
ination of bilingual education policy and practice in officially English-only California, Stritikus
and Weise (2006) refer to this as “deep dish analysis,” a positioning that enables the ethnogra-
pher to move beyond top-down policies to the level of teachers’ practice where policy actually
takes shape. Similarly, in a seminal collection of articles on LPP for English language-teaching
professionals, Ricento and Hornberger (1996) use an onion metaphor to describe these multi-
layered processes: The outer layers of the onion represent broader policy processes, and the
inner layers represent local policy accommodations, resistances, and transformations as they
occur in everyday practice. By “slicing the onion ethnographically” (Hornberger and Johnson
2007), researchers can attend to the fine-grained detail of each layer and its position within an
organic whole.

New Debates
Two simultaneous and seemingly paradoxical 21st-century forces shape current ethnographic
work in educational linguistics. On the one hand is intensified (trans)migration resulting from
massive global flows of people, information, capital, and technology. These processes create what

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scholars have called “super-diversity” (Blommaert 2011)—globalized urban neighborhoods and

virtual spaces characterized by multilayered and crisscrossing cultural, linguistic, religious,
national, and racial/ethnic identifications. On the other hand is the mounting worldwide endan-
germent of human linguistic and cultural diversity, as the same globalizing forces serve to stan-
dardize and homogenize, even as they stratify and marginalize. Language endangerment is
particularly grave for Indigenous peoples, who, although they constitute 4% of the world’s pop-
ulation, speak 75% of the world’s languages.
These processes call for rethinking anthropological notions of culture in ways that recognize
that “multiple cultures can exist in one space and . . . one culture can be produced in different
spaces,” and for reconceptualizing language as mobile sociolinguistic resources and repertoires
(Blommaert 2011, 63). This in turn has implications for our understandings of what constitutes
speakerhood, language fluency, and speech communities. As Moore (2012, 59) describes the
issues, the existence of both super-diversity and language endangerment “complicate inherited
notions of the unitary, fully fluent . . . native speaker as . . . the normal starting point for descrip-
tion and analysis.”
The simultaneity of super-diversity and language endangerment also complicates the micro-
macro analytical distinctions discussed in previous sections and related conceptions of the local
and the global. In a recent theme issue of Anthropology and Education Quarterly, Wortham suggests
that micro and macro have outlived their utility as explanatory tools and argues for pushing
beyond these heuristics to engage more directly with “complex multiscale realities” (2012, 135).
In an example of this, Warriner (2012), in the same theme issue, presents a study of the language
ideologies of refugee women in a U.S. English-as-a-second-language program. Her fine-grained
analysis of the women’s life narratives shows how these micro-level speech acts interrupt oppres-
sive macro-level ideological, historical, and institutional constraints on their language practices
and life opportunities.
A related stream of ethnographic work has investigated the ways in which globalizing forces
are taken up and reconfigured in local language practices and ideologies—what Hornberger
and McCarty (2012) call “globalization from the bottom up.” In an ethnographic analysis of
bilingual education in Mozambique, for example, Chimbutane and Benson (2012) show how
local appropriations of top-down curricular reforms open up new spaces for the promotion of
Indigenous languages and cultures. Working in a South African undergraduate language pro-
gram, Joseph and Ramani (2012) show, similarly, how a focus on additive multilingualism in
teacher preparation can unseat the hegemony of English within the “new globalism.” In these
and other ethnographic cases, relatively small-scale education reformulations create new
options through which marginalized languages historically constructed as “traditional” (and
hence not useful in the global economy) can be resignified as “modern” (Joseph and Ramani
2012, 32).
Recent youth language research further illuminates these “complex multiscale realities”
(Wortham 2012) and their implications for education. Recognizing that youth, like adults, act
as agents, this research examines youth’s “emic views, language ideologies, and identities [to]
provide insights into how social and political processes are lived and constructed through lan-
guage use” (Wyman, McCarty, and Nicholas 2014, 4). Paris (2011), for example, looked at youth
language practices in a multiethnic high school in the western United States. Building on
Rampton’s (1995) classic ethnographic study of youth linguistic “crossing” (see also Rampton
2006, discussed above), Paris explored language sharing—“momentary and sustained uses of . . .
the language traditionally ‘belonging’ to another group [and] ratified as appropriate by its tra-
ditional speakers” (Paris 2011, 14). Understanding such processes, Paris maintains, helps us see
the sociocultural, sociopolitical, and sociolinguistic forces that alternately reinforce or cut across

31
Teresa L. McCarty

ethnic divisions “toward spaces of interethnic unity” (2011, 16)—a requirement, he argues, for
a pluralistic society.
This research also foregrounds the ways in which youth “translanguage,” a term used by García
to explain the heteroglossic language practices she observed in urban bilingual classrooms. Trans-
languaging goes beyond code switching and involves the “multiple discursive practices in which
bilinguals engage in order to make sense of their bilingual worlds” (García 2009, 44). Although García’s
use of the term is situated in “super-diverse” urban spaces, ethnographic research with Indigenous
youth in semi-urban and reservation and village settings shows the salience of this construct, and
related notions of linguistic hybridity and heteroglossia, for understanding dynamic processes of
language shift and endangerment. In the large-scale study of Indigenous youth language ideologies
and practices discussed above, for instance, my co-researchers and I found that, contrary to educa-
tors’ perceptions of youth as disinterested in their heritage language and of Indigenous languages
as largely absent from their daily lives, Native youth were growing up in highly complex socio-
linguistic environments that included multiple languages and language varieties to which they had
differential exposure and in which they had differential receptive and productive abilities—
sociolinguistic resources that might be marshalled for Indigenous-language reclamation, but which,
for the most part, went undetected or were stigmatized in school (McCarty et al. 2013). Studies by
Nicholas (2014) with Hopi youth, Lee (2014) with Navajo and Pueblo youth and young adults,
Messing (2014) with Mexicano (Nahuatl) young adults, and Wyman (2012) with Yup’ik youth in
Alaska, shows how young people translanguage and negotiate “mixed messages” about the value
of their heritage language in sociolinguistic environments undergoing rapid language shift.
These studies problematize yet another set of binaries: “speaker” versus “non-speaker,” “flu-
ent” versus “non-fluent,” and “extinct” versus “living” with reference to languages (Leonard,
2011; McCarty et al. 2013, 173). The studies also provide nuanced ethnographic portraits of the
often “closeted” multilingual repertoires of Indigenous and minoritized youth. As Wyman et al.
write, these studies demonstrate the fallacy of deficit assumptions of youth linguistic practices,
highlighting “the sociolinguistic strengths of heritage language learners in settings of language
endangerment” (2014, xx).
Three additional lines of ethnographic inquiry are important here. The first concerns the lin-
gering debate on the role of schools in structuring diversity in complex sociolinguistic ecologies,
and specifically whether schools can serve as resources for the reclamation and maintenance of
endangered mother tongues. Since Hornberger’s groundbreaking (1988) ethnographic study of
these issues for Quechua in Peru, a great deal of ethnographic effort has been poured into answer-
ing this question (for a treatment across four continents, see Hornberger 2008; for an analysis of
the U.S. and Canada, see McCarty and Nicholas 2014). It seems clear from this research that, while
schools cannot substitute for intergenerational language transmission in the family, when aligned
with other social institutions, schools can reinforce, in significant ways, family- and communi-
ty-based efforts. Moreover, when we look around the world, we find few examples of successful
language revitalization in which schools have not played a prominent role.
A recent strand of research growing out of this work asks whether schools can promote the
dual goals of language revitalization and enhanced academic achievement among Indigenous/
minoritized students. As Hill and May (2011) observe with reference to Māori-medium school-
ing, “[T]here remains a dearth of information on the factors that contribute to the educational
effectiveness of such programs” (162). Drawing on ethnographic research at the Rakaumanga-
manga School in Aotearoa/New Zealand, Hill and May show the efficacy of “high” levels of
Māori-language immersion (i.e., instruction through the Indigenous language for 80–100%
of the school day) alongside careful planning of English-language instruction in achieving the
goal of full Māori-English bilingualism and biliteracy. Programs such as this also show the value

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of building on Indigenous/minoritized students’ linguistic hybridity as a resource rather than

treating hybridity as a liability for learning in school.
A final line of inquiry concerns the role of education practitioners in the LPP process. A
decade after Ricento and Hornberger (1996) placed English language teaching professionals
at the center of the LPP “onion,” Ramanathan and Morgan (2007, 447) offered a reconsider-
ation of the “everyday contexts in which [language] policies are interpreted and negotiated.”
Emphasizing practitioner agency and a view of policy texts as “multifaceted signs . . . whose
interpretations and enactments rest in our hands,” these comparative case studies afford
“glimpses into complex interplays between policies, pedagogic practices, instructional con-
straints, and migrations” (Ramanathan and Morgan 2007, 451, 459). A growing body of
ethnographic research positions educators “at the epicenter” of the LPP process, as researchers
move “beyond top-down, bottom-up, or even side-by-side divisions to a conceptualization
of language policy as a far more dynamic, interactive, and real-life process” (Menken and
García 2010, 4).
All of these studies contribute to the New Language Policy Studies, a paradigmatic shift away
from conventional treatments of policy as disembodied text to a view of policy as a situated
sociocultural process: “the complex of practices, ideologies, attitudes, and formal and informal
mechanisms that influence people’s language choices in profound and pervasive everyday ways”
(McCarty, Collins, and Hopson 2012, 335). Influenced by Hymes’s (1980) emphasis on “ethno-
graphic monitoring” and on language-in-use, this theoretical perspective helps us understand the
diffuse bases of linguistic inequalities in education. Perhaps even more importantly, this critical
sociocultural, processual view of language policy guides us to new possibilities for transforming
those inequalities (McCarty 2011)—a topic I turn to next.

Implications for Education

A “Way of Being”: Ethnography as a Form of Praxis

From Mead’s early contributions to the anthropology of education, to the ethnography of commu-
nication, to recent work addressing the “complex multiscale realities” (Wortham 2012) and “chron-
icles of complexity” (Blommaert 2013) of super-diversity, language endangerment, and practitioners’
roles in the LPP “onion,” ethnography has afforded rich, multilayered insights into the ways in which
linguistic diversity is constructed as a problem or a resource in schools and society. Those insights
stem from a distinctive “way of seeing” through a holistic cultural lens and a “way of looking” first-
hand, up-close, and over extended periods of time. By “casting an ethnographic eye on language . . .
at the individual, classroom, school, community, regional, national, and global levels,” Hornberger and
Johnson (2007, 24) observe, researchers can “uncover the indistinct voices, covert motivations,
embedded ideologies, invisible instances, or unintended consequences” of language policies and ped-
agogies as they are manifest in particular sociocultural and educational contexts.
In an era of growing global diversity, we are witness to language education policies designed to
curb and control diversity through reductive literacy practices and, especially in the United States,
the banning of languages other than English in schools. In this political and educational climate,
ethnography and qualitative approaches in general have been marginalized in official policy
discourse, which privileges English-only standardized tests and large-scale random clinical trials.
Yet ethnography—and ethnographers—have a crucial role to play in this policy environment.
As a form of knowledge production, ethnography is intrinsically democratizing, as its primary
goal—to “learn the meanings, norms, and patterns of a way of life” (Hymes 1980, 98)—is
precisely what people do everyday. Ethnography, therefore, has the potential to break down

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Teresa L. McCarty

hierarchies between the “knower” and the “known,” and to bring local stakeholders—education
practitioners and community members, including youth—directly into the research process.
Doing this requires exercising what Wyman et al. (2014, 18) call triple vision: an ethnographic
stance that forwards academic, youth, and broader community concerns.
This commitment to praxis represents the third pillar in the contributions of ethnography to
education—a clear values position that puts ethnography to practical use. In this “way of being,”
researchers intentionally dislodge allegedly value-free methodologies, replacing them with
grounded forms of collaborative critical inquiry. Taking such a research stance requires that eth-
nographers work in partnership with local stakeholders, using the unique tools of our discipline
to illuminate not only the injustices in language education, but the concrete possibilities for
positive change.

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 3
Methodologies of
Language Policy Research
David Cassels Johnson and Thomas Ricento

Historical Perspectives
The field of language planning and policy (LPP hereafter) started as something that linguists did,
rather than something that was studied. In the 1960s, language scholars were recruited to help
solve the language problems of new, developing, and postcolonial nations. These linguists helped
develop grammars, writing systems, and dictionaries for Indigenous languages; out of this, an
interest in how best to develop the form of a language—i.e. corpus planning—grew. Einar Haugen
introduced the term language planning in 1959, defining it as “the activity of preparing a norma-
tive orthography, grammar, and dictionary for the guidance of writers and speakers in a
non-homogeneous speech community” (Haugen 1959, 8). What Haugen describes is now
referred to as corpus planning, which includes activities related to the manipulation of the forms of
a language. Another focus is how a society can best allocate functions and/or uses for particular
languages, known as status planning, a distinction introduced by Kloss (1969). To this distinction
in the field, Cooper (1989) added acquisition planning, a term meant to capture language teaching
and other educational activities designed to increase the users or uses of a language.
One of the challenges for the field has been the relationship between language policy and the
term that preceded it, language planning. Most would agree that language policy and language
planning are closely related, but different, activities. Some argue that language planning subsumes
language policy (Kaplan and Baldauf, 1997) while others argue that language policy subsumes
language planning (Schiffman 1996). Our focus here is language policy because, within accepted
definitions of language planning, there is an assumption that some intentional language planning
takes place; however, there are many examples of language policy that are not intentional and/or
not planned. Still, we use LPP both out of respect for the tradition of research that gave rise to
the field (language planning) and because the two fields have, for all intents and purposes, coa-
lesced into one (Hornberger 2006).
While the field of LPP evolved primarily within applied and sociolinguistics, educational lan-
guage policy research also draws from critical theory, education studies, sociology, and anthropol-
ogy, creating a notable interdisciplinarity, although one of its primary homes is certainly
educational linguistics. Spolsky (1978, 2) defined the field of educational linguistics as one that
“start[s] with a specific problem and then looks to linguistics and other relevant disciplines for

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their contribution to its solution.” Hornberger (2001, 19) further articulated the aims of the field,
in which “the starting point is always the practice of education and the focus is squarely on (the
role of) language (in) learning and teaching.” We might expand upon Hornberger’s definition, to
include an emphasis on the role of language policy in learning and teaching. Indeed, the interac-
tion between language policies and educational practices, particularly for minority and Indige-
nous language users, is a vibrant area of research within educational linguistics. More recently,
Spolsky (2010, 2) has argued that educational linguistics “provides the essential instruments for
designing language education policy and for implementing language education management.”
Not only has LPP research, and more specifically educational language policy research, been
located within the field of educational linguistics, but, Spolsky suggests, the field provides guid-
ance for those who design and implement language policies and plans; thus, not only is LPP
research grounded in educational linguistics, but so is LPP practice.
The field of LPP is not lacking in theoretical robustness, but the connections between all of
the various theories and frameworks are not always clear. Ricento (2006, 17) argues that this
theoretical fragmentation means that there is not, as yet, “some grand theory which explains
patterns of language behavior . . . or can predict the effects of specific language policies on lan-
guage behavior.” While there is perhaps no grand theory, there are traditions of research that
proffer important concepts, frameworks, methods, and theoretical developments. As mentioned,
early language planning scholarship focused on developing frameworks for status and corpus
planning. Much of this early research purported to divorce the supposedly objective science of
language planning from the ideological and sociopolitical reality of language use. For example,
Tauli (1974) avers that languages can be categorized objectively according to usefulness or effi-
ciency and “ethnic languages” are not good candidates for language planning. Similarly, if less
forcefully, Kloss argues that certain languages are more suitable for national development (Kloss
1968). While Tauli’s ideas were the subject of criticism (Jernudd and Das Gupta 1971), there was
still at that time a reluctance to consider the role of ideology in language planning; for example,
Cobarrubias (1983, 6) argues that “language-status decisions are affected by ideological consid-
erations of powerful groups and counteracting forces. However, we should not saddle the theory
with ideological considerations.”
Ricento (2000) argues that early language planning research helped facilitate the continued
dominance of European colonial languages because they were the languages that were invariably
more suitable for high status domains like education and technology. He divides the intellectual
history of the field into three stages: (1) classic language planning, as explained above, (2) critical
language policy (explained below), and (3) an intermediary stage, lasting from the early 1970s to
the late 1980s. During this time, interests expanded beyond the corpus/status distinction, and
many language planning scholars, including those who were active in the first era, began to ques-
tion the viability of earlier models of language planning. Many scholars within the field began to
look more closely at language planning and policy as ideological processes. For example, an influ-
ential proposal comes from Ruiz (1984) in his article entitled “Orientations in Language Plan-
ning,” in which he lays out a tripartite set of goals, or ‘orientations,’ as he calls them, of language
planning in education, which he argues can take a language-as-problem, language-as-right, or
language-as-resource orientation toward minority languages. Ruiz (1984, 2) characterizes ‘orien-
tations’ as “basic to language planning in that they delimit the ways we talk about language and
language issues . . . they help to delimit the range of acceptable attitudes toward language, and to
make certain attitudes legitimate. In short orientations determine what is thinkable about language
in society.” The idea that language policies can hegemonically normalize particular ways of think-
ing, being, and/or educating, while concomitantly delimiting others, would become a feature of
critical language policy and continues to be an important consideration within the field.

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While noting the importance of Ruiz’ contribution to the LPP literature with his orientations
to language policy approach, Ricento (2005, 361) enumerates some of the limitations of the
‘language as resource’ orientation. He analyzes texts produced by organizations that advocate the
teaching and learning of heritage languages in the United States, and finds that in these texts
“language-as-resource is connected to particular dominant sociopolitical agendas, namely
national security, trade, and law enforcement” rather than the interests, needs, and aspirations of
the communities of speakers of heritage languages. Languages are reduced to commodities with
very particular instrumental value, and in the case of the United States, federal support is provided
for the teaching and learning of languages important to U.S. global military and economic inter-
ests. Ricento concludes that advocacy groups, in their discourse at least, may be complicit with
unstated agendas that help maintain social arrangements and values that support policies not
particularly favorable to linguistic diversity as intrinsically good or as a national resource, where
‘national’ tends to exclude non-English languages and cultures (364).
Tollefson (1991) distinguishes between what he calls the neo-classical approach—which he char-
acterizes as claiming to be scientifically neutral and dominated by an interest in the individual—
and the historical-structural approach, which instead focuses on the social and historical influences that
give rise to language policies. Language policy is expressly political and ideological in Tollefson’s
(1991) conceptualization: “[L]anguage policy is viewed as one mechanism by which the interests
of dominant sociopolitical groups are maintained and the seeds of transformation are developed”
(Tollefson 1991, 32). Tollefson later (2006) reformulated this as Critical Language Policy (CLP).
Much language policy scholarship is concerned with the relationship between discourses, ideol-
ogies, power and language policies, whether it is called “Critical Language Policy” or not, and
the notion that language policies create social inequality among dominant and minority language
users is a central tenet in the field (e.g., Phillipson 2003; Shohamy 2006).
CLP scholarship has helped reveal connections between language policy and power and has
reshaped the field, but it has also been criticized for being too deterministic (see Ricento and
Hornberger 1996) and for not capturing LPP processes (see Davis 1999). Within the last two
decades, especially, there has been a growing interest in ethnographic and discourse analytic
research methods that capture language policy processes across multiple layers of activity and
within diverse contexts (macro, meso, and micro). For example, Hornberger and Johnson (2007,
2011) argue for the relevance of ethnography of language policy as an LPP research method and
theory for examining the agents, contexts, and processes across the multiple layers of language
policy creation, interpretation, and appropriation. Other volumes by McCarty (2011) and
Menken and García (2010) feature research that is grounded in ethnographic, discourse analytic,
and other ‘on the ground approaches’ and focuses on the agency of teachers as well as the power
of policy. This work has contributed greatly to the field of educational linguistics because it
examines how language policies relate to educational practice and how micro-level language
policies emerge within a community or school.

Core Issues and Key Findings

Johnson (2013a) offers a series of findings, which we synthesize and summarize here:
Language policy agents have power. Critical scholarship has shown that educational
institutions enforce hegemonic language policies that marginalize minority languages and their
users (e.g., Tollefson 2012a). However, other research focuses on how educators resist top-
down language policy or interpret and appropriate it in unexpected and creative ways. For exam-
ple, in her study of educational language policy in Lao People’s Democratic Republic (PDR),

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Cincotta-Segi (2009, 2011) shows how Lao educational policy positions the Lao language and
culture as crucial to political and moral unity and ignores non-Lao cultures and languages. Fur-
thermore, ministry of education officials assume that official Lao-dominated discourses will be
reproduced by teachers, especially given the lack of materials and curricula in anything but Lao
language. However, Cincotta-Segi (2009) finds that the teachers often still incorporate non-
Lao languages to benefit their students: “This research has demonstrated for the first time in the
Lao context that while teachers do reproduce the official discourses through particular classroom
language practices, this reproduction is never total and in some cases is eclipsed by strong adap-
tations and contestations” (321).
Language policy power is differentially allocated among arbiters and implementers.
Menken (2008) uses the term “arbiter” to characterize the power of teachers as the ultimate
decision-makers in how a policy is implemented. E. Johnson (2012) and D. Johnson (2013c)
expand on this notion and describe all individuals with potentially powerful influence on the
language policy process as language policy arbiters. While LPP is a multi-layered process, and teach-
ers may be the ultimate arbiters in classroom implementation of policy, language policy power is
differentially allocated across, and within, educational institutions, contexts, and layers of language
policy activity. For example, Johnson (2010) reveals how a change in one U.S. school district
leadership position led to a drastic change in language policy for the entire district, transitioning
from a focus on the value of bilingualism to an emphasis on acquisition of English. The power
of the language policy arbiter is such that they have a singular impact on educational activities
within the institutions and contexts they have contact with.
National language policies restrict access to languages and language education.
National language policies can and do restrict particular languages and marginalize their users
within, and outside of, educational contexts. Many historical examples can be cited, including
the subjugation of American Indian languages in Indian Boarding Schools in the United States
(McCarty 2002), suppression of Māori in New Zealand (May 2005), and the historical margin-
alization and suppression of Aboriginal languages in Canada (Ricento and Cervatiuc 2010). It
is also the case that official recognition of a language, or languages, at the federal level can have
negative consequences on the teaching and use of other ‘non official’ languages, even when non
official languages are not proscribed and their speakers are free to use their languages in various
domains. For example, Ricento (2013) shows how the establishment of Official Bilingualism
(English and French) in Canada ‘unofficially’ marginalized languages that had been spoken by
generations of Canadians and that had equal claims for official recognition at the time the Offi-
cial Languages Act was passed in 1969. Official Bilingualism has had consequences on percep-
tions and policies with regard to the teaching and transmission of nonofficial languages and
their communities of speakers in a number of ways. Eve Haque (2012, 18) notes that “mem-
bership in the Canadian nation is achieved through designation into one of four groups: English,
French, Aboriginal, and ‘Multicultural,’” the latter a generic term for cultures and languages
other than English and French. Canadian linguistic duality, with English as the dominant hegem-
onic language, is at odds with the popular metaphor of Canada as ‘a mosaic of languages and
cultures’; thus, the national imaginary is at odds with the policy of Official Bilingualism, which
does little to recognize or support the linguistic and cultural diversity that actually exists today
in Canada.
National multilingual language policies can and do open spaces for multilingual
education and minority languages. Hornberger has long argued (and shown) that national
language policies that value multilingualism as a resource can create openings for bilingual edu-
cation which, in turn, promote indigenous and minority language use (Hornberger 2006, 2009).

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David Cassels Johnson and Thomas Ricento

She has documented two such policies in South America: The Puno bilingual education project
(PEEB) in Peru and Bolivia’s National Education Reform of 1994, both of which incorporate
Indigenous language education into official policy text and discourse.
Local multilingual language policies can and do open spaces for multilingual edu-
cation and minority languages. Rebecca Freeman’s (1998, 2000, 2004) ethnographic and
action-oriented research on bilingual education and language policy in Philadelphia and
Washington, DC, has revealed how local language planning and policy can help sustain multilin-
gual education in schools. Corson (1999) is a good guide in this respect.
Meso-level educational language policies matter. We have observed this in the United
States where language policy at the state level determines how a federal policy ends up being
enacted in schools. For example, while Title III of NCLB (No Child Left Behind) appeared to
diminish the opportunities for schools and school districts to expand bilingual education pro-
grams (see Wiley and Wright 2004), states have appropriated Title III in different ways. For
example, while there is a great deal of research to suggest that bilingual programs have been
sacrificed or weakened in many schools and school districts (see Menken and Shohamy 2008),
there has been a steady increase in the number of bilingual education programs in Washington
State.

Research Approaches
Early language planning approaches have been criticized for being technocratic (e.g., Wiley
1999, 18) and positivist (e.g., Ricento 2000, 208) because they sought to divorce the objectivist
“science” of language planning from its sociopolitical and ideological implications. Research in
educational language policy, in particular—as well as research that directly contributes to educa-
tional language policy—has been epistemologically diverse, existing on a continuum between
objectivist scientific studies of the relative effectiveness of language education programs (Thomas
and Collier 2001) and neo-Marxist approaches that examine power in language policy processes
(Tollefson 1991). Driving the objectivist strand is perhaps a pragmatism about how research can
support language policies that promote multilingualism in schools; on the other hand, critical
approaches take a more pessimistic view of how much agency is really granted to those who seek
more egalitarian policies that promote multilingualism.
LPP research methods are diverse and borrow from, among others, political and legal theory
(May 2001; Schmid 2001), communication and media studies (Rickford 1999), linguistic anthro-
pology (Mortimer 2013), economics (Grin 2003), and interpretive policy analysis (Yanow
2000). Therefore, the data of interest include a wide variety of language policy texts, discourses,
and practices. There is a particular interest in finding connections between macro-level language
policy texts and discourses and micro-level language behavior and educational practices—what
Hult (2010) refers to as the perennial challenge for the field. This interest in the field has gen-
erated an expanding body of ‘on-the-ground’ research, with a focus on local educational and
policy activities, and has primarily been supported by ethnographic and discourse analytic
research methods.
Hornberger and Johnson (2007) present the ethnography of language policy as a method that
can illuminate and inform multiple types of language planning (status, corpus, and acquisition),
illuminate and inform language policy processes (creation, interpretation, and appropriation),
marry a critical approach with a focus on educator agency, and examine the connections across
the various layers and levels of LPP activity, from the macro to the micro. Recent volumes that
feature this type of work include McCarty (2011), Menken and García (2010), and Johnson
(2013b).

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 Methodologies of Language Policy Research

Johnson (2013a) presents a heuristic for the scope of data collection in ethnography of lan-
guage policy:

(1) agents—include both the creators of the policy and those responsible for policy interpreta-
tion and appropriation.
(2) goals—refers to the intentions of the policy as stated in the policy text
(3) processes—creation, interpretation, and appropriation of policy text and discourse
(4) discourses that engender and perpetuate the policy—the discourses within and without the
policy; i.e. the discourses (whether explicit or implicit) within the language policy texts,
intertextual and interdiscursive connections to other policy texts and discourses, and the
discursive power of a particular policy.
(5) the dynamic social and historical contexts in which the policy exists—an ethnography of
language policy is interested in the dynamic social, historical, and physical contexts in which
language policies are created, interpreted, and appropriated.

A great deal of language policy analysis is, essentially, discourse analysis since it involves look-
ing at various policy texts (both spoken and written) and analyzing policy discourses that are
instantiated within or engendered by the policy texts. Therefore, the increasing prevalence of
discourse analytic studies in LPP is not surprising and includes, among others, conversation
analysis (Bonacina 2010), Critical Discourse Analysis (Cincotta-Segi 2009; Johnson 2011;
Ricento 2005), linguistic anthropology (Mortimer 2013), and Nexus Analysis (Hult 2010).

New Debates
Structure vs. agency in schools. As mentioned, current work on language policy can be
characterized by a tension between structure and agency, between critical theoretical work that
focuses on the power invested in language policy to disenfranchise linguistic minorities
(e.g., Tollefson 2012a; Yitzhaki 2010) and ethnographic and action-oriented research that empha-
sizes the powerful role that educators play in language policy processes (e.g., Menken and García
2010; Cincotta-Segi 2009). Critical scholarship has shown that educational institutions can
facilitate the marginalization of minority languages and their users through implementation of
hegemonic language policy; Shohamy (2006), for example, argues that top-down language pol-
icies are mechanisms that implement the hegemonic intentions of those in authority, a process
that is facilitated by educators. However, other research focuses on how educators resist top-down
language policy or interpret and appropriate it in unexpected and creative ways. As Mohanty,
Panda, and Pal (2010, 228) argue:

Teachers are not uncritical bystanders passively acquiescent of the state practice; in their own
ways, they resist and contest the state policy or rather, in the Indian context, its absence and
injustice by default. It is quite clear that the agency of the teachers in the classrooms makes
them the final arbiter of the language education policy and its implementation.

This tension is the subject of discussion in both Tollefson (2012b) and Johnson (2011), who
agree that the difference between what Tollefson (2012b) calls the “historical-structural para-
digm” and the “creative public sphere paradigm” is not theoretical but a matter of emphasis, and
critical approaches are very much compatible with other approaches that do focus on grassroots
movements and language policy agency—like ethnography of language policy—because both are
committed to an agenda of social justice that resists dominant policy discourses that subjugate

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David Cassels Johnson and Thomas Ricento

minority languages and their users. When combined, they offer an important balance between
structure and agency—between a critical focus on the power of language policies and an ethno-
graphic understanding of the agency of language policy actors.
Research methods in educational language policy will need to wrestle with this tension, and
especially useful are frameworks like those in Ball (1993), who offers two conceptualizations of
policy—policy as text and policy as discourse—which articulate both the power of language policy
agents to creatively interpret and re-interpret documents (policy as text) and the power of lan-
guage policy as a discursive instrument of power (policy as discourse). A policy as text orientation
rejects the quest for understanding authorial intentions in policy and instead emphasizes the
variety of ways a particular policy text is interpreted and put into action. On the other hand,
Ball’s policy as discourse orientation re-emphasizes the potential power of educational policies to
set boundaries on what is educationally feasible. While a plurality of readings and interpretations
is possible, “we need to appreciate the way in which policy ensembles . . . exercise power through
the production of truth and knowledge as discourses” (Ball 1993, 23). Ball describes the two as
opposing conceptualizations of educational policy; however, they are not necessarily in conflict.
While it is important to respect the power of language policy agents, it is equally important to
respect the power of discourses that language policies can engender, instantiate, and perpetuate.
Researcher positionality. Researchers are increasingly considering their own positionality in
the research context (Lin in press), which is especially a concern when non-minority scholars con-
duct research in minority contexts (Hill and May 2013), particularly given the benefits of ‘insiders’
conducting research in contexts that they are already familiar with (see discussion in Chimbutane
2011). Rampton (2007) questions whether a foreigner researching some previously unknown cul-
tural group can ever really develop much more than “a description of conventional systems”
(Rampton 2007, 591) and suggests that ethnographers should do research in institutions of which
they are already a member (from the inside-out instead of the outside-in). The problem of researcher
positionality is especially acute for ethnographers who tend to choose between more objectivist “fly
on the wall” ethnographic observation, in which the researcher attempts to be an unobtru-
sive observer, and more subjectivist immersion, which can lead to voyeurism and uncritical
valorization of the research subjects’ experiences (see discussion in Roman 1993). However, at least
one more option is available, that of critical ethnography, which is defined by Madison (2012, 5–6):

Critical ethnography begins with an ethical responsibility to address processes of unfairness or

injustice . . . [T]he researcher feels an ethical obligation to make a contribution toward chang-
ing those conditions toward greater freedom and equity. The critical ethnographer also takes
us beneath surface appearances, disrupts the status quo, and unsettles both neutrality and taken-
for-granted assumptions by bringing to light underlying and obscure operations of power and
control . . . [and] contributes to emancipatory knowledge and discourses of social justice.

Utilizing critical ethnography as a research method may help to resolve some of the tension
between the “historical-structural paradigm” and the “creative public sphere paradigm.” As well,
researchers will need to continue to interrogate their own positionality in the research context,
especially when much of the research involves marginalized and subjugated groups.

Implications for Education

Phillipson’s (1992) theory of linguistic imperialism describes the process whereby the spread of
colonial languages (especially English) results in linguistic hierarchisation. One of the institu-
tions most responsible for the subjugation of minority and Indigenous languages is school.

44
 Methodologies of Language Policy Research

Skutnabb-Kangas (2000) refers to minority and Indigenous language education as a linguistic

human right and describes educational programs that do not incorporate the students’ home
languages as engaging in linguistic genocide. The culprits, as Shohamy (2006) sees it, are teachers
and principals, who internalize and implement policy ideology.
Others have focused on the ability of schools to promote minority languages. Examples
from Hornberger (2006, 2009) have already been mentioned; another example is the Māori
Language Act of 1987 in New Zealand, which declared Māori as one of New Zealand’s official
languages and has supported the Māori-medium education movement (see May and Hill
2005). These national multilingual language policies open what Hornberger (2002) refers to
as ideological space for multilingual education, which educators can use to create implementational
space for bilingual educational programs that incorporate minority and Indigenous languages
as resources.
Based on their ethnographic research, Johnson and Freeman (2010) argue that educators who
are committed to fostering linguistic diversity and bilingual education can create local spaces for
preserving the linguistic diversity within a school district, and these efforts can be supported by
district-wide language policy. They propose that teams of educators and researchers who under-
stand the local context, federal and state policy, and the body of language education research, can
develop educational language policy and programs that promote multilingualism; this can even
be done within the confines of a national language policy that does not actively support multi-
lingualism or bilingual education.
Still, national language policies that promote multilingualism and linguistic pluralism might
not be able to overcome either dominant societal discourses or local beliefs and practices that
favor particular (especially colonial) languages, monolingual education, or prescriptive and
outdated language instruction (Bekerman 2005; de los Heros 2009). As Hornberger has demon-
strated in her ongoing work in South America, multilingual national language policies do not
necessarily translate into multilingual classroom practices for many reasons, including the gap
between policy creation and implementation, the ephemeral and ever-changing nature of policy,
and, especially, the language attitudes of the communities themselves (Hornberger 1988). In
addition, local multilingual language policies are not necessarily sufficient in and of themselves
to overcome these obstacles. Evidence for this finding is found in Bekerman’s (2005) ethno-
graphic research on an Arabic-Hebrew Bilingual school in Israel. Despite a local commitment to
bilingual education, some societal language ideologies were too much for one school to
overcome.
One potential future opportunity may involve researchers and educators working together on
advocacy and action research projects, characterized by Johnson (2013a) as educational language
policy engagement and action research. This involves groups of teachers, students, administrators,
and university researchers investigating processes throughout the language policy cycle—creation,
interpretation, appropriation, and instantiation—and it informs and improves these processes.
The focus is on:

(1) how macro-level language policies are interpreted and put into practice;
(2) how micro-level language policies are created, interpreted, and put into practice;
(3) multilingual education and the educational opportunities of minority language users.

This process ideally involves teachers and administrators from multiple levels of institutional
authority and includes input from students, parents, and university scholars. Language policy
action research provides the research team with an opportunity to interrogate how they are cre-
ating, interpreting, and appropriating language policy, and ways of changing it if that should

45
David Cassels Johnson and Thomas Ricento

prove necessary. It also provides the opportunity for the research team to challenge inequalities
in schools that emerge from the subordination of minority languages; thus, there is an inherent
agenda of social justice.
Following Kemmis and McTaggart (1988 [1981]), Johnson (2013a) proposes that members of
the language policy action research team plan action together, act and observe individually and
collectively, reflect together, and reformulate more critically informed educational language plans and
policies. In addition, a list of research features is offered:
(1) Collaborative and participatory. Language policy action research involves a diverse
group of individuals from multiple levels of institutional authority who collaboratively develop
research questions; collect and analyze data; and reformulate language plans, policies, and practices
based on critical examination.
(2) Acceptance of different types of data as evidence. Quantitative studies might
include the relative effectiveness of different education programs, the implementation of language
policies (as reported in surveys), and the attitudes about various language policies and language
attitudes. Qualitative studies focus on language policy and educational processes: How are lan-
guage policies and programs created, interpreted, and put into practice? How do attitudes about
language policies impact classroom instruction? Findings help inform future language plans and
policies.
(3) Research team members develop an understanding of the macro-level lan-
guage policies influencing their educational practices and critically examine the
language of these policies. While the focus is local, an understanding of macro-level language
policies is crucial. A critical examination of the language policy language in macro-level policies
may reveal implementational and ideological spaces (Hornberger 2002) that the research team
can utilize to implement the educational programs they believe in.
(4) Includes research on past language policy successes and failures and current
language policy processes in other parts of the country/world. Every context is unique
but there may be similarities in language policy processes across contexts and educators can learn
from each other. Such comparisons are vital for developing a fuller understanding of how lan-
guage policy works and for developing better theories of language policy activity.
(5) Informed by research in applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, and educational
practices. This includes research on the relative effectiveness of different language educational
programs (e.g., Rolstad, Mahoney, and Glass 2005), the impact of testing on language policy and
practice (e.g., Menken 2008), successful strategies for developing local language policies (Corson
1999), first and second language acquisition (e.g., Lightbown and Spada 2006), language learning
processes and language teaching methods (e.g., Richards and Rodgers 2006), and sociolinguistics
and language teaching (e.g., Hornberger and McKay 2011).

Further Reading
Cooper, R.L. 1989. Language planning and social change. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Corson, D. 1999. Language policy in schools: A resource for teachers and administrators. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence
Erlbaum Associates.
Johnson, D.C. 2013. Language policy. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
McCarty, T.L. 2011. Ethnography and language policy. London: Routledge.
Ricento, T. (Ed.) 2006. An introduction to language policy: Theory and method. Malden, MA: Blackwell
Publishing.
Tollefson, J.W. 1991. Planning language, planning inequality: Language policy in the community. London:
Longman.

46
 Methodologies of Language Policy Research

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 4
Researching Identity Through
Narrative Approaches
Christina Higgins and Priti Sandhu

This chapter discusses the development of narrative approaches in the study of identity
formation and change in educational linguistics. Narrative approaches are promising for
examining identity because they allow researchers to study how people position themselves
in relation to larger societal structures and macrolevel discourses. Narratives can be analyzed
to study identities as they relate to ideological topics such as beliefs and attitudes, and they are
especially well suited for identifying the discursive positions that individuals take up in the
stories they tell when making sense of their own and others’ lives. In educational linguistics,
narratives have become increasingly used to understand how people negotiate their identities
in classrooms and in their everyday life. The analysis of narrative encompasses both life history
autobiographic narratives as well as more interactionally contextualized narratives that take
place in educational contexts. Those who are interested in developing an understanding of
how people view their own and others’ experiences will find narrative analysis a worthwhile
undertaking. Researchers who want to investigate the role of narratives in co-constructing
experience through collaborative storytelling will also find narrative analysis to be a very
useful approach.

Historical Perspectives
From sociology to psychology to education, narratives are now treated as primary data in an
increasing number of fields in which positivist traditions have long held sway. This may be
due in part to what has been called a “biographical turn” in the social sciences (Chamberlayne,
Bornat, and Wengraf 2000), or an interest in methods that can uncover the personal and social
meanings that are considered to be the basis of people’s actions, rather than identifying
structural or macrolevel factors as the starting point for analysis. In the social sciences, this has
amounted to a paradigm shift that now emphasizes the individual as the primary sense-
making agent in the construction of her or his own identity, rather than the end product of
larger forces. Of course, how much agency individuals have in shaping their own narratives
is itself a topic of inquiry, and many researchers situate their narrative work with a critical eye
to the role of social class, race, and gender in interpreting their findings. In addition, research-
ers have begun paying more attention to their own positionality in the process of collecting

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 Researching Identity

the data and interpreting it (Bamberg 2003; Lee and Simon-Maeda 2006). In recent years,
narratives have become more prominent in the field of educational linguistics due to increas-
ing interest in the important role that identity has in learning, teaching, and using language
in society. Many researchers who have taken ethnographic and case study approaches to their
research now find narratives a central part of their analytic toolkit, and the body of research that
sets out detailed methods for collecting and analyzing narrative data has grown tremendously
in the past decade.
Most accounts of narrative analysis in educational linguistics begin by acknowledging
the importance of William Labov’s contributions, which involved the analysis of narrative
structure in stories that he elicited in interviews with young African American males. Though
primarily a variationist who works on sociophonetic data, Labov explored the interviews
to counter claims in educational linguistics that African Americans have a “restricted code”
(Bernstein 1971), which was argued to lead to the production of less complex narratives
compared to those produced by Anglo American English speakers. As an outcome of this
work, Labov and Waletzky (1967) proposed a structural model for analyzing narrative
chronology, consisting of a basic structure: abstract, orientation, narrative clauses (i.e., com-
plicating action), and coda. Abstract and coda provide a link with the conversational frame,
while the orientation section introduces characters and setting. Labov and Waletzky also laid
the foundation for the concept of “tellability,” which refers to the need for narratives to be
newsworthy and about something remarkable rather than mundane. This concept was further
elaborated on by Ochs and Capps (2001), who demonstrated that storytelling is a highly
interactional process in which narrators and audiences negotiate details and evaluative
stances at all stages of the tale. Current approaches that analyze the discourse units that
comprise narratives and their relationship to overall story structure tend to build on these
scholars’ work.
From a rather different angle, many narrative studies produced in the past two decades are
driven by post-structuralist viewpoints. The impetus of much of this work is the development of
positioning theory, an approach developed by Bronwyn Davies and Rom Harré (1990) that
examines the types of subject positions, or subjectivities, that people assume in telling stories.
They explain that “a subject position incorporates both a conceptual repertoire and a location
for persons within the structure of rights for those who use that repertoire. Once having taken
up a particular position as one’s own, a person inevitably sees the world from the vantage point
of that position and in terms of the images, metaphors, and storylines that are relevant within that
particular discursive practice” (46). Though it might be said that this type of narrative analysis
has led to a greater amount of scholarship in educational linguistics, it is clear that many of the
scholars working in this tradition borrow tools from more interactional approaches. For example,
Higgins (2011a) used Goffman’s (1981) framework of footing in combination with positioning
theory to analyze how Swahili language learners moved from their role as storytellers to evalua-
tors of actions in stories. An analysis of the learners’ discursive moves acted as windows into the
learners’ positionings and made visible how they aligned with what they narrated as ‘Swahili’
language and culture.
Perhaps due to the influence of post-structuralist work, narrative analysis has often been
subsumed under discourse studies. Hence, deconstruction, the identification of macrolevel
discourses and ideologies, and the role of power in language and society are all significant topics
for narrative analysts. More recently, the co-construction of identity has taken center stage, and
frameworks allowing for the microanalysis of identity, such as conversation analysis and inter-
actional sociolinguistics, have become highly relevant to the analysis of narratives embedded in
conversations and interviews.

51
Christina Higgins and Priti Sandhu

Core Issues and Key Findings

Narrative research has long been used by scholars interested in studying identity from a variety
of perspectives, in large part because of the ontological understandings that have come to under-
pin this approach (Riessman 1993). Of special appeal to identity scholars is the assumption that
narratives are meaning-making devices enabling people to lend coherence to their lived experiences
(Bruner 2002). Narrators are understood to wield their voices and hence enact their agency and,
in so doing, adopt evaluative stances about people, expectations, and worldly conditions. Narratives
are also acknowledged to be located within their social, cultural, and historical contexts and, as
such, are viewed as being impacted upon by macrolevel or conventional storylines (Pavlenko
1998). These intricate associations make their evaluative function even more salient as narrators
are able to construct particular relationships between themselves and their social orders, often by
reproducing or critiquing existing relationships of power and knowledge (Peterson and Langellier
2006). Narratives are thus sites wherein nuanced, highly contextualized, multiple, and often
conflicted identities are constructed.
A substantial body of early narrative-based work within educational settings in the United
States was concerned with the interconnections between ethnic and sociocultural identities of
students and their narrative styles, with attention to educational implications. Jim Gee’s early
work (e.g., 1985, 1986, 1989) analyzed oral narratives of African American and Caucasian students
using ethnopoetics to highlight the close interconnections between features of their stories and
their sociocultural backgrounds. Concerned that mainstream educators would disregard African
American children’s narrative styles, Gee focused on identifying the narrative structures of the
African American children’s narratives vis-à-vis Caucasian children’s narratives. Similarly, Sarah
Michaels (1981) and Courtney Cazden (1988) contributed to understandings of minority
schoolchildren’s interactional styles through their analyses of oral narratives taking place during
routine classrooms such as ‘sharing time.’ These researchers aimed not only to document the
different narrative structures, but also to draw attention to the ways that the minority students’
narratives were potentially less valued among Anglo teachers, with the implication that the
students would suffer academically. While later studies complicated and expanded their findings,
this research has led to the dilemma of whether minority children must be asked to abandon their
own narrative styles and to acquire an ‘essayist,’ mainstream narrative style in order to succeed in
school. As Gee (1989, 109) points out, this may be difficult, if not unethical, as narrative style is
part of one’s identity, and is “connected with a culture’s mode of expression, presentation of self,
and way of making sense” of the world. Adding a more positive perspective, Poveda’s (2002) more
recent study of a Romani child set in Spain showed that the student’s ‘different’ narrative style
encouraged the teacher to engage more with the student and led the other students to partici-
pate more as well. This work on oral narratives has emphasized the need for educators to be
knowledgeable of the close connections between verbal styles and social identities and the
challenges students face when asked to emulate mainstream discourse styles both at the personal
and pedagogical levels.
Beyond interactional styles in classrooms, narratives have also provided insights into the ways
that school-aged students identify with different groups and networks. Here, researchers have
combined the analysis of narratives with understandings of students’ sociocultural and interac-
tional contexts to understand how students produce and reproduce social identities in their
schools and in larger society. To illustrate, Moore (2006) analyzed narratives of British students
to examine how hierarchies of ‘townies’ and ‘populars’ functioned within girls’ social networks,
paying attention to how certain girls were named and took up the rights to tell stories in multi-
party research interviews. Similarly, in a study exploring racial ideologies in California, Bucholtz

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(2011) analyzed Caucasian youths’ stories about racial fear, reverse discrimination, and fight
stories, which reproduced Black/White racial binaries. In addition to comparing the stories with
her own ethnographic observations, which did not find evidence of racialized violence or
intimidation, Bucholtz critically examined her own role in the construction of racial categories
in the interviews she carried out.
Narrative-based research within education has encompassed teacher identities as well (see also
Martel and Wang, this volume). One strand of such work has examined the identity construction
of in-service teachers in classroom interactions. Juzwik and Ives (2010) adopted a multi-layered
short story dialogic approach to analyze teacher identity as it was constructed in a short story the
teacher narrated within a classroom activity. Theorizing the dynamic, emergent, and interactional
nature of teacher identity, the study showed how the “teacher’s identifying narrative performance
as well as teacher-student interactions and relationships come to be mediated by a variety of
small-scale contextual and interactional factors” (58). Moving beyond classroom interactions,
other approaches have highlighted the importance of providing spaces for teachers to narrate
their professional experiences and identities. For example, McKinney and Giorgis (2009) analyzed
the autobiographies of literacy specialists working in schools to examine how their identities as
writers and as teachers of writing were negotiated and performed. An offshoot of teacher identity
research has examined the narratives for pre-service teacher education. One illustration of this
work is Alvine (2001), which used reflective literacy autobiographies of trainee teachers to exam-
ine the interconnections between their personal knowledge and the theoretical knowledge of
their teacher education courses; the trainees then drew from their autobiographies to formulate
compellingly integrated and grounded beliefs about teaching and learning.
Identity research in the teaching and learning of languages has also become a focus in recent
years. Because language teacher identity has been addressed extensively (Martel and Wang this
volume), we limit our comments here mostly to language learners. Seminal research in this area
began only about two decades ago, and it began with a focus on adult immigrant English lan-
guage learners. In this research, the learning of a second language has often been treated as going
through the stages of deconstruction and de-centering of the self, followed by the reconstruction
of one’s identity in the L2 (Norton Peirce 1995; Pavlenko 1998; Pavlenko and Lantolf 2000).
Much of this work has adopted a post-structuralist perspective on identity as being unstable, fluid,
and dynamic, yet simultaneously grounded in various discourses of gender, age, class, ethnicity,
and nationality.
Norton (2000) presents a comprehensive, book-length study of this type, utilizing participant
narratives to investigate the limited options that immigrant women from Peru, Poland, and
Vietnam faced in Canada as they struggled to engage in second language learning opportunities.
Norton analyzed narratives from diaries the women kept as part of a critical ethnography of the
women’s lives, and she found that the women’s language learning experiences were affected both
by being silenced in a patriarchal society and also by their gendered, raced, and classed experi-
ences. Adding another and more empowered perspective to narrative accounts of immigrants and
identity construction, Vitanova (2005) examined how East European immigrants to the US, both
men and women, were able to author themselves, using Bakhtinian terminology, in their second
language—English, thereby resisting the negative positionings assigned to them because of their
second language learner and foreigner status.
Narratives have proven fruitful for better understanding how identities relate to language learn-
ing in the late modern era of transnational affiliations and hybrid identity options, as learners have
an ever-widening array of ways of thinking about the languages and cultures that they study. Rather
than seeing languages as tied to monolithic ‘target’ cultures, studies are showing that learners often
connect their language learning with a range of real, virtual, and imagined communities—only

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some of which are mother tongue users (Duff 2007; Higgins 2011b). Learners often make
stronger friendships with others online, in forms such as fan fiction, where they construct new
narratives for each other to read (Black 2009), and through sharing the positionality of ‘language
learner’ in study abroad programs (Kinginger 2008). Additionally, migrants and relocated
individuals may form their own communities comprised of newcomers, rather than striving to
gain access to a community of native speakers. Higgins and Stoker (2011) examined narratives
to show how Korean adoptee-returnees in Korea with relatively limited contact with Koreans
positioned themselves as rightful speakers of their heritage language. The learners narrated stories
where their Koreanness was contested by Korean nationals, and in response, they constructed a
third space in which their status as ‘overseas Koreans’ was legitimated, and where their Korean
language competence was identified as valid.
As research on language learning and teaching has become more reflective on many levels,
narrative research within applied linguistics has grown as researchers both reflect on diverse
aspects of using narrative methodologies and use narrative accounts to focus on emergent topics
within the field. Lee and Simon-Maeda (2006) interrogated the role that racial identities play in
the research practices of two researchers—Asian and White—through their personal narratives.
While the latter researcher grappled with issues of positioning, reflexivity, and the tensions inher-
ent in representations of ‘others,’ the former tackled the complexities facing a researcher of color
attempting to represent ‘her own kind.’ Scholars have also begun to explore how narrative research
can reveal the ways in which researchers working within language education negotiate their
researcher identities, reduce power differentials between themselves and participants, and
encourage teacher collaboration in research projects (Norton and Early 2011). Adding a much-
needed international perspective to this growing body of work, Canagarajah (2012) recounted
how he successfully “negotiated the differing teaching practices and professional cultures of the
periphery and the center in an effort to develop a strategic professional identity” (258). In a
globalized world where English has acquired multi-faceted local identities, he highlighted the
need for closer communication between these diverse communities and the need to critically use
multiple identities to become part of the larger professional discourses and practices of the field.

Research Approaches
In an important article on narratives in applied linguistics, Aneta Pavlenko (2007) writes that in
studies on autobiographic narratives, “it is not uncommon to see a summary of participants’
observations, richly interspersed with quotes, presented as analysis” (163). To remedy the lack of
analysis present in much of this research, a comprehensive treatment of narrative data needs
to involve attention to the content (what is said, i.e., themes), the context (the microcontext of the
interview and the macrocontext of the sociopolitical events surrounding the telling), and
the form (how the narratives are told discursively). Relatively new ways of looking at narratives
not only as stories that convey ‘what happened,’ but also as interactional data in which speakers
artfully position themselves and others in discourse have thus emerged. Within the field of orally
recounted narratives, what Pavlenko refers to as form was analyzed early on by Labov and Waletzky
(1967) in their seminal functional analytical model. Over the past several decades, scholars work-
ing from more discourse analytic perspectives, such as Bamberg (1997), Wortham (2001), and
Georgakopoulou (2007), have asserted the need to take account of interactional surroundings in
order to recognize the collaborative nature of talk and the particular social actions the narrative
carries out in a specific interaction.
Much narrative data is collected through interviews with a researcher, with the goal of estab-
lishing participants’ accounts of their life histories, in which they present big picture perspectives of

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their past experiences. Such data collection allows researchers to gain a holistic understanding of
an individual’s experiences, which can shed light on particular research questions. In life-history
research, analysis usually focuses on the content and context of the telling, and analysts treat
narratives as sense-making devices wherein individuals use stories to craft coherent visions of
their past and present. A useful illustration of life-history narrative research is Menard-Warwick’s
(2005) study, in which she interviewed two Latina immigrants living in California six times.
Her analysis of the narratives was set in the context of her larger ethnography and involved her
participant-observation over a period of many months in the women’s community school ESL
classrooms. After an initial coding of themes, she discovered the important concept of intergener-
ational trajectories, which in turn provided her with a deeper understanding of the connections
between the women’s engagement with English and Spanish literacies vis-à-vis their own
childhood experiences, and as parents of school-aged children.
Life history narratives are also used to examine how narrators might evoke collective remembering
(Wertsch 2002)—that is, culturally shared narratives that have been socially constructed across
time and reified through frequent retellings. The narration of collective remembering is closely
bound to identity construction and can be seen as an example of speakers engaging in microlevel
and macrolevel discourses to position themselves with regard to nation-states, ethnic group
memberships, and gender identities. Using narratives taken from interviews and language learner
diaries, Kinginger (2008) provides clear examples of how larger discourses and shared storylines
impact language learners’ experiences while studying abroad. Focusing on Americans studying
abroad in France, Kinginger (2011) examined the different degrees to which four college-aged
women adhered to nationalist storylines of American-French relations, and how much this
affected their experiences in a cultural context that was explicitly critical of the United States’
military actions in the Middle East. Not surprisingly, such collective remembering often occurs
in classroom interaction as well. A stellar example is Juzwik (2009), which explored how students
become socialized toward narratives about the Holocaust that follow nationally sanctioned
storylines.
A relatively recent but influential contribution to the field of narrative studies is in the form
of the distinction between ‘big’ and ‘small’ stories. ‘Big stories’ such as those collected in life history
narratives, autobiographies, or stories about life-altering events are mostly elicited by researchers
in interviews, as opposed to ‘small stories,’ which are recounted in everyday interactions (Bamberg
and Georgakopoulou 2008; Georgakopoulou 2007). The well-established tradition of collecting
big stories normally imposes a list of criteria that determine what can actually be considered a
story. For instance, there is a requirement for a chronological series of events about past experi-
ences, a plot that has a beginning, middle and end, and takes on a particular perspective or voice.
In contrast, small stories are interactional tellings of ongoing events, future or hypothetical events,
and shared events. They can be very brief, as they also capture allusions to previous tellings,
deferrals of tellings, and refusals to tell.
Small stories have been conceptualized as talk-in-interaction, embedded in their discourse envi-
ronment, collaboratively produced by speakers and listeners (Georgakopoulou 2007). Such an
orientation foregrounds the concept of narrative from the interactants’ perspectives, and takes a
strongly emic perspective of what might be considered a narrative. While Georgakopoulou
(2007) draws upon conversation analysis as a useful analytical tool for analysis, she also emphasizes
the external contexts that shape the telling of small stories. Because small stories tend to be
threaded through interactions and reemerge over the course of time, the concept of inter-narrativity
is also important, as the life history of a narrative allows researchers to examine how a narrative is
moved in time and space, recycled and reshaped so that it fits each new context of its telling. The
analytical orientation of what is accomplished through the tellings of these small stories is that

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people use them “in their interactive engagements to construct a sense of who they are, while
big story research analyzes the stories as representations of world and identities” (Bamberg and
Georgakopoulou, 2008, 382). Small story proponents do not posit a substitution of research on
big stories with small ones; rather, they argue that the field of narrative research would be
enriched through the inclusion of small stories while their conceptualization and analytical styles
could make useful contributions to big story research.
Bamberg and Georgakopoulou’s attention to the role of stories, whether big or small, have
great importance in discourse-oriented narrative analysis. They highlight the importance of
looking beyond the referential aspects of narrative to the interactional elements of the narrative
telling, especially the accomplishment of interactive positionings by the narrators and their
narrating audiences (Bamberg 1997; Wortham 2001). Narrators may evaluate the contributions
of their interlocutors (in the case of interviews), and interviewers themselves can also supply
evaluative positioning in the act of co-constructing the interview (Wortham and Gadsden 2006).
In short, stories told in oral interviews need to be analyzed as products of the interaction between
the teller and the interviewer (Mishler 1986). Therefore, assumptions holding the narrator to
be the sole creator of a narrative are debunked because the interviewer’s style of questioning,
prompts, acknowledgments, encouragements, facilitations, challenges, interruptions, and silences
all are viewed as decisively impacting the story that eventually gets told. Narratives can
simultaneously perform a multitude of functions, and narrators can communicate propositional
information and display evaluations of this information (and of the interaction itself ), while also
constructing a socially recognizable identity (Koven 2007).
Some researchers have augmented the analysis of narratives, whether big or small, with
ethnographic knowledge of their participants’ experiences, drawing on observations, document
collection, and interviews over an extended period. This can help establish the macrocontext in
which the narratives are told (Pavlenko 2007), and it can offer the researcher a deeper under-
standing of the discourses that shape the narrative tellings. If the goal is to make explanatory links
between narratives and specific social phenomenon, such contextual information is crucial to
avoid privileging narrative accounts and to instead treat them as social phenomena that need to
be further examined (Atkinson and Delamont 2006). The purpose of doing so is not to deter-
mine the truth value of narratives, but rather to understand how the stories that people tell are
embedded in larger ideological, economic, and political contexts, and hence, are shaped by those
forces.

Debates
We will address four points of debate in this section: 1) the distinctions between narrative inquiry
and narrative analysis; 2) the relevance of reflection in narratives; 3) the nature and role of context;
and 4) researcher reflexivity. Some scholars have found it important to distinguish between
narrative analysis and narrative inquiry in their work, which points to a larger debate over what
comprises a thorough analysis of narrative data. Within this debate, narrative inquiry is usually
described as an approach that focuses more on big stories, asking questions of who, what and why,
rather than considering the question of how stories are told. In other words, narrative inquiry
values stories for what they can tell us about the teller’s self, while narrative analysis is also inter-
ested in examining how tellers construct their stories within the context of the here-and-now of
the storytelling event and interlocutors. This distinction is generally borne out in research
approaches, as ethnographic and case study work in educational linguistics tends to use narrative
inquiry, whereas researchers following discourse analytic traditions tend to favor narrative analy-
sis. The two different approaches also have consequences for the presentation of data and the style

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of research reporting. Many narrative inquiry studies present the voices of the participants in
third person synthesis of findings, sometimes inserting illustrative excerpts into the writing. On
the other hand, narrative analysis studies include extensive, detailed transcripts and close analysis
of the actual voices of the narrators (e.g., Wortham 2001; Sandhu 2014a, 2014b). Despite these
apparent differences, there is much to be gained from a synergy between the two approaches,
since focusing on how people engage in telling stories sheds light on the various selves that are
articulated, and seeing how such stories change in particular interactional contexts allows us to
understand more about who and what than may have previously been imagined (Georgakopoulou
2006). As already discussed, a three-pronged approach that takes into account the content, con-
text, and form of narratives has been recommended (Pavlenko 2007). Nevertheless, the debates
continue because research that addresses questions of how often neglects thematic topics, and
narrative work that investigates what and why questions often avoids examining the intricacies of
narrative discourse. While there may be cases where a delicate balance between the two is the
goal, it is clear from the literature that some research questions are better served with a focus on
what questions, while others are best suited for how questions.
While discussing the distinctions between ‘big’ and ‘small’ stories previously, we explained the
varying understandings of narratives that these two perspectives have adopted. These continue to
be a topic of much debate within the field, especially in the way in which they conceptualize
reflection and its importance for identity construction. ‘Big’ stories are valuable because they are
removed from the here and now of ongoing social action and thus allow narrators the temporal
distance from life events, enabling them to reflect on them and thus assign meaning to lived expe-
rience. The self or subjectivity that this process of reflection produces is a larger, more stable and
continuous one than that which emerges in everyday experiences. While acknowledging that
this larger self is not a “fixed, grandiose, narcissistic, hyper-masculine vision of the Individual,”
Freeman (2006) argues that “our lives—the movement of our lives, across significant swaths of
time—continues to have meaning for many” (135). On the other hand, it can be argued that
reflection is present in varying degrees in small stories as well (Bamberg 2006). The question is
not the presence or absence or even the quantity or quality of such reflection, but instead, how
interpretations are accomplished in and through interaction. In summary, the debate over reflec-
tion is whether narratives are based on “internal psychological constructs” or if they are dialogic
and discursive artifacts.
Another point of debate that has emerged in narrative work is the role of context in narrative
approaches. Narrative scholars have repeatedly emphasized the importance of the context
within which narratives are situated, maintaining that narratives are never recounted in a vacuum
but are inextricably embedded in and thus are products of their local environments. Analysis of
various levels of positioning in narratives addresses the importance of taking into account the
multiple levels of context, including the level of positioning between the researcher and the
participants, as well as the level of positioning amongst discourses (Bamberg 1997). However,
the extent to which narrative analysts incorporate the ‘world’ of the narratives into their analysis
differs significantly (Riessman 2008). Some scholars adopt Mishler’s (1986) understanding of
interviews as interactional sites where interactants collaboratively negotiate for and construct
meaning. Others include within their analytical lens the shared (or dissimilar) characteristics of
the interactants and examine how the racial, linguistic, gendered subjectivities of the interactants
impact the narratives that are recounted. Still others adopt an even wider perspective and exam-
ine how personal stories of participants are connected to larger social worlds, or Bamberg’s
(1997) third level of positioning amongst discourses. There is emerging work that attempts to
bridge some of these distinctions. An example is Sandhu (2014a), which examines the collabo-
rative production of a narrative told within a research interview and simultaneously attends to

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the construction and resistence of hegemonic societal discourses regarding the value of Hindi
or English medium education.
A fourth area of debate is the nature and extent of researcher reflexivity that narrative scholars
bring to their work. It has been argued that narrative-based research will be richer if it takes into
account the historical and social location, not only of the narrators, but also of the researchers,
since both influence the research relationship (Riessman 2002, 37). However, in most narrative
studies that examine identity construction, the researcher’s positionality vis-à-vis the participants
or in relation to the topic under examination remains absent. This could be because the research-
ers’ own life experiences are very different from the participants, and because such examinations
are not yet commonplace in the literature, and hence, are often underappreciated when under-
going peer review. A compelling explanation is posited by Nelson (2005, 315) who says, “texts
in which the researcher’s subjectivity is foregrounded can be perceived as irrelevant, self-indulgent
or insufficiently critical.” However, narrative scholars are increasingly becoming cognizant of the
added insights that engaging in researcher reflexivity brings to their analysis and are looking at
how their racial, professional, linguistic, gendered identities impact diverse elements of the
research process, such as the co-construction of narratives, the relationships between them and
their participants, and the narrative analysis and interpretations that are made. We would suggest
that as more outlets for publication value research that treats the researcher’s positionality as a
central feature of analysis, more attention to this last debate will lead to new insights. This is
already being done in interview research, where the role of the interviewer is treated as central
to the narratives being told (e.g., Miller 2011; Sandhu 2014a).

Implications for Education

Narratives can provide a basis for concrete pedagogical materials and activities in classrooms of
all kinds. English language classrooms for adult immigrants, for example, can be designed so that
students’ narratives act as a bridge in connecting their classroom learning to their lives beyond
the classroom walls and in providing a space for student voices to be heard. Writing autobio-
graphic narratives “can be empowering, especially for those to whom the act of naming and
framing lived experience in an education context is not necessarily familiar, comfortable, or
historically valued” (Nelson 2011, 467). As Menard-Warwick (2006) found in her research with
adult learners of English, when learners were given the chance to write in English about their
personal histories and their families, their enthusiasm for learning grew exponentially. Similarly,
sharing diary entries gave the learners the opportunity to develop their oral skills and to learn
new vocabulary as well (Norton 2000). Future research is needed that examines how narratives
can be used as a pedagogical resource for teachers working with migrant and minority populations
for which culturally relevant materials are lacking.
Narratives have a great deal of potential for practical purposes in the field of teacher education
(Barkhuizen and Wette 2008; Johnson 2009). They can offer aspiring or in-service teachers the
opportunity to critically reflect on their beliefs and teaching philosophies, and they can be used
to assess changes and growth as they experience teacher training. From a sociocultural perspec-
tive, narratives can be utilized as the core of professional development activities for teachers as a
way of re-envisioning teaching as dialogic mediation. Narratives can help teachers in teacher
education programs to ‘externalize’ their understandings of teaching theory and practices and to
‘verbalize’ their thought processes so that they “not only name the theoretical constructs they are
exposed to . . . but, through the activity of narrating, . . . begin to use those concepts to make
sense of their teaching experiences and to regulate both their thinking and teaching practices”
(Johnson and Golombek 2011, 493). Finally, interactional narratives that take place in classrooms

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can be analyzed as part of self-reflective teaching and learning. Rex and Juzwik (2011) provide
a guide that addresses a range of very practical issues, including how to encourage student
participation in discussions of difficult topics and how to draw upon cultural differences as
resources for all to learn from. Future research that examines the relationship between interac-
tional, classroom-based narratives and their impact on student participation and engagement with
learning would be a very exciting direction for future narrative work in education.

Further Reading
Bamberg, M. 2007. Narrative—State of the art. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. [Originally published as 2006
Special Issue of Narrative Inquiry, 16(1).]
Barkhuizen, G. (Ed.) 2011. Narrative research in TESOL. Special issue of TESOL Quarterly, 391–590.
Pavlenko, A. 2007. Autobiographic narratives as data in applied linguistics. Applied Linguistics, 28(2),
163–188.
Riessman, C. 2008. Narrative methods for the human sciences. London: Sage.
Wortham, S. 2001. Narratives in action. New York: Teachers College Press.

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 Part 2
Advocacy in
Educational Linguistics
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 5
Language Advocacy in Teacher
Education and Schooling
Christian Faltis

Introduction
The focus of this chapter is on language advocacy, defined here as the promotion of an array of
socially, culturally, and politically constructed language practices, derived from language policies
and orientations, particularly within educational contexts of teacher education programs and
K–12 classrooms. Language advocacy represents positions taken about language in society
through explicit and implicit promotion of educational and societal reasons for using and learn-
ing language in schooling. In educational contexts, language advocacy practices are politically
mediated human activity organized from shared understandings of language as constructed by
teacher educators, teachers, and educational linguists about how language practices should be
enacted within local schooling contexts. As human activity, language practices advocated by and
for teacher educators and teachers are bundled activities that represent larger ideologies concern-
ing the nature of language, and how it should be used and practiced.
This chapter examines language advocacy as orientations to language by teachers who interact
with children and youth in primary and secondary grades, and teacher educators who prepare
teachers within formal teacher education programs that lead to state-endorsed teacher credentials.
The orientation teachers and teacher educators use to enact and challenge their own and others’
orientations toward language advocacy, especially in their local schooling contexts, matters for the
kinds of language practices that are promoted and tolerated in classrooms and elsewhere in schools.
The chapter begins with a brief historical accounting of the relation between societal events and
language orientations that have affected teacher educators and teachers since the advent of American
public schools. Following this section is a discussion of the dimensions of language advocacy in the
current contexts of teacher education and teachers. Next comes a section on recommendations for
teacher education and teachers, followed by a concluding discussion of future directions.

Historical Perspectives on Language Advocacy Orientations

Since the creation of public schools in the later half of the 19th century, following the American
Civil War, the majority of teacher educators and teachers in the United States have been mem-
bers of the dominant group. The first public schools taught young children literacy and math

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Christian Faltis

skills, almost exclusively in one language—English—up to the 6th grade. As public schooling
expanded westward and into secondary levels over the ensuing decades, educators and politi-
cians alike debated whether public schools should be open to all students or whether African
American, Mexican American, and Native American students should be schooled separately
from White students. The segregationists prevailed and influenced the official American
schooling policy of separate schools for different ethnic groups, a policy that lasted well into the
mid-20th century.
By the end of World War I, the United States experienced a spike in immigration from eastern
and southern Europe, sparking widespread fear that America was becoming too linguistically
diverse and overly populated by darker-skinned immigrants. This fear stoked the flames of
Americanization efforts in schools, viewing local efforts by new immigrants to retain their cultural
traditions and language practices while residing in America as un-American. As the linguistic and
cultural landscape of the United States underwent rapid change, a small group of prominent White
scientists, anthropologists, and educators, with roots in eugenics, began espousing racist views that
new immigrants (especially those of color), post-Civil War Blacks, and Native Americans were
genetically and culturally inferior to the original Anglo Saxon colonial immigrants, particularly in
the area of language (Edwards 2010).
The eugenic argument had a direct bearing on language advocacy practices at that time.
Eugenicists argued that because the language abilities and practices of immigrant children led to
low intelligence, teaching them would always be a challenge. Moreover, they contended that it
would be useless to teach immigrant children to think in languages other than English, as the use
of these languages contributed to the low scores on the intelligence tests used to measure intel-
ligence. For an entire generation between 1910 and 1940, the dominant message conveyed to
teacher educators and teachers about immigrants and children of color was that language, race,
and ethnicity had an adverse effect on the ability to learn. Language advocacy stemming from
this deficit view solidly promoted the use of dominant, majority language for education.
By the end of World War II, the genetic arguments about language deficits waned to some
extent, owing in part the re-designation of eastern and southern European immigrants as White
(Muhammed 2010) and the focus on rebuilding of the nation through the promotion of unity
among diverse language communities. Instruction in a common language, it was argued, contrib-
uted to national unity. Through the next decade and into the 1960s, members of Black, Mexican,
and Native American groups began to question the common language-national unity ideology,
making the case that their language and cultural traditions, practices, and histories needed to be
part of the nation building from that point forward.

Language in the Era of Civil Rights

Language advocacy shifted from an emphasis on collective and national unity to a demand for
specific instructional programs, such as bilingual education, and the teaching of Mexican
American, African American, and Indigenous American history and culture in schools. Chicano
activists and Mexican American students, for example, engaged in sit-ins and other forms of civil
disobedience to bring attention to racist policies and their language education needs (San Miguel
2001). Teacher educators and teachers developed ethnic and language curricula to reflect changes
in language demographics. The 1960 census data indicated that the Spanish-surnamed popula-
tion in the United States had increased by more than 50%—from 2.3 million in 1950 to nearly
3.5 million in 1960. These data also indicated that Spanish-speaking children and youth were
faring poorly in school and that the language of education used in schooling was a primary
concern with Latino communities (Faltis and Coulter 2008).

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In 1968, Congress passed the Bilingual Education Act (Title VII of the Elementary and Sec-
ondary Education Act), the first federal recognition of the role of languages other than English,
as a means to meet the educational needs of “children who are educationally disadvantaged
because of their inability to speak English” (Congress, U.S. PL 90–247, Sec. 702, 1968). While
the Bilingual Education Act did not specifically mandate or define the kinds of programs that
schools should use, grants were awarded primarily to teacher education programs and schools
with high numbers of emergent bilingual children that (1) developed and operated bilingual
programs, (2) prepared bilingual teachers, and (3) established communication between the home
and school (Faltis and Coulter 2008). Emergent bilingual students are defined in this chapter as
immigrants, children of immigrants, and indigenous children who are adding varieties of the
majority language while their bilingual practices are emerging over time (García 2011).
The federal bilingual education period lasted from 1968 to 2001, with the passage of the No
Child Left Behind Act, which changed the focus of federal support for non-dominant language
learners from bilingual to English-only policies. Throughout this period, educational linguists
and activists chipped away at the earlier eugenic, racist discourse, taking on the low-intelligence,
low-language development premise. In 1969, for example, sociolinguist William Labov published
The Logic of Non-Standard English, in which he refuted the contention that the language varieties
used in Black urban communities were less logical than White peers’. Labov (1969) wrote
pointedly: “Unfortunately, these notions are based on the work of educational psychologists who
know very little about language and even less about Negro children” (179). He went on to show
through meticulous analyses that these children “possess the same capacity for conceptual learn-
ing, and use the same logic as any one else who learns to speak and understand English” (179).

Questions About the Nature of Language

Following Labov’s seminal work in sociolinguistics, a number of minority educational linguists
started working on the traditional conceptualizations of bilingualism and non-standard dialects,
posing questions about the nature of language mixing that occurs in bilingual communities within
and across language varieties. Language advocates in the field of bilingualism during the bilingual
education period were heavily influenced by Fishman’s (1967) paradigm of individual and societal
bilingualism. Fishman’s model posited that in order for minority languages to survive in contexts
along with a dominant, majority language, they had to be used separately within specific domains
of use. Two languages that enjoyed separate, functional distributions among use were said to rep-
resent diglossia, a concept he borrowed from Ferguson (1959). In bilingual education, the idea of
diglossia meant that the two languages of instruction should be presented separately. When teach-
ers and students mixed the two languages, it was likely that the minority language would suffer.
The reason, according to Fishman, was that when a dominant language was used for a purpose that
was once served by the minority language, the dominant language takes over that purpose due to
its power and prestige. Accordingly, for individual emergent bilinguals to develop high proficiency
in their two languages, they will need to have ample opportunities to hear and use their two lan-
guages separately over time.
In 1980, Pedro Pedraza and colleagues in New York published the results of a multi-year study
in which they challenged Fishman’s rule about diglossia (Pedraza, Attinasi, and Hoffman 1980).
They found that children and adults who were raised bilingually not only mixed their two lan-
guages for communicative purposes, but that the children’s proficiency in the two language
repertoires increased as they grew older. Likewise, in the late 1970s, a young educational linguist
named Guadalupe Valdés (Valdés-Fallis 1976; 1978) began examining the nature of code-switching
in classroom contexts. Valdés defined code-switching used by bilingual students as the alternation

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Christian Faltis

between two or more languages during bilingual discourse. She was among the first educational
linguists to embrace code-switching as a sophisticated means of bilingual language use among
children and youth. In the popular discourse, code-switching (mixing of two languages within
an utterance—in linguistics, referred to as intra-sentential code-switching) was and continues to
be maligned as lazy speech, and evidence of one’s inability to use the two languages separately, in
ways that reflect common notions of educated speech (see Chappell and Faltis 2007).

Language Advocacy Around Human Rights

By the 1990s, there was a shift in the discussion around language advocacy, in response to the
scaling up of English instruction worldwide with espousals for teaching standard variety, coupled
with the decrease in uses of languages other than English for instruction and other public uses.
Early on, some language advocates in the United States and other countries with large multilin-
gual populations looked to the work of Skutnabb-Kangas and Phillipson (1994), who proposed
that people have a linguistic human right to identify with and use their minority language
practices. According to these scholars, a human rights language advocacy position espouses the
view that at the individual level:

. . . everyone can identify positively with their mother tongue, and have that identification
respected by others, irrespective of whether their mother tongue is a minority or a majority
language. It means the right to learn the mother tongue, including at least basic education
through the medium of the mother tongue, and the right to use it in many of the (official)
contexts . . .
(Phillipson, Rannut, and Skutnabb-Kangas 1994, 2)

At the collective level, advocacy for language from a human rights perspective means “the
right of minority groups to exist . . . to enjoy and develop their language and the right for
minorities to establish and maintain schools” (Phillipson, Rannut, and Skutnabb-Kangas, 1994, 2).
An example of language advocacy that focuses on language rights can be seen in McCarty’s
(2003) proclamation about teaching indigenous languages in the United States: “Indigenous
language revitalisation confronts not only a colonial legacy of linguicide, genocide, and cultural
displacement, but mounting pressures for standardisation. Those pressures are manifest in exter-
nally imposed ‘accountability’ regimes—high-stakes testing, reductionist reading programmes,
and English-only policies” (159).
Viewed against the earlier efforts to sanction minority language use in transitional bilingual
programs, a human rights language advocacy approach extends the promotion of minority lan-
guages as a human right, while simultaneously challenging efforts to decrease the use of minority
languages and dialects in school and society as racist and leading toward linguistic genocide.

Anti-Immigrant Discourse and Re-Emergence of Deficit Thinking

In the early 2000s, within the rising anti-immigration discourse levied mainly against the grow-
ing population of Mexican immigrants who entered the United States from the 1980s and 1990s
were renewed efforts to associate deficit thinking with the language practices in Mexican families
(Valencia 2010). Mexican immigrant children and youth were targeted by unitary language
advocates as resisting efforts to learn the national, majority languages. In the meantime, deficit
thinking proponents insisted that deprived cultural practices used in Mexican families and other
minority groups contributed to their lack of progress in learning the majority language. Research

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by Portes and Rumbaut (2001) however, found that Spanish-speaking immigrants emerge as
predominantly English speakers by the third generation. Bilingual language advocates, as well,
related a different narrative about the funds of knowledge Mexican families use to navigate their
daily lives (González, Moll, and Amanti 2005), rejecting deficit views based on constructions of
deprived home environments.

Disinventing Monolingual Views About Language Diversity

The bulk of theoretical and practical work developed in the field of educational linguistics in the
name of minority language advocacy since the 1960s reflects a position committed to both the
promotion of language diversity in modern nation-states, and the support for the expansion of
minority language rights. More recently, educational linguists within this orientation have sought
to disinvent and reconstitute language (Makoni and Pennycook 2007) in ways that place hybrid-
ity and circumstantial bilingualism, where language users perform language acts using both lan-
guages, as the basis for understanding language as a local practice (Pennycook 2011). Makoni and
Pennycook (2007) draw on the scholarship about the invention of colonial Africa and the decon-
struction of language as a separate, autonomous system to argue that hybrid language practices
(Bhabba 1994) more accurately represent the realities of bilinguals than concepts based on mono-
lingual norms in post-modern times. Much of this newer research questions the conceptualiza-
tion of language as a separate, autonomous system that language advocates in minority language
rights camps have deployed in their efforts to espouse their views (see Canagarajah 2005; García,
Flores, and Woodley 2012).

The Unitary Empire Strikes Back

Despite efforts toward language advocacy to promote language diversity using monolingual
norms or as local language practices “governed by stylistic and strategic deployment of numerous
styles and a range of language” (García 2007, xiv), powerful unitary forces have continued to work
feverishly toward the establishment in schools and society of a common, majority language.
These efforts, coupled with the teaching of monolingual standards-based approaches to language
in academic contexts have been particularly successful at the state level. For instance, in 1998,
voters in California passed Proposition 227, which restricted the use of languages other than
English for instructional purposes, in order to develop “English for the Children”; in 2002, voters
in Massachusetts passed Question 2, which outlawed bilingual instruction; and in 2003, voters in
Arizona passed Proposition 203, an even more restrictive language policy that banned bilingual
instruction and mandated English-only instruction focused on the teaching of prescribed lan-
guage forms. Similar restrictions against bilingual instruction in the name of “unitary language”
(Grant 1997) have also passed in Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, and Alabama. Proponents who
advocate for unitary language policies point to the negative juxtaposition of local minority affil-
iation and national identity, arguing that affiliation to language and non-standard varieties of
language serves as an obstacle to national unity and dooms users to low socioeconomic status.

Language Advocacy in the New Era

Undaunted by these unitary efforts, bilingual language advocates, spearheaded most prominently
by Ofelia García (2009) and colleagues in both the United States and other multilingual locations
(García and Kleifgen 2010; García, Flores, and Woodley 2012; Menken and García, 2010), con-
tinue to push back, using alternative understandings of the nature of language and how it is

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Christian Faltis

approached in schooling. In the contemporary era of minority language advocacy, language

advocates see their goal as twofold: (1) to confront the unitary language perspective espoused by
dominant majority language advocates, and (2) to disinvent separate, autonomous views of lan-
guage and bilingualism, with an eye toward proposing for teacher educators and teachers new
ways of understanding and advocating for language diversity in the students they teach.
In summary, an essential feature of language advocacy throughout recent U.S. history is that
it seeks to promote a particular understanding of language, and in doing so takes a stance that not
only favors, but also challenges, certain shared practical understandings of language, language use,
and language users. In the section below, language advocacy is summarized in terms of orienta-
tions toward unitary or diversity that range from weak to strong positions. As this brief historical
account hopes to make clear, language advocacy cannot be separated from larger issues around
language and language users that exist in contemporary society and have histories based on the
extent and nature of contact between peoples of diverse origins.

Language Advocacy as a Critical Issue in

Teacher Education and Teaching
In educational contexts, a contemporary critical issue with respect to language advocacy centers
on the awareness of orientations toward language advocacy within local contexts that teacher
educators and teachers hold and use to guide their day-to-day practices. Lucas and Ginberg
(2008) argue that all teachers and teacher educators need to clearly understand the dimensions
of language advocacy in order to respond critically to the realities of language diversity in con-
temporary classrooms.

Realities of Language and Diversity in Schooling

No fewer than 85% of 3.5 million practicing teachers and nearly all teacher educators in the
1,400 college and university teacher preparation programs across the United States are members
of the dominant group (Feistritzer 2011); fewer than 1% of either group are bilingual and bilit-
erate in languages representative of the bilingual communities in which they teach. Students
entering the teaching profession in years to come are likely to continue this pattern.
As language advocates, teachers and teacher educators have a more significant impact on lan-
guage practices of children and youth from ages 4 to 18 than any other adult, barring parents.
Teachers engage with their students through language, holding sway over the kinds of language
practices that are enacted inside the classroom, including what language practices count, what
language practices are enabled, and for what purposes.
Millions of children and youth enrolled in school, by contrast, are emergent bilinguals and mem-
bers of minority groups who may use language practices that are devalued in school. About 10%
of elementary schools and 5% of secondary schools across the United States enroll nearly 70% of all
immigrant children and youth; about half of all elementary schools nationwide have substantial
numbers of emergent bilingual students, classified and often labeled as English language learners,
and nearly a quarter of all secondary schools enroll bilingual students who are continuing from
elementary school or are first time enrollees (Cosentino de Cohen and Clewell 2007).

Dimensions of Language Advocacy

To help understand the dimensions of that which teacher educators and teachers are presently
facing in developing language advocacy practices in their local settings, let us refer to Figure 5.1.

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 Language Advocacy

Strong

Promote a common language in Promote local language and

school and society for collective circumstantial bilingualism; espouse

identity and national unity; reify transnational literacy and hybrid

standard language; disparage non- language practices; challenge deficit

standard as flawed language models

Unitary Diversity
Tolerate foreign languages (standard Tolerate elective, transitional

dialect); support foreign language bilingualism and biliteracy in schools;

development as an economic privilege monolingual bilinguals; reify

resource academic language

Weak

Figure 5.1 Language Advocacy Dimensions

On this grid, the vertical axis represents the strength of support, from strong to weak, for certain
language practices, depending on the orientation of language advocacy. The second dimension,
represented by the horizontal axis, is the orientation of language advocacy, ranging from unitary
to diversity. Representative positions are listed for each quadrant, and each of these is explained in
more detail below, proceeding from the top leftmost quadrant, in a counterclockwise direction. It
is most instructive to consider these axes as continua, rather than fixed positions. Moreover, it is
quite possible for individuals to advocate more than one position on the grid, at any one point in
or across time, and the orientations originate, for the most part, from good intentions.
Historically, K–12 teachers and teacher educators have operated philosophically within the top
left quadrant, especially prior to 1960, followed by the bottom left quadrant. Throughout history,
particularly during times of heightened civil rights awareness (1960–1980s), schools and teacher
education programs have been situated somewhere between lower and upper right quadrant.
Notably, advocates of bilingual education and English language learners during recent periods of
bilinguaphobia (Faltis and Coulter 2005) and anti-immigrant discourse have been especially vig-
ilant about affirming language diversity. The least common and least widespread orientation
among teachers and teacher educators is the upper right quadrant, which strongly advocates for
hybridity and diversity in language and literacy practices and actively challenges deficit approaches
to language and language learning. This strong diversity orientation objects to many of the core
theoretical constructions of language espoused by traditional bilingual education and standard
language advocates as well as the basic tenets of uniformity language advocates.

Strong, Unitary Language Advocacy Orientation

The strong, unitary position in the top left quadrant promotes a common language in school and
society as essential for developing and sustaining national unity through collective identity—
namely, one language for one nation. The connection between language and nation developed
during the colonization of India, Africa, and the Americas (Dorian 1998). A key tenet of colo-
nization was to de-language indigenous children and youth through schooling in the language

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Christian Faltis

of the colonizer (Stroud 2007). Once a nation had completed its colonization, use of indigenous
and immigrant languages served only to fragment society and encourage the development of
language affiliations detrimental to a common nation state.
Language advocates from a strong, unitary orientation subscribe to the belief that each nation
should have only one language to unify the nation; one language liberates citizens from the tyr-
anny of narrow communities to guarantee them personal autonomy, equality, and common citi-
zenship (Parekh 1995). As May (2012) explains it:

The ‘triumph’ of universalism with respect to language is evidenced by the replacement over
time of a wide variety of language varieties spoken within the nation-state’s borders with one
‘common’ language . . . This process usually involves legitimation and institutionalization of
the chosen national language. Legitimation is understood to mean here the formal recognition
accorded to the language by the nation-state—usually, via ‘official’ language status. Institution-
alization, perhaps the more important dimension, refers to the process by which the language
becomes accepted, or ‘taken for granted’ in a wide range of social, cultural and linguistic
domains or contexts, both formal and informal. Both elements, in combination, achieve the
central requirement of nation-states: cultural and linguistic homogeneity in the civic realm or
public domain.
(6)

Schlesinger (1992), an advocate of this position in recent decades, makes a similar argument:

A common language is a necessary bond of national cohesion in so heterogeneous a nation

as America . . . institutionalized bilingualism remains another source of the fragmentation
of America, another threat to the dream of ‘one people’ . . .
(109–110)

Language advocates who support a common national language have made several attempts to
legally recognize English as the official language. One of the main goals of advocating for English
as the official language is to force immigrant children and youth who enroll in schools to be
instructed in language and academic content only in English, throughout their schooling expe-
riences. Under the English-only banner, teacher education programs are expected to orient
teachers to this particular goal, as evidenced by adherence to state accreditation standards, which
give lip service to English learners, and federal standards for English language arts within the
common core framework.
Within this orientation, new immigrants and emergent bilingual children and youth are
required at worst, and expected at best, to stop using their home language (considered to be and
depicted as an autonomous foreign language) and learn the national language in the public realm
of schools, in order to be successful in schools and to eventually participate as educated adults in
government, the military, and in commerce.

Weak, Unitary Orientation

At the lower end of unitary, a weak orientation maintains its affiliation with the value of a com-
mon national language, but appeals to liberal democratic visions of the language-as-a-resource
(Ruíz 1984), for economic development in which languages other than the dominant one are
tolerated in the public sphere and supported only in the private sphere (Barry 2001). This ori-
entation tends to romanticize minority languages as long as they remain in the private domain,

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providing little recognition to their aesthetic, historical, or affiliative value (Ricento 2005). Pref-
erence is given to teaching standard varieties and literatures of foreign languages, which are tol-
erated at the secondary level of education, well after students have acquired language and literacy
in the dominant language. Minority language use among students is tolerated outside of class, but
is often looked upon with suspicion (Valenzuela 1999). One of the consequences of advocating
for language from a public-private sphere perspective is to weaken the value of non-dominant
languages, a point Parekh (2000) makes:

The public realm in every society generally enjoys far greater dignity and prestige than the
private realm. The culture it institutionalizes enjoys state patronage, power, access to valuable
resources, and political respectability, and sets the tone of the rest of society. Although cul-
tures are free to flourish in the private realm, they exist in its overpowering shadow, and are
largely seen as marginal and worth practising only in the relative privacy of the family and
communal associations. Subjected to the relentless assimilationist pressure of the dominant
culture, their members, especially youth, internalize their inferior status and opt for uncrit-
ical assimilation, lead confused lives or retreat into their communal ghettos.
(204)

Hence, while private language use of non-dominant language by minority language speakers has
been tolerated over time, the end result is that the dominant language achieves its unitary power.
At the secondary level, foreign languages and English as a second language are tolerated for
the economic purchase they offer students, particularly for the purpose of global competitiveness.
However, as Reagan (2005) points out, foreign language teacher educators and teachers continue
to have complete authority over how languages are presented for learning. In most cases, this
means teaching students through a grammatical syllabus that privileges standard language varie-
ties, and disparages non-standard usage.

Weak, Diversity Orientation

Bilingual education as practiced in the United States and many countries in the world (Heller
2007; Petrovic 2010) is a weak form of advocacy for language diversity. In most cases, bilingual
education has been oriented toward a social construction of diversity that encourages elective,
learned bilingualism and biliteracy and privileges monolingual bilinguals, often in the name of
language human rights (Skutnabb-Kangas and Phillipson 1994). Monolingual bilingualism is an
invention (Pennycook 2007) that can be traced to a number of foundational ideas used in the
development of bilingual education, beginning in recent history with the Bilingual Education
Act of 1968.
Minority language use by teachers and students in bilingual programs is tolerated only to the
extent necessary that it allows children to progress effectively through the educational system in
the dominant language (Petrovic 2010).
At the heart of the weak, diversity orientation to language advocacy is that individual “lan-
guages” (Spanish, English, Korean, Chinese) are presented as individual, countable constructs,
each with its own separate grammar and name, based on a “monolingual norm of speakerhood”
(Hill 2002, 128). Viewing languages as separate entities, bilingual educators in this weak orien-
tation for diversity advocate for diverse languages in general, and specifically for the local lan-
guages used in their schools and communities.
A weak, diversity orientation tolerates minority language development for children and youth
who have already learned the common, majority language. This can be seen in the widespread

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Christian Faltis

promotion of dual-language immersion programs. Modeled after the French-Canadian immer-

sion programs, dual immersion programs are organized to provide separate instruction each of
the two languages. A strict separation of the two languages reflects the dominant culture prefer-
ence for language as a separate entity, a form of diglossia, where the bilingual’s two autonomous
languages are used individually with certain people for particular purposes (see Valdés 1997).
From this perspective, the bilingualism resulting from dual language immersion programs sup-
ports a traditional view of bilinguals normed on the language uses of educated monolinguals,
which Heller (1999, 271) refers to as parallel monolingualism. Moreover, as Valdés (1997), points
out, dual language immersion programs benefit dominant group students more than minority
group students, in effect because the power relation between language and nation continues to
be held by the dominant group.
Heritage language education courses, with the goal of expanding oral and written language
abilities through the acquisition of standard varieties of the heritage language, are also a form of
weak, diversity language advocacy. Heritage language advocates range from those who wish to
extirpate borrowings, non-standard usage, and code-mixing from the students’ language, to those
who view their mission as teaching minority students standard, academic language practices. In
either case, the heritage language is considered to be the problem, and academic, monolingual
uses of the language the solution. The argument, from a weak, diversity orientation, is that learn-
ing the standard variety of a language purchases higher social status than the low status of the
private, local variety of language.
Support for a weak, diversity orientation to language advocacy is traceable in part to early
psychological-based research conducted in Canada, which resulted in concepts such as subtractive
and additive bilingualism (Lambert 1975) and dimensions of language use needed for successful
schooling (Cummins 1979; 2003; 2008). Weak, diversity advocates are against subtractive forms of
bilingualism and English-only instruction for emergent bilinguals, and for additive bilingualism.
Language advocates in this orientation support the linguistic rights of individuals and groups
to use and expand their home language, which, in home and school settings, is portrayed as a
separate, measurable object. Adding a second language to the minority language is desirable, to
the extent that the end result of bilingual development is a solid form of diglossia.
Weak, diversity language advocates recast language diversity in terms of conversational and aca-
demic language, based originally on a distinction put forth by Jim Cummins (1979) between basic
interpersonal communicative skills (BICS) and cognitive academic language proficiency (CALP).
Cummins’ theoretical distinction continues to dominate teacher education and teacher-based
approaches to academic language, despite numerous critiques.

Strong, Diversity Orientation

Unlike those who tolerate elective and transitional bilingualism and privilege monolingual bilin-
gualism and academic language, language advocates with a strong, diversity orientation look to
what people actually do with language to question the ways that schools and teacher education
programs conceptualize and language diversity. This orientation in language advocacy seeks to
normalize bilingualism without diglossic separation, to place mixed languages, creoles, and multi-
lingual language practices at the center of what language diversity means and how it is enacted
through local practices. Strong, diversity language advocates confront deficit perspective about
minority language users as well as monolingual language models that inaccurately portray the
language practices of minority children and youth.
Local language practices and circumstantial bilingualism are viewed as normal ways of becom-
ing bilingual. In the strong, diversity orientation transnational literacy practices are encouraged

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 Language Advocacy

as a way to build sites for children and youth to creatively use multiple language varieties “to take
up, resist, and negotiate academic and identity positionings” (Hornberger and Link 2012, 272).
From a strong, diversity orientation, bilingual users are frequent “border crossers” (Anzaldúa
1987), whose languaging (García 2009) and translanguaging (Williams 1994) practices necessarily
transcend social borders of separate language domains in the pursuit of meaningful interaction.
Translanguaging in schooling contexts refers to the process by which bilingual students make
sense of and enact language bilingually, in ways that question fixed identities and meanings in the
pursue of new meanings.
For strong, diversity advocates, therefore, language is action-based, rather than being a thing
to be counted, reified, or tolerated. Language, or more accurately, languaging diversity in this ori-
entation is based on the promotion of an integrated bilingual norm, where language users employ
their full language abilities from two languages at any given time, adjusted to the needs and
possibilities of the interaction. As an integrated bilingual norm, language practices are inherently
dynamic and ever changing as users interact, interpret, and perform across time and space.
Strong, diversity language advocates have no truck with narratives that conceptualize language
as a separate autonomous system (aka the “Language Myth,” Harris 1981); that summarily prohibit
the use of language other than the dominant varieties in school, work, government, military, and
the economy (official English stance); that portray language development as an economic resource
(foreign and heritage language development); that support minority language practices in schools
only as a temporary transition to the dominant language (transitional bilingual education); that
de-value hybrid bilingual practices (view translanguaging as flawed and undesirable); and that
frame translanguaging from a linguistically deficit lens (low level thinkers due to lack of academic
language use).
In summary, language advocacy can tilt toward a unitary or diversity orientation and range
from strong to weak support of either. The grid represents indicators of each orientation, with
the understanding that individual teacher educators and teachers can cut around two continua,
depending of the views they hold toward the language of their students and language users in
their professional lives. The grid serves as a heuristic, and does not include all of the perspectives
and practices that can be linked to the main orientations.

Recommendations for Teacher Educators and Classroom Teachers

First and foremost, language advocacy is multi-dimensional, and in educational contexts, varia-
tion across the two continua among educators is expected. Nonetheless, if teacher educators and
teachers wish to commit to a particular orientation in language advocacy, they need to recognize
and be aware of their own and their colleagues’ stances toward language and language users.
Building and sustaining a community of language advocates in teacher education programs and
schools requires program-wide infusion and buy-in of language advocacy practices (Athanases
and de Oliveira 2011). For teacher education, this means that teacher education faculty, including
field supervisors, mentor teachers, and faculty in other departments who work with beginning
and practicing teachers, need to be clear about the orientation they hold about language advo-
cacy, and the strength of their convictions about the orientation.
Likewise, classroom teachers in constant contact with children and youth need opportunities
to discuss school wide policies and practices in terms of the orientation toward language advo-
cacy held by administrators, teachers, and support staff. Language advocacy can be discussed in
professional development workshops, and through informal teacher study groups. For example,
teachers can use the grid in Figure 5.1 above to determine the strength and direction of language
advocacy orientations at the school and district level. In secondary level schools, teachers within

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Christian Faltis

various disciplinary departments can identify where they stand on the grid, and where steps they
would need to take to move them in a direction agreed upon through discussion across academic
disciplines.
Accordingly, it is recommended that teacher educators and teachers engage in discussions in
which they:

• Seek to locate themselves on the grid of dimensions of language advocacy.

• Question their understandings of language, including common views of language as “good vs.
bad,” “proper vs. improper,” “standard vs. non-standard,” and “monolingual vs. bilingual.”
• Study more deeply the unitary and diversity orientations of language advocacy.
• Develop a mission statement for their program or school setting that includes a declaration
of language advocacy agreed upon by majority decision.

Further Reading
For helpful readings on unitary language advocacy, the following sources are recommended:
Barry, B. 2001. Culture and equity: An egalitarian critique of multiculturalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Porter, J. 1975. Ethnic pluralism in Canadian perspective. In N. Glazer and D. Moynihan (Eds.), Ethnicity:
Theory and experience (pp. 267–304). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Schlesinger, A. 1992. The disuniting of America: Reflections on a multicultural society. New York: W.W. Norton
and Company.

For helpful readings on diversity language advocacy, the following sources are recommended:
Edwards, J. 2010. Language diversity in the classroom. Clevedon, England: Multilingual Matters.
Makoni, S., and Pennycook, A. (Eds.) 2007. Disinventing and reconstituting languages. Clevedon, England:
Multilingual Matters.
Demas, E., and Saavadra, C. 2004. (Re)conceptualizing language advocacy: Weaving a postmodern mestizaje
image of language. In K. Mutua and B. B. Swaderner (Eds.), Decolonizing research in cross-cultural contexts
(pp. 215–234). Albany: State University of New York Press.
Pennycook, A. 2010. Language as a local practice. London: Routledge.

Informative readings on translanguaging as a contemporary alternative to monolingual bilingualism include:

Canagarajah, S. 2011. Translanguaging in the classroom: Emerging issues for research and pedagogy. Applied
Linguistics Review, 2, 1–28.
Creese, A., and Blackledge, A. 2010, Spring. Translanguaging in the bilingual classroom: A pedagogy for
learning and teaching? The Modern Language Journal, 94(1), 103–115.
Hornberger, N., and Link, H. 2012, May. Translanguaging and transnational literacies in multilingual class-
rooms: A biliteracy lens. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 15(3), 261–278.
Jørgensen, J. 2008. Poly-lingual languaging around and among children and adolescents. International Journal
of Multilingualism, 5(3), 161–176.

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Barry, B. 2001. Culture and equity: An egalitarian critique of multiculturalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Bhabba, H. 1994. The location of culture. London: Routledge.

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 6
Educational Equity for
Linguistically Marginalised
Students
Anthony J. Liddicoat and Kathleen Heugh

Introduction
Language issues have come to be seen as significant for achieving equitable education and
linguistic marginalisation is an important element in educational inequality. Linguistic margin-
alisation occurs when a language is excluded from the public life of a society in such a way that
its speakers have less access to social, economic, and political resources. It is a typical correlate of
the selection of a national language that serves all linguistic functions to the exclusion of other
languages. The term “linguistic marginalisation” is an attempt to move the focus away from the
idea that educational inequity is only an issue for linguistic minorities. In many nations, linguistic
marginalisation is experienced primarily by numerical minorities who are expected to adjust to
the linguistic practices of the numerical majority. In many other nations, especially those that
came into being at the end of European colonialism, the dominant language is typically the lan-
guage of a numerical minority, while the languages of the numerical majority are excluded from
much of public life, including education. Regardless of the nature of linguistic marginalisation,
marginalised groups share similar educational needs and problems and we aim to bring into
relationship some of the themes common to both.

Historical Perspectives
Linguistic marginalisation is a consequence in part of the emergence of the one nation–one
language ideology that developed with the rise of the nation-state. The idea that a nation-state
should have a single official language is an innovation of the European post-Enlightenment
period, although historically linguistic uniformity was not considered as fundamental for the
operation of a polity. While this ideology can be traced to earlier periods, notably the Reforma-
tion, the one nation–one language ideology emerged most strongly during the French Revolution.
The rationalist nation-building agenda of the Revolution argued for a single language for the
French state in two ways (Geeraerts 2003). The first was a pragmatic rationale: A common
language allows effective communication and access to state institutions and political functions.
The second was symbolic: A single language creates and represents a single, unified identity. In

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effect, it is this second perspective that is most significant for the development of linguistic mar-
ginalisation. The first requires dissemination of a common language, but not inherently at the
expense of other languages. The second sees linguistic diversity as inimical to the development
of unified nation-states and therefore constitutes language diversity as a problem to be managed
by states.
The rise of the nation-state with its monolingual ideology led to the formation of a domi-
nant linguistic habitus, that is, a dominant sense of what constitutes linguistic normality. This
dominant habitus was a monolingual habitus (Gogolin 1994) that conflated the one nation–one
language ideology with perceived linguistic norms for individuals. Thus, in the emergence of
nation-states, “a basic and deep-seated belief was created that monolingualism is the universal
norm of an individual and a society” (Gogolin 2009, 536). From the perspective of the mono-
lingual habitus, the plurilingual individual is a deviation from the norm and this deviation is
understood within the framework of other ideologies, notably those that equate language with
national affiliation. The monolingual habitus thus effects linguistic marginalisation of those who
do not speak the official language of their nation as an ideological production.
This ideology held sway most importantly at the beginning of mass education. Schooling was
closely identified with the nation-building project and where nations emphasised monolingual-
ism for unifying and identity functions, schooling became synonymous with assimilation into the
dominant language and hence into the national identity. Non-dominant languages and cultures
were excluded from schools and from officially accepted understandings of the nature and
purpose of education and of what constituted the educated person (Paquette 1989). Schools
therefore became essentially monolingual environments in which the dominant language was
seen as both the goal and the instrument of education and other languages were marginalised if
not completely excluded. Other languages were frequently considered as barriers to effective
learning of the dominant language and so as an educational problem to be solved, ideally through
language shift and assimilation to the monolingual norm.
School laws of the 19th century did not typically prescribe or proscribe languages for use in
education and few contained a specific mention of media of instruction or the languages through
which literacy or other education goals would be developed. The silence on questions of language
represents the success of the one nation–one language ideology and the monolingual habitus.
The lacunae about language in such laws were filled by the pervading language ideologies of the
time. For example, the French Third Republic’s laws on compulsory education of 1880 make no
reference to French; however, French was the only language used in French schools. The use of
French in this case is embedded within a republican ideology of linguistic diversity as divisive,
anti-democratic, and anti-republican. In other cases, schooling laws explicitly addressed language
issues, as in the case of the 1907 Dialect Control Ordinance, which banned the use of Ryukyuan
languages in Okinawan schools and punished children who spoke them (Liddicoat 2013).
Punishment of the use of languages other than the national language in school contexts was
found even in contexts where no specification of language was made in law, with punishments
ranging from ridicule to corporal punishment.
Monolingual education was poorly adapted to the needs of speakers of marginalised languages
and frequently took the form of ‘submersion’ (Cohen and Swain 1976) of learners in a second
language context for which they were little prepared. Moreover, teachers were typically mono-
lingual in the official language, meaning that little real communication could be achieved between
teachers and students. As Valenzuela (1999) argues, schools function less to develop capabilities
and more to remove their linguistic, cultural, and community identities, marginalising languages
and their speakers and, through this marginalisation, contributing to the educational, social, and
economic marginalisation of their speakers.

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The practices and ideologies of language education that emerged in the 19th century were not
only features of education in nation-states but were exported to colonial contexts. In these
contexts, the languages of the local people were marginalised in favour of the languages of the
colonial powers, with the colonial language being the normal language of monolingual educa-
tion. The introduction of monolingual, colonial educational models often overlaid older,
multilingual education practices, such as those developed through religious education in Islamic
West Africa (Heugh 2006). Such practices were typically ignored by colonial regimes and
excluded from understandings of education and the educated person.
The association of education with national languages was not universal. In some cases, local
languages were included in education in order to maintain colonial dominance (Pennycook
2000). In other cases, alternative approaches to the education of marginalised linguistic groups
existed outside government controlled education. Protestant missionary schools of the 19th
century often emphasised the acquisition of literacy in local languages as a means of evangelisa-
tion and of accessing religious texts (Liddicoat 2012). For such schools, a religiously oriented set
of goals held precedence over goals of nation building and was guided by a different logic in
constructing education. However, in colonial contexts, there were also many cases in which
evangelisation and the extension of colonial control went hand in hand; in such contexts,
monolingual education in the colonists’ language was the norm. The advent of compulsory state
education, often accompanied by a utilitarian discourse, often led to the progressive abandonment
of such models in favour of monolingual education in the colonial language.
The first half of the 20th century is characterised by studies that claimed to identify a “language
handicap” in bilingual children (e.g., Jones 1952). When compared to monolingual children,
bilingual children appeared to be less capable in a wide range of language abilities, including
poorer vocabulary, lower standards in written composition and greater incidence of grammatical
errors (e.g., Saer 1923). Such findings contributed to a discourse of deficit in educational and
other contexts that equated bilingualism with negative effects on children’s intelligence. The
language handicap was understood as a form of linguistic confusion that had a negative impact
on children’s intellectual development and academic performance (e.g., Saer 1923). Most of these
early studies of bilingualism were characterised by serious methodological shortcomings. A
particular problem was that children were usually assessed only in the dominant language—that
is, monolinguals were assessed in their first language and bilinguals in their second. This variable
had significant impact on tests of language knowledge and performance and on performance in
language-based tests of intelligence. Moreover, studies did not usually control for variables other
than language, especially socioeconomic status, and so confounded the variable of language with
other variables that impact on education. This is particularly problematic as speakers of margin-
alised languages are typically marginalised in other ways, and the fact of their social, economic,
and political marginalisation was ignored in understanding their educational performance. Some
early critics (e.g., Fukuda 1925) recognised the methodological problems, but such studies did
not lead to a questioning of the validity of the forms of psychometric testing being used to
measure educational and linguistic success. Research that addressed such problems has typically
found a positive rather than a negative impact of bilingualism. Studies from South Africa in the
1930s and 1940s (e.g., Malherbe 1946) found that students who received bilingual education,
even from relatively poor socioeconomic contexts, achieved more highly in secondary school
assessments than did students who received monolingual education. In these studies, assessment
was conducted using bilingual instruments and students could read both language versions, and
sometimes answer questions in the language of their choice.
The failure to control for the full range of variables in assessing bilingual students led to a
reification of language as an explanatory factor in educational attainment, with bilingualism

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being referred to as a social plague (Epstein 1905) and “a hardship devoid of apparent advantage”
(Yoshioka 1929, 476). Essentially, such thinking reflects an underlying monolingual habitus in
educational and policy practice. This monolingual habitus had multiple and complex impacts on
the educational experience of speakers of marginalised languages that reinforced their marginal-
isation. In particular, the idea that education was equated with the use of the dominant language
led to a belief that other languages should be excluded from education.
The monolingual habitus did not mean that multilingualism was absent in schools but such
multilingualism was largely constrained to elite education, which typically included sustained
learning of additional languages. The range of languages admitted in such educational programs
was small—typically classical languages and a small number of prestigious modern languages,
such as French, German, or English. The choice of languages reflects local ideologies of prestige
and/or usefulness, and a high level of achievement in these languages was seen as fundamental to
the concept of an educated person. There is thus an internal paradox in approaches to language
in education that stigmatises the bilingualism of some and rewards the bilingualism of others.
This paradox can be understood in terms of Skutnabb-Kangas’ (1981) distinction between elite
and folk bilingualism. Elite bilinguals are typically speakers of the dominant national language
who have acquired a valued additional language through formal education as a form of intellectual
training. Success in the acquisition of the additional language is taken to demonstrate intelligence
and application. Folk bilinguals are those who acquire a non-dominant language through first
language socialisation and also have knowledge of the national language. In this case, acquisition
of the dominant language, as perceived through the monolingual habitus, is natural and unre-
markable. This means that errors in speaking or writing are perceived in terms of deficiencies in
knowledge and use of the normal language of communication rather than as achievement in the
use of an additional language. Acquisition of the non-dominant language brings with it none of
the social accolade associated with academic achievement and intellectual development; instead
the non-dominant language is seen as the reason for deficiency in the national language. In this
way, not only are some languages marginalised, but so are some types of bilingualism.

Core Issues and Key Findings

The core issue in the education of linguistically marginalised students is the degree to which they
have access to and receive quality education that is comparable to and equitable with that
provided to students from dominant language backgrounds. For much of the 20th century,
research conducted in the global north has dominated the literature on linguistically marginalised
students, and this research indicates that bilingual education is necessary, especially for students
from low income indigenous or migrant communities. However, this has been based on the
assumption that the language of dominance is also the language of the numerical majority of
the mainstream society in which the marginalised community lives.
While the core issue of access to quality education remains the same, the situation in southern
contexts has complexities of scale that differ from those in the north. The first of these has to do
with the scale of marginalisation. Whereas in the north, marginalisation affects minority com-
munities, in the south it affects majority populations. The second has to do with the degree of
linguistic diversity, since more than two thirds of the world’s languages occur in the south (mostly
in Africa and in South and Southeast Asia). The third is that in these settings, there are layers of
linguistic marginalisation amongst indigenous communities, superimposed by one of the major
international or former colonial languages. As in northern contexts, monolingual education in a
dominant international or regional language is highly problematic. However, bilingual education
may be equally problematic if this is in an international language and a dominant national or

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regional language. This type of bilingual education may approximate an elite bilingualism that
serves to restrict multilingual practices, entrench class division, and further advantage dominant
communities with closer proximity to urban centres of power. Geopolitical and geolinguistic
marginalisation occurs on a sliding scale, so that it increases or decreases according to distance
from the structures and language(s) of the centre. Students further from the centre are likely to
be more marginalised and less likely to have access to equitable education (e.g., Mohanty 2012).
In northern contexts, education authorities have tended to offer limited, short-term, or ‘weak’
bilingual programs that restrict opportunities for productive engagement in mainstream educa-
tion. Education systems can do this for several reasons. Marginalised communities are either
numerically small and/or socioeconomically disempowered, they have been effectively ‘invisibi-
lised’ (Skutnabb-Kangas 2000), and education authorities misuse education assessment data.
Weak programs include submersion or subtractive bilingual education (i.e., the child is prevented
from being able to use the first language for learning at school) and early-exit bilingual education
(limited use of the home language for one or two years of primary education). None of these
facilitate the further intellectual development of a marginalised student in the school system, and
the linguistic building blocks required for learning new knowledge are removed or prematurely
terminated. Thus, students perform poorly on standardised and system-wide tests and typical
responses from educational authorities have been to terminate whatever limited provision has
been available, as was the case through Proposition 227 in California (c.f. Krashen 1996) and,
more recently, in relation to Indigenous Australian education by the government of the Northern
Territory in 2008 (Simpson, Caffery, and McConvell 2009). There are no reliable studies that
demonstrate that low income students who are linguistically marginalised succeed in submersion
or early-exit programs (Heugh 2011b). Such decisions reinforce low self-esteem, exacerbate
marginalisation, and frequently result in what Mohanty (2012) calls ‘push-out.’ Students simply
absent themselves from an education system that lacks meaning or relevance.
Educational linguists have understood equitable provision to be dependent upon strong, well
resourced bilingual education in which the goal is biliteracy development in both the home
language and the dominant language of the nation-state (e.g., García and Baker 2007). Most
research in bilingual education of marginalised students indicates that it is essential that both
languages be used as mediums of instruction for a minimum of five to seven years. This is in order
that students are able to progress, uninterrupted, in relation to the curriculum and also to learn
enough of the dominant language to be able to use this language productively for learning in
subjects across the curriculum after this point (e.g., Cummins 1981; Thomas and Collier 1997;
2002). Examples of successful or strong bilingual programs, such as heritage or dual language
programs, have been described for Europe (e.g., Extra and Gorter 2001) and the United States
(e.g., García 2009; McCarty 2013).
The numbers of students engaged in strong bilingual programs in northern contexts are rel-
atively small, therefore the data sets from longitudinal studies of student achievement in such
programs are often criticised (García and Baker 2007; Howard, Sugarman, and Christian 2003).
Nevertheless, there are two longitudinal studies that together have gathered comprehensive data
of more than 900,000 minority students (Thomas and Collier 1997; 2002). In these studies the
researchers tracked students’ achievement in L2 (English) reading proficiency from Grade 1 to
Grade 11 across several different language models. These include weak (e.g., English-only, early-exit,
late-exit) and strong (dual language) programs. The majority of students were in weak programs,
while relatively fewer were in strong programs. The students in the dual language programs had
higher achievement than those in the weak programs. However, because the number of students
in such programs is relatively small in comparison with those in the weak programs, the findings
have elicited some criticism (Howard et al. 2003). Nevertheless, the patterns of achievement in

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these studies, including the differences found between weak and strong forms of bilingual
education, show remarkable similarity to patterns of student achievement found in various
studies in Africa (e.g., Ouane and Glanz 2011).
As discussed above, marginalisation in the global south has characteristics that differ from
those in the north. Whereas in the north, most children were enrolled in formal education
throughout the 20th century, this has not been the case in southern contexts. Prior to 1990, the
majority of marginalised students in the south were either not enrolled in primary education or
they fell out of the schooling system before completing primary school (Bamgbose 2000). Thus
the degree of systemic marginalisation from the schooling system has been extreme. UNESCO’s
Education for All framework and the Millennium Development Goals, including universal primary
education and gender parity for girls, have changed the dynamics. Most children are now enrolled
in primary school, but this does not mean that they stay. Where marginalised students are in
school in southern contexts, bilingual education is seldom provided, and where it is, it is
inadequate and insufficient.
In most southern countries, the contemporary language ecology includes minority, regional,
and national languages, as well one or more former colonial language(s). The former colonial
language is used as the language of economic, political and educational dominance, and is also
the language of access to the international community. As an instrument of power, this language
serves to marginalise speakers of endogenous languages in post-colonial states. For example, in
India, although speakers of the national language, Hindi, are relatively privileged, they aspire to
high level bilingualism in Hindi and English in order to enjoy full citizenship and to participate
in the global sphere. Speakers of regional (state languages), such as Oriya in Orissa, are one step
removed from participation at the national level, and two steps removed from access to interna-
tional possibilities, but, since their aspirations are no less, they would need trilingual education in
Oriya, Hindi, and English in order to have comparable access. Speakers of Tribal languages
in Orissa are the most marginalised, and they would need to have education in the Tribal language,
Oriya, Hindi, and English if they are to participate fully (Mohanty 2012). In Ethiopia, pastoralists
in the Afar Region know that they need Afar for trade and survival at the local level, Amharic in
order to engage in regional and national affairs, and they want very much that their children
should develop a high level of proficiency in English.
There is a chasm between what students need and what they receive, particularly in southern
contexts. The greater the linguistic diversity in such settings, the less likely it is that the most
marginalised students will receive equitable educational opportunities. Education systems, for the
most part, have offered students a monolingual education in the international or former colonial
language, as in most Francophone and Lusophone countries of Africa. At best, these students are
offered limited access to early-exit mother-tongue education. The educational outcomes for
students in these programs are less positive than those for marginalised students in similar pro-
grams in the global north (Bamgbose 2000; Ouane and Glanz 2011). In former British colonies,
systems usually offer early-exit programs (mother tongue medium education [MTE] for three
years followed by transition to English medium), and the outcomes, as evident in system-wide
multi-country assessments of literacy, are usually dismal (Heugh 2011b). Elsewhere, Coleman
(2011) demonstrates that access to the international language, English, in countries like Bangladesh
and Pakistan is limited to students from middle class homes in private schools. Although lower
income families and students do all in their power to facilitate access to English, there are socio-
political constraints and ill-fitting educational programs that result in the further marginalisation
of students who do not have efficient access to English education.
Research on linguistic diversity, marginalisation and education has been a regular feature of
education in Africa from the early 20th century, with numerous commissions of enquiry directed

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towards identifying effective language education models for African children. Based on these
studies, UNESCO has recommended mother-tongue education for the first few years of primary
(i.e. early-exit programs) since the 1950s, but there have been no legal instruments to put this into
effect. Post-colonial governments have mostly reduced the number of years of MTE (in former
British colonies) or introduced weak early-exit bilingual education (e.g., in Burkina Faso, Mali,
and Mozambique). Some countries have elected to use the dominant regional or national African
language for part or all of primary, followed by a switch to English medium (early-exit in
Swaziland, Botswana, Malawi, Kenya; late-exit in Tanzania and Somalia). Speakers of less dominant
African languages in these settings, invisibilised in the education system, have been most seriously
marginalised. Achievement for speakers of the dominant African language has been disappointing,
and even more so for more marginalised students (Bamgbose 2000; Ouane and Glanz 2011).
In South Africa, while English and Afrikaans speakers have been required to have bilingual
education since 1910, speakers of African languages were required to have trilingual education
until 1997. During the first 20 years of apartheid education, 1955–1976, African students received
eight years of MTE plus the teaching of English and Afrikaans as subjects. Secondary education
involved a switch to English and Afrikaans dual medium education, with the African language
retained as a subject. Government, African communities, and educational linguists had no idea at
the time that, quite by accident, the apartheid language education model, even if poorly resourced,
offered the best opportunities for African students to succeed in primary school and to remain
to the end of secondary. African students at school during this period had the highest level of
achievement in the secondary school-exit examinations in the country’s history. Student resis-
tance to eight years of MTE in 1976, however, resulted in a reduction to four years of MTE until
1994. Despite a constitutional commitment to multilingual education, three iterations of
post-apartheid educational transformation have resulted in the further reduction of MTE for
African students to three years (i.e., early-exit bilingual education). Achievement of African
students declined from 1978 to 1994, and it has declined even further in the 20 years of
post-apartheid education (Heugh 2011b).
In another example, system-wide data from Ethiopia offer some of the most recent and most
significant evidence of the potential of multilingual education to reduce inequity and to increase
opportunities for participatory citizenship. Since 1994, Ethiopia has implemented a bilingual and
trilingual education system across the 11 administrative regions of the country, and in 32 lan-
guages. This resulted in a dramatic increase in primary school enrolment and retention to the
end of primary. Assessment data for Grade 8 students between 2000 and 2008 show that students
who have eight years of MTE in the local or regional language, with the national language
Amharic and English as subjects, achieve more highly than students with fewer years of MTE,
and are more likely to complete secondary school (Heugh 2013).
Even though Ethiopia is one of the poorest countries of the world, the government initiated
and implemented a multilingual system across the country with a minimal education budget
between 1994 and 2004, and the evidence shows increasing student enrolment, retention, and
achievement. The increase in student achievement is similar to that found in South Africa with
a similar policy of eight years of MTE between 1955 and 1976. However, the Ethiopian govern-
ment decided to reprioritise English in the system from 2005 onwards, and diverted 44% of the
teacher education budget to invest additional resources in English, reducing MTE. Just as student
achievement declined once the provision of MTE was reduced in South Africa, so too has this
occurred in Ethiopia. In each case, the systems have attempted to introduce early-exit models and
invested heavily in these, with no evidence of a positive return on investment. Argument that
multilingual education is too costly does not hold true in Africa. Rather, monolingual or early-exit
education offers limited or poor returns on investment (Heugh 2011a).

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Sociopolitical and economic changes on a global scale from the 1990s have altered the world
order in ways that affect the scale and complexity of linguistic marginalisation in northern
contexts. Whereas in the last decades of the 20th century, a strong bilingual program may have
offered marginalised students adequate access to equitable education, this may no longer be the
case. Significantly altered language ecologies increasingly mean that speakers of dominant languages,
previously satisfied with monolingual education, may now require at least two languages for
purposes of international communication. If marginalised communities in countries of the global
north previously required two languages, they now require three. Just as degrees of marginali-
sation are evident in the south, these are becoming increasingly recognised in the north. For
example, Saami communities in Northern Scandinavia might have similar linguistic requirements
in school education to those of Tribal children in India (see a related discussion of Basque and
Frisian education in Gorter and Cenoz 2012). Increasing mobility of both indigenous and
migrant communities brings about changes in language ecologies of highly urbanised/metro-
politan centres. The scale and complexity of linguistic diversity and marginalisation of the north
is therefore moving closer to that of the south. These global changes in no way reduce the needs
of linguistically marginalised students in education systems. Rather, they sharpen the focus on
increased opportunities for inequity and social stratification, unless education systems find ways
to mainstream multilingual education.
In summary, there are several core issues and findings regarding linguistically marginalised
students and (in)equitable opportunities for successful education in both contexts. Firstly, if
education systems are to attempt to ensure equal access to meaningful education, there is evidence
that linguistically marginalised students require a minimum of six or seven years of multilingual
education in well resourced contexts of the global north. In less well-resourced contexts, as in the
global south, students require at least eight years of strong multilingual education. Detailed and
longitudinal studies of bilingual education in the north and system-wide assessment data of
multilingual education systems in the south offer compelling evidence. This evidence shows gaps
of achievement between marginalised students in submersion and early-exit programs compared
with students learning through their home language. The evidence also shows improved achieve-
ment of students in strong bilingual/multilingual programs. The core issue remains, however, that
large proportions of students remain marginalised in the schooling system in both the north and
south. The difference is that in the south, marginalisation and inequity apply to most students.

Research Approaches
The study of the education of linguistically marginalised groups is characterised by methodolog-
ical diversity. Broadly, both quantitative and qualitative methods have been used.
Quantitative methods have usually taken the form of assessments, typically involving testing
of elements of language proficiency, literacy, and numeracy. Such testing can measure a range of
different forms of educational achievement, but in measurements of literacy, often dominant
language literacy is included, and in some cases it may be the only measure. This is especially the
case where data are obtained from standardised testing of national populations that includes both
speakers of the dominant and marginalised languages. Quantitative research approaches are
strongly supported by policy makers and development agencies, and the results from such meth-
ods are highly valued in education policy and program design. This is because quantitative data
are considered useful for benchmarking and, thus, for identifying issues of success and failure in
education.
While quantitative research does have a place in understanding the education of linguistically
marginalised students, research using testing has been particularly problematic in this area; it has

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frequently been flawed because of the monolingual habitus underlying the research approach.
This point was made above in relation to early studies of bilingualism, but persists in many
modern studies. One significant problem has been that such research data has usually been
collected in the dominant language. This means that linguistically marginalised students are
tested in their non-dominant language, usually without recognition of the consequences for the
validity and reliability of the data. This problem is compounded when achievement is compared
with that of dominant language students, who are tested in their first, sometimes only, language.
In addition, most quantitative studies of the education of linguistically marginalised children have
been one-off, synchronic assessments of educational performance at a particular time. This is
actually highly problematic for assessing education in multilingual settings as longitudinal studies
(e.g., Ouane and Glanz 2011; Thomas and Collier 1997) have demonstrated that it is not possible
to evaluate the impact of any second language (majority language) program in fewer than four
years, and that accurate interpretations are only likely over a minimum of five to six years.
Quantitative benchmarking, when used in unsophisticated ways to inform policy, may lack
validity and reliability. For example, the benchmarked results of large-scale national literacy and
numeracy testing in Australia in 2008 were used as a rationale to close bilingual education
programs for indigenous Australians who spoke English as an additional language (Simpson et al.
2009). The argument used was that such students performed consistently below the national
average for literacy and numeracy. The problem here was the nature of the comparisons: Second
language capabilities for indigenous students were measured against those of first language speak-
ers of English, rather than benchmarking against similar students. In reality, the testing showed
that students in bilingual programs performed better than other indigenous students acquiring
English as a second language who were not in bilingual programs. This situation points to the
sort of problems that can result from a lack of nuance in the collection, interpretation, and use
of quantitative research, and points to questions of the ethical conduct and use of such research
with linguistically marginalised populations.
Since the 1980s, research on the education of linguistically marginalised children has increas-
ingly used qualitative methods, especially ethnography, sometimes in conjunction with quantita-
tive methods. Qualitative research allows for the possibility of more nuanced accounts that locate
children’s school performance to their context to develop a rich description of their education.
Such research investigates not only the process and outcomes of educational programs but also
issues such as attitudes to educational programs and perceptions of their value, engagement and
participation in education, and sociopolitical issues relating to the provision of education. This
research has sought to understand recurring processes in the education of linguistically margin-
alised children that can explain educational problems in context. The results of this research have
produced a more nuanced picture of educational success for the children of marginalised linguis-
tic communities. Research approaches to the investigation of linguistically marginalised students
are often hampered by a monolingual habitus in research design and implementation that privi-
leges the language of the researcher over the language of the research participant (Liddicoat
2011), and this can have significant implications for the effectiveness of such research.
Most recently, research in this area has taken a critical stance towards the education of
marginalised groups and has focused on how power and ideology shape educational possibilities.
In particular, language education policies can be seen as ideological frames that shape understand-
ings of the nature and purpose of education (Liddicoat 2013). Within such contexts, schools and
teachers can contest these possibilities by opening new spaces for students’ languages in teaching
and learning (Ramanathan 2005). However, societal forces can also exert pressures that restrict
possibilities for innovative action (Bekerman 2005). Education for minoritised students is thus
subject to complex interactions of context that need to constitute elements of research approaches.

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New Debates
Debates about the languages and education of marginalised communities have been polarised
along at least two fault lines. The first is the tension between the theory and research within
educational linguistics (which includes key areas within applied, socio-, and cognitive linguis-
tics) vis à vis the short-to-medium term interests of educational authorities (in political systems
based on three-to-five-year terms of office). The second, our focus here, is a set of competing
positions within the various sub-fields of linguistics. The first of these involves terminology
and either contested understandings of key terms or theoretical slippage in their use. The term
‘mother tongue’ or ‘mother language’ has recently been used pejoratively to stigmatise language
maintenance, heritage, and bilingual programs as ahistorical, essentialist, and outdated. The
pejorative discourse associated with this term is often linked to efforts to deny access to bilin-
gual programs. Strategic terminological slippage, in which subtractive or early-exit bilingual
programs are passed off as if they were late-exit or additive in design, has been used by
government agencies, merchants of early-exit programs, and some development agencies
(Ouane and Glanz 2011). Multilingual education is variously (mis)represented as: a (monolin-
gual) education system that includes linguistically diverse student communities; various forms
of linguistic accommodation within a monolingual mainstream system; multiple iterations of
bilingual programs, hence multilingual education across the system; and multiple alterna-
tives to mainstream or non-formal bilingual and trilingual programs. Red herring debates or
terminological slippage are often used as smokescreens to avoid implementing linguistically
equitable education.
While there are persuasive sociolinguistic arguments regarding reframing terminology, these
require conceptual clarity in order to avoid opportunistic misappropriation (see also Krashen
1996). It needs to be clear that when interested parties refer to bilingual education, that theoret-
ical consistency would require that it is understood as the use of two languages for purposes of
learning and teaching across the curriculum. Where the goal is to use more than two languages
for learning and teaching across the curriculum, this is multilingual education. However, both
bilingual and multilingual education extends beyond the notion of multiple languages in
parallel.
New debates point towards key pedagogical practices within bilingual and multilingual edu-
cation. Until recently, bilingual education has been understood to mean parallel, separated lan-
guage systems in schools. Reanimated debates within socio- and cognitive linguistics suggest that
language might be better understood as a process, or as a verb, and that bilingual and multilingual
people use their linguistic repertoires to make meaning. Thus, a re-take on code-switching as
‘translanguaging’ (García 2009; see also García & Woodley, this volume), or what Agnihotri
(2007) refers to as ‘multilinguality,’ suggests the need for reconceptualising how we deliver bilin-
gual and multilingual education. Translation and interpreting appear to be significant language
skills that have been ignored in the last four decades of post-grammar-translation pedagogy. Such
considerations have implications for curriculum design, assessment, and teacher education.
Inequality in assessment has had serious implications for marginalised students everywhere.
Limited forms of ‘language accommodation’ (e.g., permitting the use of dictionaries, additional
time to write high stakes assessment instruments, etc.) are insubstantial and do not rectify imbal-
ances in the validity and reliability of such testing regimes. There are, however, recently developed
instruments that foreground linguistic diversity and equity (e.g., Shohamy 2011) and these have
opened up further debates.
The challenges remain in how teachers and education authorities will accommodate the lin-
guistic repertoires of students in ways that make use of their language skills and build on these so

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that students may engage as productive citizens of the contemporary world. There are useful
examples of curriculum design, assessment practices, learning resources, and teacher education in
Africa and India, and there are useful examples of multilingual accommodations in urban settings
in Europe and North America. However, the continued scale of linguistic marginalisation of
students in high income countries and the majority of students in low income countries suggests
that the debates are in their infancy.

Implications for Education

The main implication of research in the education of linguistically marginalised children is
that there needs to be a radical reconsideration of the role and nature of multilingual educa-
tion. In particular, it means that multilingual education needs to be seen as the usual practice
for educating such children and not as an exceptional or transitional arrangement. From this
reconsideration, there flow a number of further implications.
Multilingual education involves teacher education and preparation costs. As linguistically
marginalised groups tend to have had fewer educational opportunities, there may be significant
issues in teacher recruitment. As a result, specific educational programs may need to be estab-
lished to develop such teachers. These teachers also require specific preparation for teaching in
multilingual contexts. In particular, they need preparation to assist them in teaching both
dominant and marginalised languages in ways that are linguistically and culturally additive and
embrace diversity. However, Heugh (2011a) has argued that this cost is less than is claimed by
opponents of multilingual education. The cost is, moreover, offset by the benefits of improved
educational outcomes for marginalised groups.
There are also implications for how linguistically marginalised children are assessed. Assess-
ment needs to become sensitive to the fundamentally linguistic nature of any assessment task and
to the ways that this plays out in various contexts of assessment. In order to do this, we will need
innovative approaches to assessment that are more equitable in contexts of linguistic marginali-
sation. In particular, standardised testing is particularly problematic, as standardisation in itself may
preclude the very possibility of linguistic and cultural diversity in assessment forms.
There are also implications for the development of educational materials ranging from cur-
ricula to textbooks. If education is to be sensitive to and respectful of linguistic and cultural
diversity, materials need to be developed in a way that reflects this. This often involves more than
the translation of curricula or textbooks. It also involves the development of new materials that
incorporate the linguistic and cultural traditions and knowledge of marginalised groups into
school education programs. One consequence of the lack of commercial interest in marginalised
languages has been that educational materials are often of poorer quality and have lower produc-
tion standards than materials in the dominant language, a discrepancy that reproduces the
marginalisation of the languages involved, at least in educational contexts.

Further Reading
Coleman, H. 2011. Dreams and Realities: Developing Countries and the English Language. London: British
Council.
Hornberger, N. H. (Ed.) 2003. Continua of Biliteracy: An Ecological Framework for Educational Policy, Research,
and Practice in Multilingual Settings. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
Martin-Jones, M., and Jones, K. (Eds.) 2000. Multilingual Literacies: Reading and Writing Different Worlds.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Singleton, D., Fishman, J. A., Aronin, L., and ÓLaoire, M. (Eds.) 2013. Current Multilingualism. A New
Lingusitic Dispensation. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

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Skutnabb-Kangas, T., and Cummins, J. (Eds.) 1988. Minority Education: From Shame to Struggle. Clevendon:
Multilingual Matters.
Skutnabb-Kangas, T., and Heugh, K. (Eds.) 2012. Multilingual Education and Sustainable Development Work.
From Periphery to Center. New York and London: Routledge.

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 7
Is There a Place for Home
Literacies in the School
Curriculum? Pedagogic Discourses
and Practices in the Brazilian
Educational Context
Elaine Rocha-Schmid

Introduction
In the last decades, a number of theorists have consistently identified schools as a place of
cultural and linguistic conflicts (Aronowitz and Giroux 1993; Gee 1996; Heath 1983; Street
1984). In schools, lower income and minority language individuals have been more likely to
have their culture and language dismissed and their voices unheard than those of their main-
stream counterparts. This has been argued to be a result of schools’ tendency to reproduce
societal unequal power relations by taking the dominant culture and language as a model for
reproduction. As traditional notions of the ‘oral and written’ and ‘literate and illiterate’ para-
digms started being contested in the 1980s, schools were urged to replace their monocultural
take on literacy for an approach that draws on non-mainstream literacy and language for
curriculum intervention.
In this chapter, I discuss the discourses of language and literacy that have dictated the
status of Brazilian low income students’ home literacies and language in the school curric-
ulum. I draw on studies in linguistics and literacy from a sociocultural tradition that argue
for the reconceptualisation of home and school literacies and, therefore, of what goes in
the school curriculum in order to break the pattern that has ensured that the majority of the
country’s lower social class individuals consistently fail at school literacies (see Bagno 2004a
and Kleiman 1995a).

Historical Perspectives
In the 1960s and early 70s, two different discourses in education coming from two different parts
of the world tackled the relationship between non-mainstream individuals’ home cultures and
school literacies. In the USA, at a time when many economically disadvantaged children were
perceived to fail to acquire the knowledge valued at school, a number of studies in the field of
education suggested a link between poverty and cultural and linguistic deficiencies (see Edwards

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1979 for a review of these studies). The notions behind the deficit hypothesis have undergirded
many adult education and family literacy programmes with a compensatory ethos. In the
context of education in Brazil, these views seem to still influence researchers’ and educators’
expectations of their impoverished pupils’ competence to acquire school literacies.
From a different theoretical perspective, in the 1970s, Paulo Freire’s seminal work Pedagogy of
the Oppressed set the stage for the re-appraisal of marginalised groups’ own cultures and voices
within the classroom. Freire (1970) suggested a model for participatory pedagogy that would
influence and inform work by a number of theorists around the world (see Giroux 1983;
Delgado-Gaitan 1990; Schugurensky 1998). At the centre of his ideas for critical pedagogy is a
teacher-student dialogical process on three levels: the identification of a context for analysis
related to learners’ own cultures and lifeworlds, a critical analysis and problematisation of this
context (e.g., the power relations of those involved in this context), and the understanding of why
and how (in political and societal terms) such context came to be (Freire 1985). Freire’s work has
received criticism on issues such as the directiveness of the pedagogical process, which critics find
may result in authoritative teacher-student relations (see Schugurensky 1998; Rocha-Schmid
2010), and his failure to refer to gender and race issues, ‘as if oppression were only about class’
(Schugurensky 1998, 22).
Freire’s notions of empowerment have, however, informed educational theorists and research-
ers with family literacy programmes and worked as antidote to deficit views (see, for instance,
Borg and Mayo 2001). In Brazil, Freire’s notions of critical pedagogy have mostly been linked
with the education of adults and adult literacy programmes. In fact, programmes of adult
education in Brazil are mostly focused on the teaching of reading and writing and do not extend
the links between home and school literacies, as can be the case in adult literacy programmes in
other parts of the world (see Delgado-Gaitan 2005).

The New World Order: Changes in Discourse

Since the 1980s, there have been a number of transformations in the debate of every sphere of
the educational system. As in other parts of the world, the epistemological changes in Brazil that
have been placed under the auspice of post-modernity (Bauman 1992) can be seen in the new
discourses and policies of democratisation, pluralism, and neoliberalism. Schooling has become a
reality for a greater number of impoverished Brazilian children, partly due to the end of dictator-
ship in the 1970s, and partly to a series of projects and policies implemented from the 1990s.
Concomitantly, the discourse of pluralism—which within the social sciences in other parts of the
world has been translated into an urge for multiculturalism and multilingualism initiatives (see
Rampton 2006)—in Brazil reignites the debate of power relations through language and literacy
that had, in the 1970s, been initiated by Paulo Freire.
Mortatti (2010) explains that although constructivism passes in the 1980s to be the ‘official’
theoretical model by which the educational system (pedagogically and in terms of governance)
is modelled upon, the debate of literacy and language amongst academics and policymakers is
also informed by two other theoretical models: interactional sociolinguistics and literacy studies
(332). These are respectively influenced by Labov’s work with dialects in New York City (1966;
1972) and Gee (1996) and Street’s (1984) notions for the New Literacy Studies. Consequently,
there has been a surge in the number of studies that locate the Brazilian debate within the debate
of literacy and linguistics from a sociolinguistics and sociocultural perspective (Kleiman 1995a;
Soares 1998; Bagno 2004a). I will review some of the most influential publications at the centre
of the current debate of literacy and linguistics in Brazil to what relates to home and school literacy
connections.

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Core Issues and Key Findings

The (Re)Conceptualisation of Literacy and Language

in the School Curriculum
The first influential publication is Kleiman’s (1995a) ‘Os significados do letramento: uma nova
perspectiva sobre a pratica social da escrita’ (‘The meanings of literacy: a new perspective on the social
practices of writing’). This is a collection of articles that together provide a sound instance of
the issues that are at the centre of the debate of how lower income individuals’ language and
literacy are conceptualised and dealt with in Brazilian schools and society at large. The different
theoretical approaches that each author takes (often originating in conflicting theoretical
discourses) provide the reader with a taste for the complexity and heterogeneity of the debate
on literacy in Brazil (see Mortatti 2010 for a historical perspective and critique of these
discourses).
Here I refer to three chapters that most closely draw on old and new conceptualisations of
the relations between orality and writing and have, respectively, been put in practice in the
classroom in a way that either intensifies a rupture between home and school literacies and
cultures, or attempts to bring students’ vernacular into the classroom to forge a bridge for the
acquisition of school literacies. The reference to relations of orality and writing is relevant here,
as these have been associated with the paradigms of illiteracy and literacy. In societies with a
strong history of popular oral cultures, in which literacy has recently been introduced to the
masses, as is the case in Brazil, these dichotomies become strong representatives of home and
school literacies and of how home cultures are conceptualised and valued in society at large. In
other words, as schools place their focus on academic literacy—mostly represented by official
documents, literary classics, and grammatical books, lower social class individuals’ home cultures
go mostly unacknowledged in the curriculum or are dismissed as inappropriate. This dynamic
has been argued to alienate these individuals and be responsible for their failure with school
literacies (Heath, 1983). Also of literacy theorists’ concern is the fact that these individuals’ homes
have mostly been assumed to be stripped of literacy practices altogether, which in modern
societies can hardly be the case, as I further elaborate in this chapter.
In the first chapter of Kleiman’s book, ‘Literacy models and literacy [alfabetizacao] practices at
school’, which draws on ethnographical studies in adult literacy programmes, Kleiman identifies
three situations of conflict that arise as outcomes of adult literacy programmes that conceptualise
literacy as an autonomous model, as suggested by Brian Street (1984), and which, as a conse-
quence, have a compensatory ethos. An autonomous perspective on literacy presupposes that
literacy is a ‘neutral technology that can be detached from specific social contexts’ (Street 1984, 1).
Street (1984) explains that an alternative approach to literacy “stresses the significance of the
socialisation process in the construction of the meaning of literacy for participants” (2). The next
three sections delve into Kleiman’s three situations of conflict further.

1. Conflicting Discourse Practices: The Construction of

Functions That Do Not Complement One Another
In the first instance, the author explains that by taking writing events (e.g., the writing of a recipe)
from an ‘autonomous perspective’ as neutral and factual to replace certain activities that students
culturally engage in through orality (e.g., the oral exchange of recipes and collaborative cooking
present in many families), the adult educator tries to create a function for the written language
which in fact has been perfectly fulfilled in students’ lifeworlds by verbal interactions. In other
words, the students do not have difficulties in relation to the process involved in following a

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recipe; the problem arises regarding the formal characteristics of a written recipe (Kleiman 1995b,
50). In a different instance, the adult educator and the students engage in a practical production
of soap, cakes, and playdough, following patterns of oral interaction with which the students are
more familiar. The written text is given a follow-up, supportive role: ‘So that we don’t forget the
recipe’. In this way, a need for the written text is constructed, instead of the previous ‘replacement’
mode. The author concludes that in the first instance it is presupposed that writing is a neutral
facilitator to mnemonic and mental processes. She contends, however, that, as Heath (1983)
suggests, not every literate group verbalises or uses the written language to analyse a sequence of
steps involved in the realisation of a task (activity), and certainly, groups with an oral tradition
have other strategies to assist them with memorisation (Kleiman 1995b, 51).

2. Identities in Conflict: The (Re)Construction of the

‘Illiterate’ as a Less Valuable Being
The second instance of conflict refers to the discourse of literacy as related to cognitive gains and,
as a consequence, the ‘illiterate’ individual as seen as devoid of intelligence to conduct social
interactions (e.g., in trading and business) (see also Graff 1987). Kleiman ponders that occur-
rences that undermine these individuals’ ability to function in society are not unusual in the
Brazilian media, in the voice of politicians, and in adult literacy programme classrooms. She
suggests that there is a need to foster a critical debate on the ‘literacy results’ to analyse the unequal
social power relations that are omitted by these discourses. In this way, the autonomous model of
literacy would be seen as just a model that needs to be problematised. This, along with the aware-
ness of other types of literacy practices and their contexts, would help to demystify the discourses
of literacy; it would be a first step towards bringing the education system closer to students’
realities, beyond asking students to assimilate to it.

3. Conflicting Values: Students’ Resistance to the Literate Culture

In the third instance, Kleiman describes how the reading of a medication description ends up
causing friction between the adult educator and her students, with the latter aligning themselves
against the educators’ authoritative voice that tries to ‘impose’ on them the discourse of the phar-
maceutical industry without promoting a debate that reassesses its agenda and addresses students’
own cultures and beliefs and their status and place in the wider society. (See also Gee 1996 for
the complexities of the relations between ideological discourses and reading and writing.)
Kleiman suggests that situations of conflict between the adult educator, who more often than
not reproduces the voices of mainstream groups, and students, who have their values and language
dismissed, very often result in students dropping out of these courses before being able to achieve
their goal of reading and writing.
In the chapter entitled ‘Orality and the construction of reading by children from illiterate
families’, Sylvia Bueno Terzi (in Kleiman, 1995a) discusses the finding of her ethnographic study
with school-aged children from an impoverished community in Brazil. Drawing on Heath’s
(1983) work on home and school literacy links and on her own findings, the author posits that
in literate families the development of oral and written language occurs concomitantly: “As a
child learns to talk, she starts to learn the functions and uses of writing, being able to become a
reader and text producer even before she can decode the written language (be alfabetizada)”
(Terzi, 1995, 91). This, she argues, is not the case with children from what she refers to as ‘illiterate’
or ‘little literate’ backgrounds, who arrive at school without being exposed to interactions around
school models of literacy.

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The author explains that once at school, these children’s acquisition of reading does not go
beyond the process of word recognition to the more ideal recognition of the written text as
another way of communicating meaning. This is the case because schools fail to take account of
students’ pre-school experiences, assuming school literacy as a universal skill; they approach read-
ing and writing as purely coding and decoding. As a consequence, the interactions teachers
engage students in bear no familiarity to the nature of interactions students experience outside
school. In this way, the link between orality (as students from low income families know it) and
writing is lost; the possibility (argued by the author) of the latter being developed through the
means of the former is missed.
Through ethnographic action-research, the author embarks on a nine-month project that
aims at re-establishing the link between oral and written language for her low income partici-
pants in school. In more practical terms, her approach involves constructing a dialogue around
the written text whereby both the interaction patterns and the context of the situation are
designed to resemble the oral interactions students are more familiar with and to allow them to
infer meaning from topics from their home oral experience. The author concludes that by the
end of the study, participants had acquired the notion that literacy and orality were two means
to the same goal (that of meaning making) and were able to draw on their funds of knowledge,
allegedly mostly acquired from orality, to build their comprehension of school written texts.
Terzi’s article provides a sound account of how reading and writing are conceptualised and
consequently dealt with in the school researched, which can arguably be taken as using the insti-
tutionalised, traditional ways of approaching literacy common in other schools in the country. Its
relevance to the discussion of home and school links for children from a low economic back-
ground is obvious—firstly, in its description of the ruptures of language and literacy they face
when arriving at school and, subsequently, in the attempts the author/researcher engages in to
overcome these constraints. By acknowledging and departing from children’s home interactions,
levels of comprehension, and own strategies around texts, the author suggests an approach that
falls into the perspectives of multiple literacies (see Auerbach 1997), which place the responsibil-
ity for bridging the home-school gap on schools rather than transferring it to parents, which can
be the case with family literacy programmes (Gadsden 2008).
In other respects, however, the use of concepts such as ‘illiterate’ or ‘little literate’ to refer to the
families in the study contradicts the very notions the author draws her theoretical inference from.
While the study reinforces the notions that individuals use both written and spoken modes to
‘supplement and reinforce’ each other (Heath 1983), it seems to miss the point that this sociali-
sation around reading (and of reading in association with other modes—see Kress 2003 for issues
of multimodality) also happens in low income communities, which are part of a literate society
and therefore exposed to the written artefacts that are subsumed by it (Street 1984). If taken the
way they are described in the article, the participants of Terzi’s study seem to live in a community
devoid of literacy where their only claim to ‘cultural models’ is their oral interactions. It takes us
back to a description of impoverished children’s background as that which departs from middle
class literacies and interactions, which are taken as the standard model for analysis. In this way, a
focus on a ‘lack or a deficit’ (Schultz and Hull 2002, 27) remains. An approach with a stronger
sociocultural ethos would take into account how these children engage with the literacy material
they do have at home (e.g., labels from products, siblings’ school books, religious books, bills etc.)
and the literacy events they witness at home (e.g., their siblings doing their homework; role play
around school interactions that may take place amongst school children and young siblings; their
parents paying bills and going about other mailing). Proponents of multiple literacies have argued
for a ‘culturally responsive approach’ (Bloome 2008, 255) that uses family literacies as curriculum
intervention (Gonzalez, Moll, and Amanti 2005). Drawing on these views, Bloome (2008) explains

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that “part of the dynamic addressed by culturally responsive pedagogy involves eschewing a priori
constructions of students as having deficit cultural and linguistic backgrounds that make difficult
students’ effective participation in classroom literacy practices” (255). He adds that

The concept of funds of knowledge has been used to emphasize that the homes and com-
munities of cultural and linguistic minority students are not deficit in social, linguistic and
cultural capital, but rather that teachers need to design curriculum and instruction in ways
that provide opportunities for students to bring to their participation in classroom literacy
events the funds of knowledge available in their households and communities (Gonzales,
Moll, & Amanti 2005; Moll, Amanti, Neff, and Gonzalez 1992). (Bloome 2008, 255)

These issues also suggest the intertextuality of discourses, whereby old and new concepts of
literacy are still conflicting.
The last study I refer to in Kleiman (1995a) approaches the issue of home-school links from
a sociolinguistics perspective. Stella Maris Bortoni analyses and discusses data of teacher-student
classroom interactions collected in a small rural community in Central Brazil. With a larger aim
to address the question of whether schooling enables students to acquire ‘formal registers’ of their
first language, the author analyses teachers’ patterns of code switching between standard Portu-
guese and the local rural variant in terms of whether these are related to teachers’ views of what
constitutes a literacy event. Drawing on Hymes’ (1974) ethnography of communication and
notions of speech events and Philip’s (1972) ‘structures of participation’ (see Erickson and Schultz
1977, 6, cited in Bortoni 1995), Bortoni identifies four different types of speech events through-
out the lessons observed:

1) Short interactions (speech acts [Hymes 1974]): jokes, disciplining students, short
explanations.
2) Long explanations or comments about a task that is being carried out (e.g., feedback about
a mathematical problem-solving task).
3) Feedback on the reading aloud.
4) IRE (Introduction, Response, and Evaluation) speech event (Sinclair and Coulthard 1975).

Bortoni’s analysis takes into consideration phonological and grammatical aspects to distin-
guish between the rural Portuguese variant spoken by the participants and standard Portuguese.
The author concludes that the two teachers in the study code switch according to the type of
interactions being carried out. Interactions of Type 1 above were mostly carried out in the
rural variant, while Types 3 and 4 (which are more closely associated with school practices)
were predominantly carried out in standard Portuguese. The author suggests that the level of
standardisation of the teachers’ speech was directly related to the conceptualisation they hold
of distinctions between oral events and literate ones.
The teachers in the study were also found not to focus on correcting students’ uses of their
vernacular (a practice considered usual in Brazil at the time of the study). The author comments
that a culturally sensitive approach (Erickson 1987; see also Ladson-Billings 1994) would
acknowledge and raise students’ awareness of the differences between the standard variant and
other marginalised variants. Bortoni concludes that the interactional patterns observed in the
classroom contributed to shift the perspective from the dichotomy of ‘good Portuguese and bad
Portuguese’ to ‘the Portuguese we use to read and the Portuguese we use to talk’ (Bortoni 1995,
140). In addition, she posits that working on a more positive platform seems to have fostered an
environment of respect and friendship between teachers and students in the classroom. She

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suggests that this approach may result in students’ acquiring features of standard Portuguese,
which are valued in more formal events of communication, without dismissing students’ own
vernaculars.
Bortoni’s study alludes to issues of language discrimination that are symptomatic of social
inequality in Brazilian society. Questions about issues of acceptance of students’ vernacular within
schools are relevant in a context that has been characterised by a strong focus on prescriptive
teaching of the standard language, in which the written text has been taken as a model for oral
communication.
The article is on par with the sociolinguistic perspective that has been taken by a number of
linguists and educational theorists on the approach to issues of standardisation, the status ascribed
to other variants, and the subsequent ‘teaching’ of the first language in Brazil in the last decades.
I discuss below some of the issues that arise from this debate.

Vernacular Language and the School Curriculum

A number of studies in the last three decades have drawn on the work of sociolinguists in other
parts of the world, mostly on Hymes’ (1964) ethnography of communication, Labov’s (1966;
1972) notions of interactional sociolinguistics, and Halliday’s (1978) systemic linguistics to sup-
port the claim for a re-conceptualisation of language and its study. I briefly draw here on Marcos
Bagno’s (2004a) book Linguistica da Norma (The Linguistics of the Norm) to summarise the issues of
language discrimination and language inculcation that have been at the centre of this debate and
that have relations to the discussion being pursued herein.
The understanding of these issues has been argued as crucial for the understanding of the
process of sociocultural inequality reflected upon and achieved through language discrimination
in society and, in a micro dimension, for the factors that lead to teachers’ conceptualisations of
literacy and the battle they engage in with their students for the acquisition of the standard var-
iant (see Faraco 2004; Luchesi 2004; and Bagno 2004b).
Bagno (2004b), Faraco (2004) and Luchesi (2004) draw on historical facts to explain these
issues. They contend that on par with the Eurocentric agenda of the Brazilian elites in regards to
culture and language, which has been in place since colonial times and detrimental to the culture
and language of the great majority of Brazilians, the set of linguistic features that came to be seen
as the norm to which all should aspire, and which still adorns the pages of the many normative
grammar books available in the country, was based on a European Portuguese variant registered
in literary classics of the 19th century. In spite of being closer to the variant spoken by the elite
than to any other variant spoken in Brazil, mostly due to the fact that those grammarians, poli-
cymakers, and the print media who declare themselves guardians of the standard language are
themselves members of this elite, the artificial nature of this standard and the rather predictable
gap—in syntactic, semantic, and phonological terms—between this and other variants spoken in
Brazil have been argued as some of the factors contributing to the intensive prescriptive approach
to language in Brazilian schools and, in turn, the marginalisation of different vernaculars.
As a consequence, two main equivoques are encountered in the way language has been
approached in schools. First, there is the notion that the written text should be taken as a model
for the oral mode, and, second, there is a focus placed on the prescriptive teaching of grammar,
both in schools and in the media. The latter is evidenced in the shape of television and radio
programmes, newspaper and magazine columns, and so on, (Bagno 2003) which have the aim to
teach native speakers of Brazilian Portuguese to speak their own language ‘correctly’. This
involves pointing out perceived ‘errors’ that are found in the speech of a great part of the
population.

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Castilho (in Bagno 2004a, but written in 1978) explains that despite the democratisation of
schooling in the 60s and 70s, every element present in state schools conforms to the dominant
class language and culture. He posits that attempting to replace a social group’s linguistic variant
with another reinforces the ‘complex of linguistic incompetence’ already existent in the lower
social classes (Castilho 2004, 33). Silva (2004, 261) also ponders that the act of taking the written
text as the model for oral language creates a conflict between the school standard and the ‘friend-
ship group’s’ standard. Given the nature of the standard valued at school, she argues, however, that
the process of erasing one vernacular in favour of the written variant and the consequent feeling
of lack of linguistic competence Castilho refers to is not only a reality for lower income social
groups, but also for students from a middle class background. In this way, the gap between stu-
dents’ language and the language aimed at school has been fossilised not only by the literacy
practices that the latter values and tries to pass on as universal to different sociocultural groups,
but also by the language it imposes on these groups as a model for reproduction.

Research Approaches
Schultz and Hull (2002) suggest that studies on the nature of school and home literacy continu-
ities and discontinuities have been mostly conducted through the theoretical lenses of (1) the
ethnography of communication (Hymes 1964; Heath 1983); (2) cultural historical activity theory
built on Vygotsky’s work (see Scribner and Cole 1981), and (3) the New Literacy Studies (see
Street 1984; Gee 1996). Marsh (2010) refers to the sociocultural, cultural, and sociological theo-
ries as the three broader fields of study that have informed work with a focus on home-school
literacy links. She explains that under these three fields of study there are a number of concepts
generated in relation to literacy studies.
It is not possible to provide here a comprehensive account of the methods used by theorists
working in all of these theoretical traditions. It is possible to point out, however, that the great
amount of work in sociocultural studies, and particularly in New Literacy Studies, has followed
an ethnographic tradition of data collection within homes and learning institutions (see Barton
and Hamilton 1998; Bartlett 2007; and Grenfell, Bloome, Hardy, Pahl, Rowsell, and Street 2012a).
The classroom domain has been used as a field of ethnographic studies more traditionally by
ethnographers of communication (Hymes 1974) and more recently by theorists drawing on
Bhabha’s (1994) notions of the classroom as a third space (see Gutierrez 2008).
In Brazil, recent work in this area has significantly been conducted within the theoretical
perspective of the New Literacy Studies, interactional sociolinguistics, and cultural studies fol-
lowing Vygostky’s (1962) work on cognitive development. These studies have predominantly
been conducted within schools (see, for instance, Colello 2007; Cruz 2007). These new perspec-
tives on literacy have also motivated work from an ethnographic approach that looks into literacy
within other domains (see Souza’s 2011 work with black youth artists; Franchetto 2008 on the
conflicts between oral and writing practices in indigenous communities; and Tavares and Ferreira
2009 on home literacy practices and the networks of lower income families).

New Debates and Implications for Education

Literacy
The theorisation of literacy through the lens of the New Literacy Studies has in the last dec-
ades encouraged a number of researchers to document the out-of-school literacy practices of
individuals around the world. Many studies have also pointed out how marginalised groups

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have successfully been involved in literacy practices in different domains while failing at school
literacies. More recently, however, literacy theorists have drawn attention in retrospect to the
tendency encountered in this line of studies to overemphasise a ‘school-home literacy divide’
and, in turn, to romanticise out-of-school literacies while villainizing school practices (Brandt
and Clinton 2002; Hull and Schultz 2002; Street 2012a). While the discontinuities between
home and school literacies seem to be a fact to many non-mainstream children, Schultz and
Hull (2002, 12) posit that “We may fail to see the presence of school-like practice at home
(. . .) or non-school-like activities in the formal classroom. Such contexts are not sealed tight
or boarded off; rather, one should expect to find, and one should look to account for, the
movement from one context to the other” (12). The authors add that the account that is
made of schools, teachers, and academic literacies are often too harsh at a time when teachers
are increasingly confronted with the mere implementation of policies, rather than being
involved in consultation and discussion.
Taking the criticism of aspects of New Literacy Studies into account, Street (2012a, 45)
ponders that it is now time for theorists to move beyond these theoretical critiques and to
develop positive proposals for interventions in teaching, curriculum, measurement criteria,
and teacher education in both the formal and informal sectors, based upon these principles.
He contends that it will be at this stage that the theoretical perspectives brought together
in NLS will face their sternest test: that of their practical applications to mainstream
education.
Street and colleagues (see Grenfell et al. 2012) build on the concepts of the NLS, in
conjunction with Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of practice, in search of a sociocultural approach
that fulfils Street’s suggestion above. An aspect of their debate is the role ethnography can have
in empowering both educators and their students in the search to promote awareness of and
familiarisation with community practices. Street’s (2012b) project Learning for Empowerment
Through Training in Ethnographic-style Research (LETTER) has trained adult literacy
practitioners in India and Ethiopia on how to conduct ethnographic-style research to investi-
gate into their students’ community practices. These practitioners have been able to go from a
passive position as spectators in a teacher training program to one of active ethnographers in
control of how to best incorporate their findings onto their classroom practices. The expecta-
tion is that an ethnographic approach to investigate students’ community literacy practices
may function as an antidote to the many preconceptions of different groups’ languages and
literacies that still persist. At the same time, it may give teachers some sense of autonomy amidst
increasing accountability.

Digital Literacies
Looking into students’ practices from an ethnographic approach could also provide educators
with a more informed awareness of their students’ uses of digital literacies. Erstad (2011, 105)
ponders that rather than describing youth’s digital use homogeneously, ‘[we] need to specify
variations and digital divides among young people at different age levels, and in different cultural
contexts, and also to specify different aspects of digital media, from gaming to social media,
texting, and so forth’ (p. 105). A closer investigation of students’ uses of digital literacies could
help us to ‘[identify] what impact such technologies have on specific social practices in which
people are involved’ (Erstad 2011, 105). Moreover, it would also contribute to a more learner-
centred pedagogy in which students’ funds of knowledge would not only be acknowledged, but
would also be taken as valid aspects towards course syllabi.

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 Is There a Place for Home Literacies

Parental Involvement
There is a need for research that assesses the place of parents and students’ voices within
schools. There are the questions of 1) whether there would be a place for family literacy
programmes in the educational system in contexts like the one discussed herein; and 2) whether
these would even be desirable given the compensatory nature that these programmes have been
argued to assume (see Rocha-Schmid, 2010). On this matter, Gadsden (2008, 172) suggests that
the field should engage in ‘a more in-depth focus on and analysis of culture’ that goes beyond the
narrow categorisation of ethnicity and race. In a context of harsh social inequity, descriptions of
cultural differences tend to be debated at the level of social classes without much further attention
to individuals’ other identities, such as participation in religious, sports, or political groups, which
are prone to inform and widen their literacy practices.

Language
Language theorists in Brazil warn of the need of a reconceptualisation of language and its
study. This, they argue, ought to include the problematisation of the relations between the
standard language and the sociocultural and economic factors that have historically contrib-
uted to language as a means of social inequity representation and reproduction (Bagno 2004a).
This should lead to:

1) the awareness that the written form should not and cannot be taken as a model for oral
communication (a practice that has resulted in the discrimination of any production that
does not comply with its rules of correctness);
2) the recognition and acceptance (not only tolerance) of other variants; and
3) the prevalence, at school, of those grammars that incorporate a descriptive (rather than
prescriptive) account of written and oral uses of different linguistic variants.

Faraco (2004) posits, however, that this should be a debate that goes beyond school gates and
into the public and political societal domains.
This chapter has reviewed some of the main debates being carried out in the area of
educational linguistics and literacy studies in Brazil. It has been suggested that the issues
of language discrimination and traditional conceptualisations of a rigid literacy and orality
paradigm have played a very strong role in schools’ failure to serve the country’s lower social
class individuals.
On a more positive note, political and epistemological changes observed in the last decades
have brought about a discourse that calls upon schools to transform themselves to better serve
these individuals’ children. The expected result is that home cultures and languages will stop
being objects of shame (see Barlett 2007) and be instead supported and drawn upon in children’s
acquisition of the academic literacies that are so valued in official domains.

Further Reading
Bartlett, L. 2010. The Word and the World: The Cultural Politics of Literacy in Brazil. Cresskill: Hampton Press.
Pahl, K., and Rowsell, J. (Eds.) 2006. Travel Notes from the New Literacy Studies: Instances of Practice. Clevedon:
Multilingual Matters.
Ribeiro, V. M. 2003. Letramento no Brasil. Sao Paulo: Global Editora.
Soares, M. 2003. Alfabetizacao e letramento. Sao Paulo: Contexto.

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Elaine Rocha-Schmid

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 8
Non-Native Teachers
and Advocacy
Enric Llurda

Historical Perspectives
Non-native language teachers have historically remained invisible in mainstream applied and
educational linguistics, their contribution disregarded or looked down on. The dominant vision
in the language teaching profession has entrenched the native speaker as the ideal teacher, and
therefore only native speakers have been endowed with the knowledge and authority to pass on the
language to learners, much like a religious guru can implement certain sacred rituals that are for-
bidden to non-members of the group. Only when native speakers have not been available have
non-natives been tolerated as teachers of the language, although they could never aspire to the
same level of authority and legitimacy of ‘real’ native speakers. They have been accepted as sur-
rogate teachers, but have had no right to claim a legitimate role in the language teaching task,
and so their voice has hardly—if ever—been heard. The literature on language teaching and
language acquisition has, therefore, been historically dominated by a native speaker bias, which
has affected the way second language acquisition has been conceptualized as well as the guiding
principles of second language teaching. For instance, if we look into the different methods and
approaches that appeared in the second half of the 20th century, we can find several discrepancies
regarding the teaching of grammar, the type of materials used in class, and the use of spontaneous
language vs. planned structures (Richards and Rodgers 2001). What we cannot find is any dis-
crepancy in the teacher model that underlies all those proposals and ideas for classroom interven-
tion. In all cases, the native speaker has remained the default teacher, the one who spoke ‘with no
errors’ and could therefore guide the student into the realm of the new language. In short, the
unchallenged assumption was that you cannot invite somebody to a place unless it is ‘your’ place;
you cannot teach a language unless it is ‘your’ language, and you can only claim the language to
be ‘yours’ if you are a native speaker. The invisibility of non-native teachers has had its manifes-
tation in how methods of language teaching were designed, packaged, and promoted, but also in
research of classroom-based interaction, in which the issue was not even mentioned or discussed,
and more especially in the whole field of teacher training, completely ignorant of the specificity
and the needs of this particular group of teachers.
What were non-native teachers expected to do? They were supposed to pay close attention
to native speakers’ performance and to work hard to imitate them in all aspects. Yet, they could

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never escape a sense of inadequacy, a feeling of being ‘impostors’ pretending to be what they
surely were not (Bernat 2008). This view has, fortunately, changed a great deal in the last twenty
years. Contemporary educational linguistics has incorporated the notion of the non-native
teacher and the need to challenge the authority of the native speaker as fundamental elements of
the discipline, which has managed to critically deal with previously established notions and foun-
dations. The leading force questioning the native speaker as the default teacher has been in the
area of English teaching, but there is some evidence that the movement is spreading out onto the
teaching of other languages (Callahan 2006). The reason English teaching has been the leader in
the advocacy of non-native teachers must be traced back to the leading role of English as the
most widely learned second language, as well as the increasing presence of non-native speakers
of English in influential academic positions at the international level. Kachru’s influential notion
of ‘World Englishes’ and the nativization of English in ‘outer circle countries’ (Kachru 1986;
1992) is fundamental to understanding this move. The direction initiated by Kachru was later
completed by the formulation of English as a Lingua Franca (Seidlhofer 2011) with its challenge
to native speaker ownership of English (Widdowson 1994; 2012). Kachru opened the door to
new varieties of English and engaged the linguistic community in a description of the English(es)
used by multilingual speakers of English in countries other than the traditionally considered
English-speaking countries. His work was key in promoting the acceptance of diversity among
English speakers. The global presence of English and the increasing use of English among
non-native speakers is one of the reasons why so many people now consider it totally unnecessary
to aim at speaking English like native speakers. The fact that the world has more non-native
speakers of English than native speakers, and the great number of English interactions in which
participants’ first language is not English, gives non-natives the right to claim the language their
own, and consider themselves—as never before in history—co-protagonists in the English lan-
guage teaching (ELT) profession.
In this context, we need to situate the first studies that brought non-native language teachers
to the fore in academic publications. Medgyes published his first piece on this topic around thirty
years ago (Medgyes 1983). In that paper, he used the term ‘schizophrenic’ to describe the state of
mind of non-native teachers who (openly or secretly) wish to become native-like. Thus, he
openly discussed for the first time the struggle of non-native teachers wishing to be recognized
in the profession while at the same time feeling somehow inadequate for the job. The first
research-based piece focusing on non-native teachers, however, did not appear until ten years
later, with the publication of the results of an international survey comparing the characteristics
of native and non-native teachers of English (Medgyes 1994; Reves and Medgyes 1994).
Medgyes’s survey pictured non-native English teachers (NNESTs) as having a bright side and
a dark side as compared to native teachers (NESTs). The bright side was based on the advantages
derived from the shared learning experience with their students, such as the prediction of diffi-
culties or the use of strategies. The dark side was tied to a ‘language deficit’ and an ‘inferiority
complex’. Medgyes concluded that both NESTs and NNESTs needed to be aware of their own
strengths and weaknesses and he argued that a combination of both would be ideal in any edu-
cational environment. This approach was empowering, although it did certainly simplify and
somehow overgeneralize the picture. Yet, Medgyes’ pioneering work shook the profession and
became the basis upon which a great deal of future research was built, as can be observed by
looking at the wide range of studies that have been inspired by or have even directly used
Medgyes’ questionnaire. Medgyes also emphasized the language deficit of NNESTs, an approach
that was criticized by Samimy (1997), because “the overemphasis on the linguistic deficit could
perpetuate a sense of marginalization among nonnative professionals rather than promote a sense
of empowerment” (Samimy 1997, 817). However, Medgyes further insisted on the idea of the

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importance of language proficiency development by NNESTs (Medgyes 1999), and his argu-
ments were supported by other researchers (Derwing and Munro 2005; Lim 2011; Llurda 2005b)
who, in addition to acknowledging the unfairness of a situation in which NNESTs are constantly
suspected for lack of (NS) proficiency, emphasized the need to be competent users of the language
in order to adequately display their teaching skills.
This point of departure in research on non-native teachers has undoubtedly determined the
direction of subsequent studies. The need to undermine existing discriminatory practices gener-
ally favouring NESTS over NNESTs, and the commitment to advocate for NNESTs’ rights and
conditions has strongly determined research on NNESTs, placing the emphasis on the assets of
NNESTs, rather than on their potential weaknesses. This may have been misinterpreted in certain
contexts, up to the point that some NSs have felt the need to claim their own status after they
may have experienced some discriminatory practices, especially in countries with regulations
preventing foreigners to access permanent teaching jobs in the state school system. Such a view
has been more prominent in contexts were foreigners may have been othered and isolated from
the local community (e.g., Japan), creating also a sense of distrust and potential discrimination
(Houghton and Rivers 2013). The dominant thread of NNEST research, however, has aimed at
developing awareness of NNESTs as a tool to increase self-confidence and overcome marginali-
zation. Thus, in-depth qualitative studies have flowered in the last few years, focusing their
attention on NNESTs’ lives and ideological construction of reality (Hayes 2010; Ilieva 2010; Reis
2011; De Oliveira and Lan 2012).

Core Issues and Key Findings

Non-native teachers’ identities have been strongly determined by what Phillipson (1992) labelled
“the native-speaker phallacy” or, in a more elaborate form, what Holliday (2005) named “native
speakerism”: a particular way of “othering” or marginalising NNSs, and consequently one of the
many manifestations of racism (Holliday 2005). Race is, in fact, a key element in the discussion
of native and non-native teachers, as discriminatory practices are often associated with practices
of segregation of “the other”, the foreigner, the stranger who does not belong to the inner circle or
the native community, and such discriminatory practices are conveniently disguised as common
sense. The effects on teacher identities of racialized categories associated to the native/non-native
distinction are explored and discussed in the works of Amin (1997), Chacon (2006), Kubota and
Lin (2006), and Motha (2006).
Native speakerism has contributed to the impression that native teachers are better suited to
teach a language and additionally that students prefer them over non-native teachers. Such a
claim was widely held until some researchers did actually ask students on their views towards
native and non-native teachers and found that students were much more aware of the virtues of
a language teacher than expected, and could appreciate non-native teachers by their true value
rather than applying preconceived stereotypes (Benke and Medgyes 2005; Lasagabaster and Sierra
2005; Mahboob 2004; Pacek 2005; Watson Todd and Pojanapunya 2009). However, using a
matched-guise technique, Butler (2007) found that Korean primary students’ attitude toward
the American-accented English guise was superior to the Korean one, and they preferred the
former as a prospective teacher. In short, when students’ opinions are taken into account, we find
some bias towards NESTs (Moussu 2010), which is rather compensated by a high appreciation
of NNESTs’ value and qualities by students who have experienced both native and non-native
teachers (Benke and Medgyes 2005; Cheung and Braine 2007; Lipovsky and Mahboob 2010;
Moussu 2010; Mullock 2010; Pacek 2005). Moreover, Moussu (2010) focused on students’ first
language, expected grades, teachers’ countries of origin, and class subject (grammar, reading,

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Enric Llurda

etc.) in order to establish a connection between these variables and the attitudinal responses given
by students on native and non-native teachers. For instance, Asian students held less positive
attitudes towards all teachers, and particularly towards NNESTs, than students from the Medi-
terranean area. Teachers’ first language was a relevant variable, but as shown in previous studies
(Inbar-Lourie 2005; Liu 1999), students did not always guess the native or non-native identity of
their teachers. Interestingly, students’ attitudes at the end of the semester were better than at the
beginning, but this improvement was more visible in the case of non-native teachers.
These results confirm that preconceived ideas favouring native teachers over non-native ones
are well extended, although everyday experience has the power to transform those stereotypes
into awareness of actual teaching skills by any given teacher, be it native or non-native. Yet,
non-native teachers have been repeatedly found to have some relative strengths over natives, and
particularly over those native teachers who are monolingual and monocultural, lack the experi-
ence of having learned a foreign language, and ignore the language and culture of their students.
Research has found that bilingual and bicultural non-native teachers can greatly contribute to the
language teaching profession (Llurda 2005a). Some recurrently found advantages of non-native
teachers are their higher level of language awareness (Llurda 2005b; Medgyes 1994), their higher
empathy and role model function (Faez 2012; Nemtchinova 2005), and their capacity to predict
the actual difficulties students will encounter in the process of learning (McNeill 2005).
Non-native teachers often have to face many instances of overt job discrimination. Mahboob,
Uhrig, Newman, and Hartford (2004) and Clark and Paran (2007) respectively found that a
majority of U.S. and U.K. employers in the ELT sector considered nativeness an important factor
in hiring English teachers. Other factors were also taken into account in the recruiting process,
but certainly being a native speaker appeared to be an asset and, other things being equal, the
native speaker would be preferred over the non-native. In a similar vein, Selvi (2010) analysed job
advertisements posted electronically in two leading English language teaching recruitment
resources, to find that a majority of advertisements specified nativeness or made some reference
to the native condition as part of the job requirements. In spite of evident cases of job discrimination
and some biased perceptions held by social agents, there is a rather well-established consensus that
the difficulties experienced by non-natives in being recognized and establishing their professional
status are due to their own lack of self-confidence and low professional self-esteem (Moussu
2006; Nemtchinova 2005). Some evidence suggests that NNESTs themselves suffer a specific
type of self-hatred that has been metaphorically labelled ‘impostor syndrome’ (Bernat 2008) or
Stockholm syndrome (Llurda 2009a), consisting of secretly admiring the native speaker and
denying themselves the legitimacy of being considered rightful language users and teachers.
Some research has been conducted on establishing ways and procedures to improve the level of
self-confidence and professional self-esteem, especially during teacher education (Barratt 2010;
Golombek and Jordan 2005; Lee 2004; Llurda, Brady, Dogancay-Aktuna, Inbar-Lourie, and
de Oliveira 2006). This is often connected to an emphasis on language development. Thus, Lim
(2011) connects language proficiency to student teachers’ career decision-making, and Shin
(2008) provides practical suggestions for improving non-native teachers’ conditions, with a strong
emphasis on developing language skills and incorporating the discourses of local communities.
Ilieva (2010) claims that students often end up parroting discourses on issues such as equity or
multicompetence, but at the same time acknowledges the influence of such discourses on offering
new identity options and empowerment linked to the development of agency. Reis (2011) also
offers a socioculturally based narrative of the process of empowerment experienced by a
Russian non-native speaker of English in the context of a graduate program in applied linguistics
in the United States. The study is based on the idea that “through critical reflection and collab-
orative inquiry, NNESTs can challenge disempowering discourses and conceive of legitimizing

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professional identities” (Reis 2011, 34) and recounts the process by which a non-native graduate
student engages in a dialogical questioning of the native speaker myth. One of the conclusions
of this study is that “it is critical for teacher educators to create mediational spaces that allow
NNESTs to collaboratively challenge disempowering discourses and conceive of legitimizing
professional identities” (Reis 2011, 48).
Attitudes of non-native teachers towards their own competence in teaching a language that is
not their native one are strongly influenced by concepts such as ownership or legitimate use of
a language. Young and Walsh (2010) argue that many NNESTs in their study show confusion
regarding target language varieties, and yet they do participate in a standard language ideology,
which was defined by Lippi-Green (1997) as “a bias toward an abstracted, idealized, homogene-
ous spoken language which is imposed and maintained by dominant bloc institutions and which
names as its model the written language, but which is drawn primarily from the spoken language
of the upper middle class” (Lippi-Green 1997, 64). Jenkins (2007) contended that non-native
teachers have “ambivalent attitudes towards their own English accents” (211) with almost all
participants expressing “a strong desire for an NS English accent” (212), due to a generally
assumed accent hierarchy, in which some native accents are clearly on top. It is reasonable to
assume that users who hold very strong favourable attitudes towards the preservation of native
varieties of the language will tend to deny legitimacy to non-native speakers of the language. On
the contrary, teachers who embrace the idea of English as an international language or English
as a Lingua Franca will legitimize their role as language educators (Llurda 2004; 2009a). Interest-
ingly, native-supremacy attitudes are more strongly held by NNESTs who have had very little
contact with communities of speakers of English. Conversely, NNESTs who have spent a pro-
longed period in an English-speaking country display more critical positions towards the alleged
superiority of native varieties and show a stronger appreciation of the legitimacy of non-native
uses of the language (Llurda 2008).
Asking teachers about the strengths and weaknesses of native and non-native teachers has been
one of the most frequently used sources of data related to this topic. Non-native teachers have
been asked in different contexts and moments to reflect on their own condition and the specific
contribution NNESTs could make to their language students. Reves and Medgyes (1994), Llurda
and Huguet (2003), and Ma (2012) are three studies conducted in three different decades and
geographical contexts. Reves and Medgyes (1994) conducted an international questionnaire
involving teachers connected to the British Council international network, whereas Llurda and
Huguet (2003) restricted their study to teachers working in the primary and secondary education
sector in the city of Lleida, in Catalonia, with an emphasis on comparing responses given by
teachers in the two educational stages (primary vs. secondary). Ma (2012) specifically attempted
to look at strengths and weaknesses of native and non-native teachers in Hong Kong. In all three
studies, the perceptions of the high and low points of non-native teachers were rather similar,
with a perceived advantage of NNESTs over natives on communication and empathy with stu-
dents, understanding of local education system, and increased language awareness, which also
implied more clarity in grammar explanations. Conversely, non-natives were consistently found
at a loss in language skills and target culture knowledge, together with a lack of spontaneity and
an excessive reliance on textbooks.
These results need to be placed in perspective given the strong evidence showing that NNESTs
are not a homogenous group, neatly separated from natives, but rather constitute a very diverse
group, placed alongside a continuum with so-called native speakers (Brutt-Griffler and Samimy
2001; Davies 2003; Faez 2011; Liu 1999; and Moussu and Llurda 2008). Thus, non-natives teach-
ing in different settings (e.g., US and Japan) are likely to experience very different challenges,
and therefore construct different identities. Additionally, the educational levels at which teachers

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are appointed, or the type of training received, and whether part of that training took place in an
English-speaking country may also contribute to differentiate among NNESTs, as well as level
of target language proficiency, a rather distinctive feature that cannot be ignored in the charac-
terization of NNESTs.

Research Approaches
Research on non-native teachers was for a long time dependent on the seminal work by Medgyes
(1994), and therefore relied almost exclusively on survey data. Questionnaires were used to ask
teachers in different contexts about their native-non-native condition and about their language
and teaching skills. Still now, questionnaires are commonly used in research on this topic. How-
ever, the field has moved on to incorporate a wider range of research methods allowing for richer
insights.
Moussu and Llurda (2008) offered an extensive overview of research on non-native English
teachers, and also dealt with theoretical and practical implications identifying past, present, and
future lines of research. Regarding implications, it was made clear that status and empowerment
were directly involved and affected by research, which could thus not remain neutral, as it must
take a stance on the critical analysis of the socioeducational environment and conditions in which
non-native teachers develop their professional task. These authors reviewed the main research
methods used to investigate this topic and pointed out the excessive reliance on questionnaires
and self-reports. An analysis of the methods employed in the field brought the authors to con-
clude that existing research had made use of the following techniques:

1) non-empirical reflections on the nature and conditions of NNESTs;

2) personal experiences and narratives;
3) surveys;
4) interviews; and
5) classroom observations.

One of the points made by Moussu and Llurda (2008) was the need for research with a more
‘objective’ component. Holliday and Aboshiha (2009) criticized this idea, which they considered
sustained by a modernist viewpoint (671), as opposed to their own postmodern approach. In
criticizing “the struggle to be objective” (671), they advocated for more complex and varied
approaches of gaining understanding into the nature of non-native teachers, and especially ones
that aim at identifying how ideology remains present, albeit hidden, in the professional discourses.
This point of view is worth looking at, as it emphasizes the value of what they termed thick
description: “a wide range of instances from different locations and times” (Holliday and Aboshiha
2009, 672), although in arguing for the value of this method they may tend to underemphasize
the value of research based on quantitative data, which very nicely complements postmodern
approaches, as well as experiential or introspective qualitative research. In this sense, the increasing
use of mixed-methods designs in educational research offers new ways of looking at the tradi-
tional dichotomy between qualitative and quantitative research. Research on non-native teachers
should take advantage of the potential power of mixed-methods and use this methodology to
help move the field forward. It would be good news to see a series of upcoming studies breaking
the traditional dichotomy between qualitative and quantitative research and bringing both
together to further our understanding of NNESTs.
In the last few years, we have seen studies using in-depth interviews (Benson 2012; Hayes
2010) and autobiographies (Lim 2011; Park 2012) to research non-native teachers’ identities, and

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thus our understanding of the complex environments and situations experienced by a diversity
of NNESTs has enriched. Yet, the main point in Moussu and Llurda’s (2008) discussion on
research methods still holds true, as there is a lack of studies taking a more distant, generalizable,
view on non-native teachers. Watson Todd and Pojanapunya (2009) did use the “Implicit Asso-
ciation Test (IAT)”, thus incorporating an innovative research design adapted from the field of
social psychology, by means of which they determined implicit attitudes of students towards
non-native teachers in Thailand. But still, research using other methods is strongly needed in
order to complement data obtained through interviews, dialogue, and self-reports with data
obtained by other means, such as direct observation of classroom performance and direct meas-
urement of performance indicators.
An increasing number of studies based on narratives and interview data have been published.
Some particularly insightful studies are Ilieva (2010), Reis (2011), and Park (2012), all providing
reflective accounts on non-native teacher trainees in English language teaching programs in
North America, and Hayes (2010), who contributes the personal history of a Tamil English
teacher in Sri Lanka during times of war. Liou (2008) combines survey data with interviews to
provide a complex picture of multiple identities taken by non-native teachers of English in
Taiwan, relating their professional identities to the current role of English as an international
language. And following Moussu and Llurda’s (2008) suggestion to explore new methods of
research in order to widen the scope of studies on non-native teachers, Selvi (2010) focused on
online job advertisements to demonstrate the “multifaceted nature of discriminatory hiring
practices”, including such aspects as variety of English spoken, location of academic degrees
obtained, and location of residence (172). All in all, we may conclude that there has been some
progress in the variety of methods and depth of analysis since Moussu and Llurda’s (2008) review
article, and thus the picture is now becoming richer and more complex, with good reasons to
expect new studies in the near future that will contribute to our understanding of non-native
teachers.

New Debates
Beyond the comparison of the strengths and weaknesses of NNESTs and NESTs, one of the main
goals of research on NNESTs has been to contribute to the empowerment of this group of
teachers. A defining element was a critical approach to mainstream assumptions based on the
supremacy of the native speaker in ELT. Such assumptions, I have contended elsewhere (Llurda
2009b), are deeply rooted in the monolingual bias that has traditionally characterized linguis-
tics, applied linguistics, and educational linguistics. Therefore, focusing on NNESTs brings a
new way of approaching language, language learning, and language teaching, which Mahboob
(2010) calls the NNEST lens, characterized by its multilingual, multinational, and multicultural
perspective.
Recent work has emphasized the need to move beyond the rather limiting paradigm of com-
paring NESTs and NNESTs, as it constrains the work on NNESTs to a never-ending circle of
surveys in which the same results are permanently obtained, and which do not contribute to
increase our understanding of the NNEST condition or to decrease the level of discrimination
and disempowerment experienced by this group. Moussu and Llurda (2008) stated their vision
of what future directions NNEST research should take, and they explicitly asked for more studies
focusing on diversity within NNESTs and more classroom observation studies. Whereas a few
of the former have been conducted, not much has been published based on classroom observation
of NNESTs. More recently, Mahboob (2010) and Braine (2010) also referred to what directions
NNEST research should take in the future. Thus, Braine (2010) asked for more collaborative

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research by NSs and NNSs, as well as longitudinal studies that provide in-depth insights into
NNESTs, considering “the day-to-day challenges they face as both users and teachers of English,
their relationship with the English language beyond the classroom, their professional growth, and
their place in society” (88).
One area that has repeatedly been referred to in the literature but which still suffers from a
lack of research is self-confidence and professional self-esteem. It has been said that one of the
greatest problems experienced by NNESTs is their lack of self-esteem, which is responsible for
some of their reported weaknesses as well as for their generalized acceptance of the discrimina-
tory practices that they experience in the language teaching profession (Lee 2004; Llurda et al.
2006; Moussu 2006; Nemtchinova 2005). However, there is not yet any large study, other than
tentative approximations of the issue, that deals with NNESTs and self-esteem and investigates
how to overcome the deficit approach that characterizes many NNESTs’ professional identity.
Undoubtedly, NNEST self-esteem will be narrowly tied to the concept of English as an Inter-
national Language (Sharifian 2009) or English as a Lingua Franca (Seidlhofer 2011). NNESTs,
especially those working outside the Inner Circle (Kachru 1992), need to embrace this concept
in order to be accepted as legitimate users of the language, rather than permanent learners who
cannot yet be granted ‘ownership’ of the language. Supporting the notion of English as a Lingua
Franca is basic to establishing NNESTs side by side with NESTs, equally positioned to claim the
status of proficient user of the language.
Finally, the question of teaching methodology and its adequacy for local contexts and indi-
vidual characteristics needs to be critically questioned and problematized. The traditional
assumption of what was acknowledged to be ‘good language teaching’ has strongly determined
the way teachers, both native and non-native, have been judged. However, the notion of what
method to use and whether there is such a thing as an ideal method, regardless of the local con-
text, has been put into question (Kumaravadivelu 2003), which calls for a reconsideration of the
notion of “good language teaching practices” against which teachers’ professional competence
has been measured. Future research needs to look at NNESTs in their local contexts and establish
ways that allow us to understand what constitutes an adequate/inadequate practice in a given
local context. In other words, we need to move beyond centre-based models of language teaching
and develop new ways of redefining teaching competence, so as to be able to critically appraise
individual NNESTs’ performances.

Implications for Education

All in all, research on NNESTs has had a deep impact on educational linguistics. Let us now
consider some of its most relevant implications. In the first place, it has transformed the way
language teaching is construed, evolving from its conception as an activity ideally involving
native speakers to one in which different individuals contribute their share to the intended goal
of helping learners develop their language skills. At the same time, placing the focus on the con-
tributions made by non-native teachers has brought a more open view of language models and
standards, calling into question the need to reproduce a restricted set of socially prestigious forms
of language. Simultaneously, it has been instrumental in promoting social justice by raising aware-
ness of the discrimination encountered by many competent and well-prepared teachers who,
because of their non-native identity, have not accessed jobs for which they were qualified and
ready. Discrimination based on accent in the United States was amply explored by Lippi-Green
(1997), and the lack of sound reasons for maintaining a critical divide between native and
non-native speakers was convincingly stated by Davies (2003). Research on NNESTs has shown
how much discrimination still exists and how it is embedded on unfounded and preconceived

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ideas of what constitutes good language teaching. Such awareness has enormously contributed
to the enhancement of professionals’ self-esteem, encompassing language teaching professionals,
but also university professors participating in international meetings and conferences, or teaching
assistants at North American, British, or Australian universities. Additionally, the NNEST move-
ment has served as a gathering place for a diversity of researchers interested in language and
education. They have found a platform for sharing ideas and mutual encouragement to gradually
penetrate an academic world vastly dominated by English native speakers, who act as gate-keepers
controlling access to scientific knowledge, while at the same time imposing their cultural and
language norms. Finally, as a consequence of what has just been said above, research on NNESTs
has brought a new way to look at language teaching and every area of study related to language.
Such a new way of looking at linguistics in its widest sense is what Mahboob (2010) has termed
“the NNEST lens”, which entails a new way of approaching recurrent problems in language,
language teaching, and language-based research. In sum, the impact of research on non-native
teachers can help language teachers avoid preconceived ideas about language and teaching and
find the teaching solutions that best fit their particular educational situations. Teachers may, as
well, develop an increased tolerance for deviations from arbitrary norms and focus on commu-
nicative ability rather than ‘formal purity’. They can, additionally, grow a critical attitude and
actively challenge those situations in which the native speaker is the sole recipient of language
authority, based on a ‘right-of-birth’ principle. All the above is tied to a new critical understand-
ing of language and language teaching currently developing in applied and educational linguis-
tics. Teachers have the power to ultimately bring this understanding to the classrooms by looking
beyond established language norms and broadening their range of vision to incorporate the
existing diversity of language use and users.

Further Reading
Braine, G. (Ed.) 1999. Nonnative Educators in English Language Teaching. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Braine, G. 2010. Nonnative Speaker English Teachers. Research, Pedagogy, and Professional Growth. New York:
Routledge.
Kamhi-Stein, L. (Ed.) 2004. Learning and Teaching From Experience: Perspectives on Nonnative English-Speaking
Professionals. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
Llurda, E. (Ed.) 2005. Non-Native Language Teachers. Perceptions, Challenges and Contributions to the Profession.
New York: Springer.
Mahboob, A. 2010. The NNEST Lens. Non Native English Speakers in TESOL. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge
Scholars Publishing.
Medgyes, P. 1994. The Non-Native Teacher. London: Macmillan.
Moussu, L., and Llurda, E. 2008. Non-native English-speaking English language teachers: History and
research. Language Teaching, 41, 315–48.

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 Part 3
Contexts of Multilingual
Education
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 9
Established and Emerging
Perspectives on Immersion
Education
Siv Björklund and Karita Mård-Miettinen

In this chapter, immersion education is presented as one type of bilingual education program. It
has often been stated that the term “bilingual education” itself, as well as a number of other
important terms used within bilingual education programs, is both vague and multifaceted and
therefore difficult to define (for a list and a discussion on some key concepts, see, e.g., Skutnabb-
Kangas and McCarty 2008). The same is true of the term “immersion education”, which, during
its almost 50 years of existence, has become a worldwide education program. Since definitions of
immersion, which are somewhat misleading, occur in different contexts, the intention of this
chapter is to highlight essential features of immersion education that help readers to identify
immersion education characteristics.

Historical Perspectives
The birth of language immersion education is closely related with a public debate in Quebec
Canada during the 1960s on how English and French could locally be more beneficial for the
individual. This debate resulted in a new, innovative approach to teach language in school in a
way that should optimally prepare students for active use of the second language learnt in school.
The communicative aspect was regarded as crucial for the local bilingual community, in which a
good command of two languages was important for students’ future professional careers (see, e.g.,
Swain and Lapkin 1982; Johnson and Swain 1997).
The demands of the local community to focus language teaching in school on students’ active
language use led to a total revision of the traditional framework for language teaching in school.
It was suggested that language teaching should not be limited to one or two hours of language
lessons per day. Instead the language-to-be-learnt (the second language of immersion students)
should be used as the language of instruction in subject teaching as well. This was a radical
suggestion because up till then the importance of first language instruction (mother tongue
instruction) in bilingual education programs had been heavily stressed as an essential component
for successful individual bilingual development. The importance of the first language is indisput-
able in bilingual education. Unlike minority speakers in a majority speaking school or community,
majority speakers will have little or no use of their second language in or outside school, and,
therefore, their chances of becoming bilingual are low, without being surrounded by or immersed

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in the second language. By heavily increasing the portion of the second language use during the
school day, immersion students would be given almost equal opportunities to use their second
language as minority speakers have in majority communities.
The above brief description of the birth of immersion clearly shows that sociolinguistic
reasons were fundamental for the establishment of language immersion. Societal bilingualism
played an important role for the start of the first immersion program (see, e.g., Lambert and
Tucker 1972), and the distinction between majority and minority speakers was one of the core
features mentioned for immersion characteristics until the end of the 20th century (see, e.g.,
Swain and Lapkin 1982; Genesee 1991; Johnson and Swain 1997). In Johnson and Swain’s book
Immersion Education (1997), immersion was still clearly defined as a program for majority speakers
who learn a minority language in immersion. The changed sociopolitical realities, with increased
ethnic diversity in countries with established immersion programs, have now started to change
the enrollment structure from only majority speakers to immigrant families sending their children
to immersion schools. Hence, the core feature of all children in immersion being majority speakers
and sharing the same first language that is supported in the program has been revised by the
notion that all home languages the children have need to be supported within the program
(Swain and Lapkin 2005).
It is also important to point out that societal bilingualism may include geographically different
areas where linguistic conditions may be different on local, regional, and national levels. Even
though the national level is mostly used as a point of departure when defining immersion, the
balance between a majority and a minority language may differ regionally. In areas with minority
languages, immersion programs may offer an opportunity to promote minority language and
culture to both majority and minority students. In this case, the number of majority and minority
speakers in an immersion classroom is balanced in order to get an optimal language program for
each individual student. For example, in Welsh and Irish immersion programs, some minority
speakers are usually enrolled in the program, since this choice may be the only available one for
sustaining the use of a threatened minority language and for providing successful individual
bilingual development. It is, however, important to distinguish these kinds of immersion programs
from transitional bilingual programs, aiming at assimilation of minority speakers to a community
where another language is dominant and used by the majority of speakers.

Immersion Programs: Features, Aims, and Contexts

When immersion was introduced in Canada in 1965, it started with kindergarten-aged children
and care was taken to provide enough time for the development of immersion students’ first and
second languages. In line with the pioneer program, immersion education is still predominantly
based on programs in which children participate during several school years, and in which the
percentage of instruction time in the first and second language is in proportion to grade level and
program alternative (Swain and Lapkin 1982). For program alternatives, early, middle, and late
immersion have been implemented in Canada and imply that the program starts at different
student age or grade levels. Early immersion is introduced in kindergarten or grade 1, middle
programs in grades 3 and 4, and late immersion in grades 6 and 7. Due to socioeducational context,
early immersion programs are very popular in both Canada and Europe, whereas late immersion
is widely used in, for example, Australia.
Alongside the criterion of student age at the outset of the program, the intensity of the
exposure to the second language is another important criterion (Swain and Lapkin 1982). Programs
are either total programs, which start with 100% instruction time in the second language during
the first year(s) in immersion and gradually decrease to 40–50% during the last years in the

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program, or partial programs, where instruction time is distributed evenly (50%:50%) between
the first and the second language from the beginning of the program. When combining the two
criteria, programs may be run as, for instance, early total or early partial immersion programs.
Regardless of program alternative, immersion education is defined as additive bilingual education,
which offers bilingual enrichment to students. At the start of the program, students have no or
only limited skills in the second language and the development of the first language of the
students is not put at risk even if the immersion language is extensively used as the means of
instruction during the students’ school day. It is also expected that teachers in immersion adhere
strictly to the principle of using only one language in communication with immersion students
both inside and outside the classroom. Another vital principle is that programs are voluntary
(parents or, in the case of middle and late immersion, students themselves opt for immersion).
This principle of self-selectiveness may have a positive effect on the results, and, therefore,
immersion is also sometimes referred to as a prestigious program for bilingual enrichment,
addressing motivated students in a majority context (e.g., de Mejìa 2002).
After almost five decades of immersion education, programs have been implemented and
adapted to various linguistic contexts, sometimes sociolinguistically very different from the
original Canadian context (e.g., Fortune and Tedick 2008, 244). The above described one-way
immersion programs are today a worldwide phenomenon. Within these programs one can separate
second and foreign language immersion. In a second language immersion program (e.g., French
immersion in Canada, Swedish immersion in Finland) the second language of immersion
students is used on a daily basis in the local community. There is an obvious need to master the
language to be able to take advantage of the bilinguality of the surrounding community and to
get individual advantages on, for example, the local job market. Foreign language immersion
(e.g., English in China and France) is more oriented towards preparing students for a challenging
multilingual and multicultural future and improving language teaching methods to get students
to more readily and actively use international and widely used languages.
In the United States, not only one-way but also two-way immersion programs have been put
into practice with good results (see, e.g., Lindholm-Leary 2001). In two-way immersion, or dual
immersion, the varying local/regional/state linguistic conditions have been considered and
adapted to individual students’ linguistic needs. In these programs, both majority and minority
language speakers with dominance in their first language and home support for this language are
grouped together. Two main models are used in which the ratio between the instruction time in
first and second language lies between 50:50 and 90:10. The most common language pair is
Spanish-English, and in the 50:50 model the program starts with an even language distribution
for the mixed Spanish-English group, whereas in the 90:10 model Spanish functions as the major
means of instruction during the first years and levels down to 50% at later grade levels.
Besides somewhat different orientations between one-way and two-way immersion alterna-
tives, the main purpose of the enriched bilingual experience may include various target groups.
Participation in immersion and motivation of the individual may vary in a continuum where
different grades of instrumental and integrative reasons interplay, as stated above. In the Basque
country, Wales, and Ireland, immersion programs are more oriented towards language mainte-
nance and in the Hawaiian and Māori immersion programs, towards language revitalization.
Though intercultural competence is seen as essential for all immersion programs and should not
be isolated from the language learning part, culture naturally becomes more accentuated in
programs where integrative reasons are driving forces for enrolment in immersion. In purely
instrumental immersion programs, the focus will be on teaching second language skills and does
not necessarily include cultural activities beyond teaching of well-known festivities and distin-
guished persons of culture, whereas the cultural component is a natural part of teaching and

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forms an equally important part as, or even a more important part than, language skills in
maintenance and revitalisation immersion programs.
The varied implementations of immersion education in different linguistic contexts have
posed new challenges on how definitions of immersion can be refined, but remain explicit
enough to distinguish this bilingual education program from other bilingual forms. Core features
have been questioned and discussed. As regards the use of students’ first and second languages,
both languages should be used as means of instruction for content teaching, but the intensity and
duration of the second language use may vary greatly. In an article from 2004, Genesee (p. 549)
states that “at least 50% of the prescribed non-language related curriculum of studies for one or
more years” should be a minimum criterion for identifying immersion. This criterion certainly
is a minimum requirement for immersion to be considered as a program.

Research in Immersion Programs

Immersion programs are regarded as one of the most extensively researched and evaluated single
educational programs in the world. These evaluations have always combined a focus on second
language development with a thorough assessment of first language development as well as overall
content achievement. Because immersion programs are content-driven programs (for term, see
Met 1998) the immersion curriculum is the same as the non-immersion curriculum where the
immersion program is locally implemented. Therefore, it is possible to compare the outcomes
even though there are many aspects (socioeconomic and linguistic background of the students,
teaching methods and strategies, materials, etc.) that vary across programs. The results of the
Canadian immersion research published in numerous reports have played an especially important
role in the development of the immersion programs throughout the world (e.g., Johnson and
Swain 1997).
The initial research projects in immersion education were strongly product-oriented, with the
purpose to reassure educators, parents, and administrators that immersion is able to keep up with
the expected language and content objectives. The numerous international product-oriented
research projects have resulted in an overall conclusion that immersion programs are successful
and produce good language and content learning outcomes as well as positive attitudes toward
schooling, the immersion program, language learning, and the immersion language and its
speakers. Below we briefly summarize some key results.
As to first language proficiency and content knowledge, immersion students are reported to
reach the same level or surpass their non-immersion peers by the end of their immersion expe-
rience. Initial lag in first language writing and reading has been reported, especially in those
programs in which first language reading and writing is postponed to grades 3 and 4 and above.
The good first language results have been attributed to the benefits from the bilingual ability the
students are developing in immersion. A further example of well-developed bilingual ability is
that former immersion students are reported to be able to demonstrate/convey their content
knowledge in their first language, even though a major part of the content teaching has been
given to them in the immersion language (Björklund and Mård-Miettinen 2011). Recent immer-
sion studies have further shown that early bilingualism in immersion also favors the acquisition
of additional languages within the program (Björklund and Mård-Miettinen 2011).
Studies on students’ second language development dominate product-oriented immersion
research. The overall research results report high levels of comprehension skills as well as fluency
and confidence in second language production (e.g., Johnson and Swain 1997). Shortcomings
or a developmental plateau have been reported in second language grammatical accuracy and
in sociolinguistic competence in comparison to first language speakers of same age, especially in

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contexts in which the immersion students have minimal contact with the immersion language
outside the classroom and school. Other factors, such as pedagogy in the classroom and attitudes
and motivations of individual immersion students, have been found to influence the development
of productive second language skills.
Another type of product-oriented research, which has proved to be important in immersion,
is presented in studies investigating issues of the suitability of immersion for all kinds of
students. In light of the self-selectiveness of the immersion enrolment process and the fact that
immersion addresses prominently majority speakers, it is fairly easy to associate immersion
with elite bilingualism. Though there is a tendency in many contexts for parents of high or
upper socioeconomic backgrounds to choose immersion for their children, there are also
results from several studies that show that immersion is effective for children representing low
socioeconomic backgrounds. For example, results from Catalonia in the 1990s consistently
showed that Castilian-speaking students from low socioeconomic backgrounds with predic-
tions to be low achievers at school scored much better than expected—on age-level—in
immersion (Artigal 1991). It is, however, more difficult to identify what factors are crucial for
this positive development; there are individual factors and needs, pedagogical strategies, and
school/societal surroundings, to mention just a few aspects to consider. Repeatedly obtained
results across diverse immersion contexts do indicate that immersion teaching per se may be
beneficial for low achievers. Teaching strategies and strategies for efficient classroom work have
been identified and are constantly being scrutinized and refined within immersion (see Cummins
1998; Lyster 2007; Met 1998; Snow 1987; Swain 1985) and these might be vital for low
achievers, as well.
There are also some studies involving students with special needs in immersion. The research
results point in the same direction as those provided with low achievers. It is still premature to
generalize but the tendency is that even when some students in immersion have limited cognitive
or linguistic capacity, they learn to produce the second language, at least orally. Even if restricted
to oral production, this competence is an advantage and an enriching experience for students
living in bi- and multilingual surroundings (e.g., Laurén 2006). More studies are indeed needed,
even if immersion research results tend to indicate the same positive effects on intellectual and
linguistic progress, as is the case with other bilingual individuals (see, e.g., Bialystok 2007;
Genesee, Lindholm-Leary, Saunders, and Christian 2006).
From the end of 1980s onward, the focus in international immersion research has clearly
moved from the learning product to the classroom processes (Day and Shapson 1996; Johnson
and Swain 1997). During the first immersion decades, second language acquisition (SLA) was
emphasized to parallel first language acquisition. Second language learning was believed to
happen incidentally along with content learning, with the help of a considerable amount of
comprehensible input along with implicit error correction by the teachers (Krashen 1982; Swain
and Lapkin 1982). From the mid-1980s on, immersion researchers have worked on identifying
classroom processes for efficient immersion education, in terms of the students’ gaining accuracy
and complexity in second language production. It has been found that teaching strategies that
generate advanced and comprehensible student output are needed for students (Genesee 1991;
Swain 1985). The notion of implicit error correction and negotiation of meaning have been
accompanied by the need for negotiation of form and form-focused instruction in a
context-embedded way in order for the students’ second language ability to develop from
fluency to accuracy and complexity (Lyster 2007). Lyster emphasizes that good immersion
teaching provides a balance between communicative, meaning-focused interaction and activities
in which students’ metalinguistic awareness is developed by pushing them to notice and use the
second language accurately.

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Further, systematic and conscious planning for language growth within all content teaching
given in the immersion language has been identified as a key element for content learning and
for second language development in immersion education (Genesee 1991; Met 1998; Fortune,
Tedick, and Walker 2008). It is important that every content lesson is also seen as a language lesson
with content and language demands and objectives. The students need to be provided with
linguistic tools for successful content learning (content-compatible language) as well as a possibility
to develop their language proficiency along with content learning (content-obligatory language)
(Met 1998).
One of the most important programmatic and curricular features of successful immersion
education is identified to be organizing the curriculum around thematic units that integrate
content from several school subjects in a meaningful and holistic way. The planning of thematic
units is time-consuming but worthwhile. During a thematic unit, the students work with the
same key vocabulary and expressions for a longer time, using them in a variety of ways for dif-
ferent language functions (see, e.g., Gianelli 1997). The longer time allotted to each thematic unit
allows students enough time to work with both content and language, instead of progressing in
a more fragmented way in which new language and content items are linearly introduced during
each new lesson. Providing possibilities of using and reusing theme-related language is essential
for immersion students, since it is not enough for students to learn only key words of the thematic
unit. They have to be trained to naturally and accurately use their second language when engag-
ing in different theme-related activities and to become context-sensitive for second language
variation. A large thematic unit gives a natural platform for the teachers to plan a variation in
activities and to challenge the students cognitively and linguistically in different ways during the
thematic unit (Cummins 1984). At the same time, the use of thematic units encourages more
student-centered teaching approaches, in which students are readily activated and new informa-
tion will be embedded in familiar contexts, thereby offering students better possibilities for
remembering new items and connecting them meaningfully.

Research Approaches
At the early beginning of language immersion in the middle of the 1960s, both the emphasis on
teaching a second language for communication purposes and the use of a second language as a
language of instruction for subject teaching were important incentives for identifying and
developing theoretical foundations of immersion education. Since second language acquisition
was vital for immersion students’ second language development and academic achievement,
prevailing theories within SLA became a natural point of departure for theoretical frame build-
ing. This was particularly needed, as SLA has always been firmly rooted in applied linguistics with
a focus on language learning and language pedagogy, contrary to first language acquisition
research and its established research areas of linguistic universals and nature and structure of
language. Immersion was, in fact, seen as a way to perceptibly put in praxis, for example, the input
hypothesis, which states that acquisition of language takes place when learners understand
language that contains structure a bit beyond the learner’s current level of competence (Krashen
1982). The rich, varied, and abundant input in an immersion classroom came very close to first
language acquisition processes and led to more native-like real communication situations where
function is more important than language correctness and linguistic form. According to Krashen
(1982), immersion education proved strong empirical evidence that, as long as input is made
comprehensible, simultaneous subject and language teaching is successful. Within the immersion
context, the input hypothesis was later criticized and complemented with the output hypothesis,
which shifts the focus point from second language comprehension to production. Based upon

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interventions on classroom second language talk in immersion, Swain states that in order to learn
a language, a learner should not only comprehend a message but should be pushed towards the
delivery of a message that is not only conveyed, but that is conveyed precisely, coherently, and
appropriately (Swain 1985). This theory implies that it is essential for the learning process of the
second language learner to a) use the language and to b) get feedback on both linguistic function
and form in order to process the second language—not only semantically, but also syntactically.
During the 1980s, another important theoretical model for better attending to second
language learners in immersion arose from the need to better assess oral production and fluency
in a second language. Existing assessment in second language teaching was heavily dominated by
form-focused methods, which gave little or no attention to a broader view of language compe-
tence. New definitions of communicative competence (Canale 1983; Canale and Swain 1980)
included not only a linguistic component but also sociolinguistic, strategic, and discourse com-
ponents. This theoretical model of communicative competence is still discussed and used in
research and teaching today, but has been complemented with alternative definitions, as well—for
example, one by Bachman and Palmer, who define two main competencies (organizational and
pragmatic knowledge) within communicative competence (Bachman and Palmer 1996).
A third theoretical set of hypotheses of SLA during the 1980s proved to be very helpful to
explain the mechanism at work when immersion students were observed to learn content at
age-appropriate level in a language they had not yet mastered. Another seemingly contradictory
result was that the first language of immersion students was as good as, or even better than, that
of non-immersion students, even if the instruction time in the first language was dramatically cut
in immersion in comparison with non-immersion teaching. The interdependence or iceberg
hypothesis and the threshold hypothesis, presented by Jim Cummins (1984), provided theoretical
foundations for all these results, vital for the further expansion of immersion. For example,
according to Johnson and Swain (1997), additive bilingualism, when connected to immersion
education, comprises native-like proficiency in the first language and high proficiency in the
second language. Even though the definition separates first and second language proficiency,
the assumption in immersion education is that the languages learned in the program form a
linguistic interdependence (Cummins 1984). In addition, the dichotomy of BICS (basic interper-
sonal communication skills) and CALP (cognitive academic language proficiency) skills within
second language competence (Cummins 1984) was useful for providing sustainable language
growth in the immersion language development of individual students.
The student- or learner-centered theoretical frameworks from the early 1980s were gradually
accompanied with more classroom- and didactic-centered theories in immersion research at the
end of the 1980s. The Immersion Teacher Handbook, published by Snow in 1987, listed efficient
teaching strategies in immersion and discussed the dual role of immersion teachers who have to
take on both the role of a content teacher and a language teacher in the immersion classroom. The
constant balancing between content and language in immersion teaching is a prevailing research
issue that awakens interest among researchers (see, e.g., Snow, Met, and Genesee 1989; Met 1998;
Fortune, Tedick, and Walker 2008). From first, early acquisition in an immersion language,
described as a joint interaction in cooperation with others in an immersion group and allowing
for creation of indexical territories for emerging immersion language (Artigal 1991), the
pedagogy-oriented theories have shifted towards clear constructivist approaches, where learning
is seen as an active process, in which a student actively constructs new concepts and ideas based
upon current or past knowledge. The conducted research can either be more cognitive-/
student-oriented (cognitive constructivism) or interaction-/discourse-oriented (social construc-
tivism; see, e.g., Swain 2000 on collaborative dialogues). Also, influences of sociocultural theory
and ecology of language learning in a language classroom (for definition, see, e.g., van Lier 2004)

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are seen in immersion research conducted from 2000 onwards. A current issue is the discussion
of the possible effects of the use of the first language as a promoting or hindering learning tool
for immersion language development (see, e.g., Swain and Lapkin 2013). Another prevailing
research issue within immersion is the balance between experimental and analytic teaching of a
language. The initial, incidental learning approach in immersion has been vividly discussed and
refined during decades and has, in particular, been discussed in Lyster’s research (Lyster 2007). In
his framework, the counterbalanced approach, analytic traits are embedded in holistic teaching,
which enables teachers to shift focus to developmental language discussions within ongoing
content teaching.

New Debates
The section of this chapter on different immersion program alternatives and the various reasons
for the establishment of immersion education shows that immersion as a bilingual education
form has not stagnated. Instead, it has been adapted and constantly conformed to changing
linguistic conditions and needs. As shown earlier in this chapter, this flexibility, as such, poses
challenges to find a unifying definition of immersion education in future. The original intention
to give monolingual majority speakers a chance to become functionally bilingual during their
education applies to some contexts, but in many (urban) settings monolingualism is no longer a
frequent common point of departure for school-aged children. In this case, the definition of
immersion becomes an ethic question of inclusion or exclusion of simultaneous bi- or multilin-
gual speakers into programs. Changing sociopolitical realities have already oriented immersion
toward enrolment of children from immigrant families or children with immigrant backgrounds
who, via immersion, get better chances to learn the two languages of the local community than
in a traditional education program (Swain and Lapkin 2005). The effects of immersion are also
manifested in other ways, especially on students’ immersion language fluency. During the last
three decades immersion has proven to be a very effective tool to revitalize threatened languages.
Language nests (see, e.g., May and Hill 2005) and immersion have worked very successfully in
revitalisation of indigenous languages in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, mainland United
States, and Hawai‘i. A recent example is Skolt Sami, a variant of Sami language that is today
spoken as a first language by only 300 adults in northern Finland, but is now, via language nests,
introduced to kindergarten children. At the same time, these examples show how important
school is as an institution for supporting language learning on both individual and societal levels.
When immersion was first set up, only one immersion language was focused on, and on an
international level, immersion education is still mostly associated with bilingualism and
biculturalism. Nevertheless, there are contexts, in particular in the European countries, where
the inclusion of just a second language is not enough, since traditional non-immersion language
programs include two obligatory foreign languages. To better meet the language conditions in
those contexts, the aim of functional bilingualism in immersion moves towards the formulation
of functional multilingualism as the main aim of immersion (see Björklund 2005; Cenoz 2009).
In both functional bi- and multilingualism, functional language use must be flexible as well as
continuous, taking into account grade and age levels of the immersion students. Thus, functional
multilingualism is defined as a language competence level at which immersion students can act
and participate naturally in the daily use of all languages involved in the immersion program and
in line with their age (for more details, see Björklund 2011).
The inclusion of additional languages alongside with a main immersion language raises both
educational and sociopolitical issues. The teaching of additional languages can be restricted to a
couple of explicit language lessons per week or be content-based and used frequently, and

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teachers of additional languages may or may not apply the principle of using the language-to-
be-learnt as the only medium of instruction during their lessons (Björklund and Mård-Miettinen
2011; Björklund, Mård-Miettinen, and Mäenpää 2012). The perception of all teachers involved
in immersion education as being part of an immersion program and following the didactic prin-
ciples of immersion may be a crucial aspect of successful multilingualism. The consequences for
outcomes of immersion program functioning totally program-based have to be exploited further,
as product-oriented results indicate that learning additional languages in immersion seems very
effective (Björklund and Mård-Miettinen 2011; Cenoz 2009). It is, however, not sufficient to
scrutinize only classroom variables as the languages involved in immersion undoubtedly will have
different prestige or social status in different contexts. It is of utmost importance that program
design be developed in order for all languages to be valued equally and distributed in line with
an optimal definition of each student’s individual multilingual and multicultural competence.
Another way of dealing with multiple languages in immersion is double immersion (see Genesee,
1998). In this program, two immersion languages are used as media of instruction in content
teaching, but these languages are separated. During the first part of the school day, the medium of
instruction is immersion language one, and during the second part, immersion language two is
used. Naturally, first language instruction is also included as a third element in this kind of pro-
gram, and the program is especially well designed for students of heritage language backgrounds.
The integration of language and content (dual-focused education, content-based language
learning, CLIL) is today not only used within immersion programs, but also seen as a possible way
to deal with the increasing demands to get both sufficient and efficient language and subject
teaching within the compulsory education period of many countries. In Europe, in particular,
the language policy of EU has strongly supported content and language integrated learning
(CLIL). Growing awareness of the integration of content and language learning may benefit not
only bilingual education, but also language acquisition, language teaching, and cognitively related
issues in general. Optimally, programs and approaches where content and language learning are
integrated are innovative and creative meeting points for academic/content teaching and language
teaching and ways to schedule more languages in students’ school days at no cost of lessons
devoted to different disciplines.
Immersion is in many countries well developed and program-based from kindergarten to the
end of the compulsory education, whereas subsequent education levels in general do not include
similar immersion-like wide variations. A sustained life-long learning process of language(s)
would greatly benefit from continuous immersion at secondary and tertiary levels of education,
also. For example, in Canada and the Basque Country, some universities offer content courses
intended for students whose second language is used as the medium of instruction. To supple-
ment or support students’ language needs, there are a range of different provisions arranged to
facilitate the content learning processes of students; often extra courses (adjunct courses) provide
second language support. In comparison with immersion research conducted on other education
levels, results from university level immersion are scarce and need more attention in the future.
Long-term effects of immersion are needed, not only as longitudinal studies of individual
students’ second language learning from early age to adulthood, but also to conduct follow-up
studies of second and third generations of immersion students. Effects of the choice of immersion
have impacts on both individual and societal levels if enrollment in immersion goes beyond
enriched individual bilingual development and alters identity building and cultural patterns in
subsequent generations. The societal impact is especially apparent in immersion for revitalization
of languages, and, if long-term effects can be noted, it proves that immersion may function as a
powerful instrument of language policy to maintain and (re)build multilingual and multicultural
communities.

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Implications for Education

The nature of immersion programs has challenged teacher education in the countries with
established immersion education. Preschool teachers, primary school teachers, and subject
teachers are traditionally educated to teach monolingual students in the students’ first language.
Language teachers are educated to teach the language, not to teach content in the language. In
immersion education, a preschool teacher, a primary school teacher, and a subject teacher are
expected to be simultaneously a content teacher and a language teacher—to wear two hats,
as expressed by Snow (1987). In-service and pre-service immersion teaching certificate programs
have been established to guarantee that immersion education is given by qualified preschool,
primary school, and secondary school teachers who are fluent in the immersion language; have
command of the students’ home language; and are familiar with issues of bilingual and multi-
lingual development, second language pedagogy, immersion pedagogy for biliteracy and for
teaching content in a second language, evaluating content and language development, and so
on. If immersion education is to function as a coherent entity, all teachers of immersion (subject
teachers, L1, L2, and Lx teachers) must be educated to share similar pedagogical visions, value
the contribution of fellow teachers of the program, and be confident about all teachers being
responsible for their own parts of the program. This approach requires close cooperation among
all teachers and a school administration that shares the same goals and visions and allows for
necessary planning time. It is also crucial that immersion education is recognized as one program
alternative in national curriculum guidelines and that characteristics of immersion teaching are
identified, specified, and outlined as prerequisites for effective teaching.
In light of the positive results of immersion education, it may be surprising that immersion is
not put into practice on a very large scale. In, Canada, results from PISA (the Program for Inter-
national Student Assessment of the OECD) in 2000 show that among 15-year-old students,
enrolment in immersion varies from 2% of the overall student population to 32% in New
Brunswick. The small scale on the national level has impacts on the actual teaching in immersion
in various ways. As a program, immersion has had to conform to existing (monolingual)
education structures, rather than being developed from a bilingual perspective. The role of L1
for, for instance, teaching of literacy skills is still somewhat controversial in early immersion and
raises questions among both teachers and parents, since learning to read and write is mostly
taught in students’ second language, thereby challenging the implicit paradigm of the importance
of L1 in literacy teaching in monolingual school structures, which—on the other hand—has
mostly focused on L1 students being in a minority situation both within school and society.
Another important direct consequence of conforming to existing structures is very evident
at the school level. Suitable teaching material developed for immersion is practically non-
existent. Commercial material is mainly developed for L1 students and language books for L2
learners within a regular language program. Immersion teachers usually find themselves between
these two different teaching materials and prepare a lot of material themselves by adapting
available material, finding relevant and authentic new material, and supporting students’ lan-
guage input with the help of rich and varied textual sources. The time-consuming preparation
for suitable teaching material is no doubt an area in which immersion teachers often feel frus-
trated. In this case, joint preparation and shared distribution of developed material is beneficial
for all teachers and a way to sustain high motivation and a good standard among immersion
teachers. It is equally important to motivate and acknowledge immersion as an education pro-
gram on the student level, where an appropriate identification of students’ actual level of their
mastery of the immersion language at the end of the program, as well as an official recognition
(certificate of attendance in immersion and total amount of time spent in content/subject

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teaching in a second language) can concretely manifest and acknowledge the student’s input
into immersion.
The mentioned challenges of implementing immersion into regular teacher education are also
affected by the fact that immersion is a quite small-scale educational program on the national
level. This issue becomes even more multifaceted and challenging in special teacher education.
As in regular, non-immersion programs, some students in immersion will encounter difficulties
during their education time, and immersion classes should have the means to back up students
when special needs education becomes relevant. It is of utmost importance that struggling learn-
ers be assisted in the best way by educators who are familiar with both bilingual issues stemming
from the immersion program and general language and learning difficulties. Research in this field
needs to be expanded further, as regards both more cognitive-oriented research and handbooks
for practitioners (for some recent results, see, e.g., Fortune 2011; Fortune with Menke 2010). It
is also likely that immersion, where multiple languages are learnt within the program, can con-
tribute to this research field when holistic studies of students’ multilingual and multicultural
competence are focused. Also, the recent orientation towards more cross-disciplinary research
approaches and a growing body of functional and action-based research in immersion entail
methodological tools to integrate, challenge, or even reconstruct existing theoretical frameworks
in second language acquisition and thereby maintain the inspiring and leading role immersion
has had in research areas of second/foreign language learning and teaching. The thorough
research conducted on immersion education since it was first implemented plays a significant role
in the success story of immersion education. Clearly defined concepts and guidelines, as well as
product-oriented and process-oriented research objectives, has helped immersion education
navigate through changing linguistic and educational conditions and provide solid foundations
for other forms of bilingual approaches and for the future, yet to come.

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 10
Bilingual Education
Ofelia García and
Heather Homonoff Woodley

Bilingual education is the use of two languages in the instruction and assessment of learners
(García 2009).1 Bilingual education programs vary in their goals, language use, and students
served, and are shaped by sociocultural and sociopolitical factors, historical contexts, and the
power of speakers and languages. Students in bilingual education programs may be language majority
or language minority students. A bilingual education program offers all students the possibility of
becoming bilingual and biliterate. Language majority children develop the ability to use a
language other than the dominant one, which they speak at home. Other students in bilingual
education programs may be immigrants, refugees, Indigenous peoples, or simply live in house-
holds where a non-dominant language is spoken. For these students, bilingual education programs
offer the possibility of developing the language of school in ways that support their home
language practices and identities.
Bilingual education differs from traditional language education in which a “foreign” or
“second” language is taught. Firstly, in bilingual education the two languages are used as a medium
of instruction. However, in traditional language education programs the additional language is
explicitly taught as a subject. As such, bilingual education is first and foremost an educational
approach to educate students holistically, with language and literacy development in two lan-
guages as an educational goal. With the additional language also used to educate meaningfully,
the epistemology about language in bilingual education often differs from that of traditional
language education. Traditional language educators see language as a system of standardized
structures through which students listen, speak, read, and write. In contrast, bilingual educators
focus on the development of language practices; that is, on the languaging of students (Becker
1995; Maturana and Varela 1998 [1973]), which is a product of social action and consists of fluid
and flexible resources through which students make meaning of what they are learning (more on
languaging to follow). Bilingual education and traditional language education also differ in their
approach towards the relationship between language and cultural practices. Whereas learners in
bilingual education are encouraged to be able to function across cultures, and sometimes to
appropriate the different cultural practices as reflective of their integrated selves, learners in tra-
ditional foreign language classrooms are expected to become familiar with an additional cultural
context, but not necessarily to function competently within it. Pedagogically, bilingual education
integrates language and content, whereas traditional foreign or second-language education tends

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to emphasize teaching the language explicitly. Finally, bilingual education has the potential to
offer a just education, leveling the power differentials among language groups, as minoritized
languages are used in education. Bilingual education, thus, distinguishes itself in the way in which
the two languages are used to construct meaningful content, while affirming diversity and toler-
ance. We consider below the historical development of bilingual education, some of its core
issues, the research approaches and key findings, new debates, and, finally, implications for
education.

Historical Perspectives
Bilingual education is not a new approach to education or to language education. Throughout
history, most elites have been educated bilingually. In the 19th century, the development of public
schools became a mechanism of nation-states to establish the dominance of a single state lan-
guage, and education became mostly monolingual.
Bilingual education continued on its own trajectory throughout the 19th and early 20th
century. On the one hand, the elite continued to support privately financed schools offering
bilingual education that sought to develop two powerful languages. Known as prestigious bilingual
education, these bilingual schools for the elite still exist today. On the other hand, some more
powerful autochthonous minorities, especially throughout Europe, developed systems of bilin-
gual education in which both the dominant language and the community language were taught.
This was especially so in cases where language and religion coincided, as the community sought
to ensure sustainability of the sacred language. These educational programs are known as mainte-
nance bilingual education. In both prestigious and maintenance bilingual education, education was
carried out in two languages, often from the first years of schooling.
In the mid-20th century, bilingual education became entrenched as an educational option
both for language minorities and language majorities. It was in North America where the field
became fertile, and where it was expanded from the more traditional formats of prestigious and main-
tenance bilingual education. In Québec, Canada, majority Anglophone Canadians demanded
bilingual education for their children that would make them truly bilingual, enabling them to
live a fruitful life in a Francophone Québec that was becoming more politically powerful. In
response to these parents, Wallace Lambert and his colleagues at McGill University developed
immersion bilingual education programs. Through this bilingual approach, English-speaking Canadian
children were taught initially through French only, with English used increasingly, until by the
fourth grade, English was used 50% of the time. At around the same time, educators in the United
States started to experiment with bilingual education as a way to educate the nation’s language
minorities who were failing in U.S. schools—Spanish-speaking Latinos and Native Americans.
The approach was the inverse of immersion bilingual education. In the United States, the child’s
home language—usually Spanish, but also Navajo and others—was used in the early grades either
solely or mostly, with English introduced gradually. Whereas in Canadian immersion, bilingual
education French and English eventually achieved equal time allocation, in U.S. bilingual educa-
tion, what became known as transitional bilingual education, the minority language was to disappear
from instruction as soon as the child gained proficiency in English. Whereas the goal of Canadian
immersion bilingual education was the students’ bilingualism, the goal of the U.S. transitional
bilingual education was students’ English monolingualism.
This was not the first time that transitional bilingual education was used to educate language
minorities for monolingualism. In colonial situations throughout Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean,
local languages were used in the early years of primary education to enable the transition to
the colonial language. In 1953, UNESCO passed a resolution that affirmed the value of this

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educational policy for language minorities: “We take it as axiomatic, too, that the best medium
for teaching is the mother tongue of the pupil” (p. 6). Nothing was said, however, about the
sustainability of bilingualism for these students; the non-dominant language was seen as a
problem.
The ethnic revival that spread throughout the world in the 1960s fuelled bilingual education
efforts. Transitional bilingual education efforts were touted as not enough by some and as too
much by others. Many language minority communities and politicians clamored for forms of
bilingual education that would lead to sustainability of diverse language practices and not shift to
the dominant language. In contrast, some language majority politicians and others felt threatened
by the growing diversity that a new global order was imposing. At the same time, globalization
led some majority parents to want bilingualism for their own children.
García (2009) has pointed to the new conceptualization of bilingualism and bilingual educa-
tion that these sociopolitical transformations produced. Originally bilingualism and bilingual
education had been conceptualized from a monolingual monoglossic perspective, where bilingual-
ism was understood as simply the pluralization of monolingualism. From this perspective, bilin-
guals were thought to have two balanced language systems, supporting the notion that one
language plus a second language equals two separate languages. Wallace Lambert (1975) proposed
two types of school bilingualism—subtractive and additive. Subtractive bilingualism refers to what
happens when a child’s home language is subtracted as he or she learns the school’s language. It
is what happens in transitional bilingual education. On the other hand, additive bilingualism occurs
when an additional language is added to the child’s home language. It is what happens in pres-
tigious bilingual education or immersion bilingual education. Missing from this conceptualiza-
tion is what happens in the in-between spaces or border spaces—that is, where the child is neither
monolingual nor biliterate and brings into school very complex language practices, as we will see
below.
As globalization and new technologies resulted in the greater movement of people, informa-
tion, and goods, the world’s linguistic complexity came into full view, and traditional models of
bilingual education, as well as subtractive and additive models of bilingualism, proved to be insuf-
ficient. The world’s majority was not monolingual, nor fully or balanced bilingual, as had been
conceptualized in the monoglossic view prevalent in the early 20th century. Instead, with a more
heteroglossic lens of bilingualism, in contrast to the monoglossic lens described above, the fluid and
complex language practices of bilinguals came into view. Additionally, most of the world’s pop-
ulation became recognized as being at different points on the bilingual continuum. For example,
some Indigenous minorities had experienced a great deal of language loss. Although they still
held their bilingualism as a mark of their identity, they were now closer to the monolingual end
of the bilingual continuum. Other autochthonous minorities, such as the Welsh, now more than
ever claimed their bilingualism as mark of their identity and were further along on the bilingual
continuum. Then there were nation-states where the entire population was bilingual and wanted
to ensure a bilingual future. Still other nation-states saw the plurilingualism of their citizens as a
good thing, with many acknowledging the fact that their children had parents and families who
spoke different languages, sometimes within the same home, sometimes across different national
contexts. The result of acknowledging these sociolinguistic realities has been that our traditional
conceptions of additive and subtractive bilingualism no longer hold, and the old models of
bilingual education—prestigious, maintenance, immersion, and transitional—do not always
make sense.
To the monoglossic models of additive and subtractive bilingualism, García (2009) has added
two more types of bilingualism that confirm a heteroglossic view of bilingualism—the recursive
dynamic model and the dynamic model. Both of these types of bilingualism are in no way linear

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or add two languages as wholes. Recursive dynamic bilingualism refers to drawing on language
practices that have almost been silenced, in order to revitalize them and bring them forward
toward a future. It refers, for example, to the bilingualism of schools in communities such as that
of the Māori of Aotearoa/New Zealand. The Māori language cannot be simply added whole,
since the Māori community is revitalizing language practices not from scratch, but from bits and
pieces, as ancestral language practices are reconstituted for new functions. On the other hand,
bilingual schools in some contexts support dynamic bilingualism. These bilingual school programs
acknowledge that the children hold different degrees of bilingualism because their families speak
different languages or because they have lived and worked across national contexts. The bilin-
gualism of these children also cannot be simply added or subtracted whole, since their language
practices are already multiple, non-linear, and complex when they come into school. The Euro-
pean Schools for children of civil servants, for example, acknowledge their children’s dynamic
bilingualism, as we will see below.
As we said before, the traditional models of bilingual education are simply not adequate to
reflect the more complex multilingualism of the world today. Thus, other types of bilingual edu-
cation have been developed. It is important to underline that the greater power and visibility of
language minorities in the 21st century has resulted in bilingual education programs for them, and
by them, where they exercise a great deal of agency. Immersion revitalization bilingual education
programs and developmental bilingual education programs are two such programs. In Aotearoa/
New Zealand, the revitalization of Māori needed an early start. The result was the development
of “language nests” preschools, known as Kōhanga Reo, which involved Māori-speaking elders in
the community interacting in Māori with the very young. This model of early childhood bilingual
education has been adopted by other groups who speak threatened languages—Hawaiian peoples
and Native Americans in the United States; Canada’s First Nations; and the Saamis of Norway,
Finland, and Sweden, among others. In the case of the Māoris, the early childhood schooling is
continued in Kura Kaupapa Māori schools, offering immersion bilingual education in Māori in
elementary grades. These efforts to offer immersion schooling to communities whose languages
have been decimated are different from the immersion bilingual education efforts in Canada
described above, although they share some characteristics. They are known as immersion revitaliza-
tion bilingual education. On the other hand, there are communities that have suffered language loss,
but not to the same extent as the Māoris. For them, developmental bilingual education programs
(sometimes called developmental maintenance bilingual education), with a focus on the language that
is threatened, are often more appropriate. Welsh bilingual education programs often fall under this
type. These programs differ from those called maintenance above, in that they focus on the protec-
tion and development of the minority language, which has endured much hardship under previous
educational arrangements. In addition, students in these classes often display a broad range of
bilingual abilities, and are not always speakers of the minority language prior to schooling.
The greater sense of a multilingual world has meant that more language majorities are looking
for bilingual education options for their children. In the United States, two-way bilingual education
programs (often referred to as dual language bilingual education) have been developed to accommodate
students learning languages other than English (often Spanish), as well as students developing English.
Although those learning English are always language minority students, those developing another
language are English-speaking children of many kinds, including those whose families may have
spoken languages other than English. Sometimes all the children in these programs share one ances-
tral language, although they fall at every point on the bilingual continuum, including some children
who may already be English monolinguals. When bilingual programs serve one language minority
group whose members exhibit very diverse language practices, the programs are often referred to as
one-way bilingual education. In effect, they are developmental bilingual education programs.

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Increasingly in a globalized world, an education in two languages is simply not enough. And
so, multilingual education programs in more than two languages have grown. In the European
Union, the European Schools for children of civil servants offer education in more than two
languages to students in different language tracks within their schools. These programs are known
as poly-directional bilingual education. They are similar to the U.S. two-way bilingual education
programs in that they are meant for children of different ethnicities and language backgrounds.
However, although in the United States children in two-way bilingual education programs are
integrated in the same classroom, the European Schools have several language tracks, and only
integrate students linguistically after they have developed some measure of bilingualism.
Nowhere has the value of bilingualism been more affirmed today than in the European
Union. Taking note from the success of bilingual education, CLIL (Content and Language Inte-
grated Learning) bilingual education programs are substituting foreign language programs, with one
or two subjects taught in a language other than that of the dominant school system. The greater
sense of a multilingual world has also resulted in nation-states and autonomous regions where
two languages (and sometimes more) are spoken by the entire population, and are part of their
identity. Although the language arrangements of these programs depend on the national context
in which they are carried out, there is a developmental focus for all languages. Schools in Lux-
embourg, for example, follow a type of multiple multilingual education, enabling all their school
children to become trilingual—in Luxembourgish, German, and French—through school.
As the world becomes more and more multilingual, rendering traditional bilingualism insuf-
ficient, some schools are experimenting with yet another form of bilingual education, what
García and Kleifgen (2010) have called dynamic bi/plurilingual education. In all the programs
described above, the language allocation in classrooms is strictly controlled in top-down fashion
by schools and educators. However, in dynamic bi/plurilingual education programs, the locus of
control of language rests with students, as they are given agency to negotiate their linguistic
repertoires. In these schools, most often at the secondary level, there is a great deal of peer teach-
ing and collaborative learning. For example, in a class in which students read a book in English,
the teacher provides space for students in groups to discuss the reading using home languages
before sharing ideas with the whole class in English. There are also opportunities for students to
read, write, and conduct research in multiple languages (see García and Sylvan 2011). Although
all the types of bilingual education considered in this section are different, they rest on similar
core principles. The next section considers what those principles are and how they function.

Core Issues
Bilingual education rests on three core principles: the central role of language and bilingualism
in society and education, the role of bilingualism in enacting identities and ideologies and leveling
issues of power, and the ways in which bilingualism can be used to educate. We discuss the first
two core issues in this section, while reserving the last one for the section covering the implications
for education.

Language in Society and Education

In the last two decades, our actions in a globalized world of dynamic movement and advanced
technologies, coupled with advances in complexity theory, have transformed the ways in which
we think about language. The new understandings of language as practices, of languaging, have
had an impact on our epistemologies about bilingualism. Becker (1995) reminds us that to learn
a new way of languaging is not just to learn a new code; it is to enter another history of

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interactions and cultural practices and to learn “a new way of being in the world” (227). That
is, becoming bilingual does not refer to “picking up” new language structures, but it is about
acting differently as new positionings are taken.
The Chilean biologists Maturana and Varela argue that it is language that brings forth the
world. They explain: “We work out our lives in a mutual linguistic coupling, not because language
permits us to reveal ourselves but because we are constituted in language in a continuous becom-
ing that we bring forth with others” (1998, 234–235, our italics). It is our language practices that
bring us forth as individuals, at the same time that they constitute us differently as we interact
with others. Language is not external to us; it is not, as Pennycook (2010, 9) has said, “an auton-
omous system that preexists its use,” or “competence as an internal capacity that accounts for
language production.” Instead, Pennycook says, language is “a product of the embodied social
practices that bring it about” (9, our italics). If we accept this definition of language as a form of
human action, embodied in the social world of human relationships, and intimately connected
to all other forms of action—physical, social, and symbolic—then it is easy to understand why
language plays such an important part in education.
All learners need to embody their language practices in schools if they are to make meaning
of their education. Bilingual education gives all students the possibility of doing so—that is, of
doing language, of languaging in ways that constitute them, connect them, and relate them to their
human actions and those of others.
The field of bilingual education has been deeply influenced by the psycholinguistic constructs
that were developed very early by Jim Cummins (1979). Central to the development of bilingual
education in the 20th century was Cummins’ construct of interdependence. For Cummins, there
is interdependence between the two languages, enabling transfer of linguistic abilities and knowl-
edge across languages, since there is a Common Underlying Proficiency (CUP) across languages.
Cummins also posits that it takes learners of an additional language one to three years to develop
BICS (basic interpersonal communication skills), and five to seven years to develop CALP
(cognitive academic language proficiency), thus arguing for sustained bilingual instruction
throughout the grades. Although still grounded in the idea that language was an autonomous
system of structures, Cummins had already envisioned the changes in epistemologies about
language and bilingualism that have been ushered into the 21st century.
In the 21st century, super-diverse patterns of multilingualism are evident (Blommaert 2010),
with different linguistic features not bound by geographical territories and national spaces, but
rather representing complex local practices of interactions that are dynamically enacted by human
beings. These super-diverse patterns of languaging go beyond our conceptualization of bilingual-
ism and multilingualism of the past. While bilingualism in the past was seen as having command
of two languages, and multilingualism as having command of more than two languages, languag-
ing in society today is considered in its complexity of action as dynamic bi/multilingualism (García
2009; Herdina and Jessner 2002; Larsen-Freeman and Cameron 2008). But there are more than
just fluid language practices that impact bilingual education in the 21st century; there are issues
of identity, ideologies, and power that are important to consider, and these are the subject of our
next section.

Identities, Ideologies, and Power

As human action, language practices function as semiotic and symbolic tools that can be used in
the formation of identities. Language practices are instrumental in developing and sustaining
subjectivities in homes, communities, and especially schools. Today’s understandings about iden-
tity are far from those of German Romantics, and in particular those of Johann Gottfried Herder

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Ofelia García and Heather Homonoff Woodley

(1744–1803), who defined identity as natural and immovable, and closely connected to the lan-
guage a people spoke. Scholars in the late 20th century such as Joshua A. Fishman (1989) argued
that language also has a rhetorical function, and as such may discursively construct the group’s
subjective belief in a common ethnic identity. Traditional types of bilingual education were based
on a unitary monoglossic approach to language and identity, ensuring that each of the languages
performed a single identity and sociolinguistic function that resulted in a bicultural individual able
to keep language and cultural practices separate.
Postmodern scholarship has demonstrated the situational and subjective construction of iden-
tity (Bhabha 1994; Heller 1987; Le Page and Tabouret-Keller 1985; Pavlenko and Blackledge
2004). This scholarship has also described the fluid identities affected by the complex linguistic
repertoires and spaces where individuals embody or enact multiple identities today. As Pavlenko
and Blackledge make clear, language and identity are mutually constitutive in that language pro-
vides “the linguistic means through which identities are constructed and negotiated” (2004, 14).
This is the position taken up by heteroglossic types of bilingual education, acknowledging the
construction of transcultural individuals whose identities are negotiated as they adapt to the image
they have of themselves in relationship to the interlocutor, and as they decide whom they want
to be.
Postmodern scholarship has also pointed to the fact that attitudes, values, and beliefs about
language are always ideological, and are enmeshed in social systems of domination and subordi-
nation of groups, having to do not only with ethnicity, but also with class, gender, and power (see
for example Irvine and Gal 2000; Pavlenko and Blackledge 2004). Language and identity options
may be limited or not, or negotiable or not, depending on particular sociohistorical contexts.
Language practices can signal ideological positions, and can construct boundary markers for
inclusion and exclusion of the Other (Kroskrity 2000). Children’s bilingual development is
deeply affected by the constraints and options in their socialization in communities and schools.
School children exhibit considerable agency as they resist and construct new ways of using lan-
guage and new identities, not necessarily those of the home and immediate community, but also
not necessarily those of the school and the dominant society. Given the greater range of linguistic
and social choice that bilingual children of dominant groups have, they will obtain greater cog-
nitive and social advantages from their bilingualism than those whose choices are more restricted
by their social and historically situated conditions. Thus, schools need to provide a greater range
of choices for all students, and develop and empower all students to negotiate their multiple
identities and language practices.

Research Approaches and Key Findings

Research on bilingual education has repeatedly affirmed its effectiveness in educating language
minority children, as well as language majority children. The study of bilingualism in education
has used positivist models of quantitative research methodology to explore its effectiveness in
educational outcomes. Because of the centrality of this issue in the United States where bilingual
education continues to be suspect, the most comprehensive quantitative studies, often comparing
different types of bilingual education, have been conducted there. We review here a few such
studies. Ramírez (1992) conducted a longitudinal study of 554 kindergartener-to-sixth grade
Latino students in five states who were in three types of programs—English-only programs,
transitional early-exit bilingual education programs, and late-exit developmental bilingual edu-
cation programs. Students in late-exit developmental bilingual programs in which their home
languages were used for at least five years had the most academic success. In 2002, Thomas and
Collier compared achievement on nationally standardized tests of students who entered school

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without English proficiency and were enrolled in different kinds of programs. They found that
the strongest predictor of English language achievement was the amount of formal schooling the
students received in the home language. Thomas and Collier showed that developmental bilin-
gual education programs and two-way bilingual education programs were the only types of
programs that enabled emergent bilinguals to reach the 50th percentile in both languages in all
subjects. Lindholm-Leary (2001) conducted a comprehensive evaluation of programs serving
students who were learning English in California. Like Thomas and Collier, Lindholm-Leary
concluded that students who were in instructional programs in which English was initially used
for only 10 to 20% of the time did as well on English proficiency tests as those in English-only
programs or 50:50 dual language bilingual education programs. By sixth grade, however, students
in dual-language bilingual education outperformed transitional bilingual education students.
These quantitative findings in the United States have been confirmed by recent meta-analyses.
For example, Krashen, Rolstad, and McSwan (2007), Slavin and Cheung (2005), and Goldenberg
(2008) have shown that students in bilingual programs outperform those in English-only pro-
grams on tests of academic achievement. Likewise, the National Literacy Panel on Language
Minority Children and Youth (August and Shanahan 2006) and the synthesis conducted by
Genesee, Lindholm-Leary, Saunders, and Christian (2006) concluded that bilingual education
approaches are more effective in teaching students to read than are English-only approaches.
Our new understandings that language and literacy practices are shaped by local, social, and
economic conditions, and that language and literacy practices contribute to the reproduction of
asymmetrical relations of power, have resulted in increased use of qualitative methodologies in
studying bilingualism. Qualitative methods conceive of knowledge as reuniting epistemology and
hermeneutics and go beyond the distinctions that have served to “subalternize” the kinds of
“border” knowledge that bilinguals and multilinguals bring to school (Mignolo 2000). For exam-
ple, ethnographies of cases of bilingual education (for example, Blackledge and Creese 2010; and
Bartlett and García 2011) show how language practices in schools matter to people on their own
terms. Critical discourse analysis, such as Pennington’s analysis of bilingual classroom discourse at a
high school in Hong Kong (1999) enables researchers to study the structure of discursive prac-
tices, while connecting language ideologies and language practices to relationships of power.
Historical or document analysis, in which researchers collect documents that are then subjected to
interpretive policy analysis, is also broadly used, especially to study bilingual education policy and
the multiple reading of the policies by various stakeholders as interpretive communities. A recent
extension of document analysis methods is what has become known as linguistic landscape studies,
documenting the multilingual ecology and physical spaces of bilingual classrooms and how they
are used by students. Despite the research evidence, debates surrounding the efficacy of bilingual
education continue. There are also new debates, especially surrounding some past assumptions,
such as the existence of a first, second, and native language and the dualities in bilingualism. These
debates are considered in the next section.

New Debates

First and Second Languages? Native Languages?

The changing epistemologies about language and bilingualism discussed above mean that tradi-
tional terms used in speaking about bilingual education are not always useful. For example, some
scholars speak about first languages, second languages, and even third languages, whereas seen
through a heteroglossic lens, the language practices of bilinguals are not made up of two or more
autonomous language systems. The grammar of bilingual speakers consists of features that are

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socially assigned to one language or the other, but for the bilingual person there isn’t an L1, an
L2, or an L3, except perhaps as the chronological order of acquisition. What then do we call the
heteroglossic practices that characterize bilingual speech? In the last decade, alternative terms have
proliferated.
Jørgensen (2008) refers to the combination of features that are not discrete and complete
“languages” in themselves as polylingualism. Jacquemet (2005) speaks of transidiomatic practices to
refer to the communicative practices of transnational groups that interact using different com-
municative codes. Canagarajah (2011) uses codemeshing to describe a single-integrated system in
writing for rhetorical effectiveness. Metrolingualism is the term proposed by Otsuji and Penny-
cook (2010) in speaking about the fluid language practices in urban contexts.
Perhaps the term that has had the most traction in the literature to refer to these flexible lan-
guage practices is that of translanguaging. The term translanguaging was coined in Welsh (trawsie-
ithu) by Cen Williams (1994). In its original use, it referred to a pedagogical practice in which
students are asked to alternate languages for the purposes of receptive or productive use; for
example, students might be asked to read in English and write in Welsh and vice versa (Baker
2011). Since then, the term has been extended by many scholars (Blackledge and Creese 2010;
Canagarajah 2011; Creese and Blackledge 2010; García 2009; forthcoming; García, Flores, and
Woodley 2012; García and Sylvan 2011; Hornberger and Link 2012; Lewis, Jones, and Baker
2012a; 2012b). Translanguaging for García (2009; 2011; forthcoming) refers not to the use of two
separate languages or even the shift of one language or code to the other, since there are not two
languages. Rather, translanguaging is rooted in the belief that bilingual speakers select language
features from one integrated system and “soft assemble” their language practices in ways that fit
their communicative situations. That is, bilinguals call upon social features in a seamless and com-
plex network of multiple semiotic signs, as they adapt their languaging to suit the immediate task
environment. Bilingualism, as a soft-assembled mechanism, comes into existence with enaction,
with each action being locally situated and unique to satisfy contextual constraints, and creating
an interdependence among all components of the system.
The greater presence of plurilingual individuals and multilingualism in the world means that
it is impossible today to talk about “native” speakers of any language. As many have argued
(Kramsch 2009; Bonfiglio 2010), the concept of being a “native” speaker is anchored on concepts
of ethnicity, race, class, status, and privilege, and acts as a system of exclusion. “Doing” bilingual-
ism goes beyond the concept of being a “native” speaker, as it includes all who appropriate that
languaging in their lives.

Dualities in Bilingualism?
Bilingualism as 1+1 = 2 is no longer viable in our globalized, multilingual world. The Council
of Europe (2000) uses the term plurilingualism to refer to an individual’s ability to use several
languages to varying degrees and for distinct purposes. That is to say, European citizens are
encouraged to have at their disposal a varying and shifting repertoire of language practices to
fulfill different purposes. Although it is a new European concept, it is important to recognize that
the multilingual practices of many Africans have always reflected this more dynamic linguistic
repertoire (see Makoni and Pennycook 2007).
Although bilingual scholars throughout the world are shifting the conversation in the direc-
tion of plurilingualism, the United States has gone in reverse. The term “bilingual” is being
further silenced, and the categorization as “two” has been solidified in the now popular term
“dual language.” Bilingual education in the United States has always been associated with a his-
tory of social struggle around civil rights issues, mostly having to do with Latinos. The critical

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definition of political struggle for the educational rights of language minorities, and specifically
of Latinos, has made U.S. bilingual education contentious. By 1974, the time of the second reau-
thorization of the Bilingual Education Act (Title VII of the Elementary and Secondary Educa-
tion Act, authorized in 1968 for the first time), bilingual education in the United States had been
defined as “transitional,” with few exceptions. And the Supreme Court decision of Lau v. Nichols
(1974), which ruled that children developing English must have a different educational program,
never required bilingual education. As maintenance bilingual education programs disappeared
under political pressure, transitional bilingual education programs grew. Bilingual education
became less a program to develop language and literacy in two languages, and more a program
to develop the English of those who increasingly became known as “English language learners.”
By the time No Child Left Behind was implemented in 2002, the word “bilingual” had become
a “bad word,” and “dual,” insisting that the two languages had to be strictly separated, came into
popular use (Crawford 2004).
Claiming “dual” languages, learners, books, pedagogies, etc., runs counter to the shapes of the
dynamic bilingualism of societies that truly value the multiple and fluid language practices of
the 21st century. The insistence on keeping the two languages as dualities is partly responsible
for the failure of U.S. schools in developing their students’ bilingualism. In the separation, lan-
guage practices in languages other than English never become a part of an American identity, and
are instead branded as the languaging of immigrants and the “Other.” In identifying English as
the “second language” of “English language learners,” bilingual Americans are never given per-
mission to truly appropriate English language practices as their own. In insisting that the two
languages be kept separate, bilingual Americans are made to think that their fluid language prac-
tices are inferior (García, Zakharia, and Otcu 2013). For example, in maintaining that Spanish and
English language practices should always be separate, Latino bilinguals are made to believe that
their language practices are nothing but “Spanglish.” Scholars analyze their “code-switches,”
instead of acknowledging the translanguaging that characterizes all dynamic bilingual commu-
nities of practice. This has implications for education, which is the topic of the next section.

Implications for Education

Bilingual education is good for education and language learning, for both language minorities
and language majorities. But bilingual education in the 21st century must go beyond the empha-
sis on the dominant language (as happens in the United States) or monolingual proficiency in
two languages (as in the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages). As bilin-
gual education is reimagined under a dynamic framework of bilingualism, it is important to do
away with what Cummins (2007) has called “the two solitudes,” and consider the use of trans-
languaging in schools, rather than a strict separation of languages. Translanguaging is used by
students and teachers as they make sense of their bilingual worlds, using their entire linguistic
repertoires across various modalities (reading, writing, speaking, and listening), and across differ-
ent people in order to meaningfully learn. For example, although a lesson might be officially in
one language, students may discuss, research, and produce work using all their language practices.
Teachers who use translanguaging may not be bilingual themselves, but they always encourage
their students to use their entire linguistic repertoire in making meaning (García, Flores, and
Woodley 2011). As such, these teachers provide students with handouts, books, media, and print
material in many languages, and encourage students to find others (see Celic and Seltzer 2012).
Incorporating translanguaging pedagogies in today’s classrooms ensures that the bilingualism of
all children is used as a resource, even when there are no bilingual education programs. In many
ways, translanguaging acknowledges the dynamic language practices of bilinguals as human

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Ofelia García and Heather Homonoff Woodley

action. It allows the formation of multiple identities capable of leveling the power differentials
among language practices and language hierarchies that continue to exist in schools that are
organized by nation-states. Translanguaging is capable of releasing the histories and enunciations
of all people that have been buried and constrained within the fixed identities of national ideol-
ogies. It may be the only way of sustaining bilingual education for all children in the 21st
century.

Further Reading
Baker, C. 2011. Foundations of bilingual education and bilingualism (5th ed.). Clevedon, UK: Multilingual
Matters.
Fishman, J. A. 1976. Bilingual Education. An international sociological perspective. Rowley, MA: Newbury House.
García, O. 2009. Bilingual Education in the 21st century. A global perspective. Malden, MA and Oxford:
Wiley-Blackwell.

Note
1 Most of the conceptualization and information that follows can be found in García (2009).

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Matters.
Bartlett, L., and García, O. 2011. Additive schooling in subtractive times. Bilingual education and Dominican immi-
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Becker, A. L. 1995. Beyond translation: Essays toward a modern philosophy. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
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 11
The Intersections of Language
Differences and Learning
Disabilities
Narratives in Action

Taucia Gonzalez, Adai Tefera, and Alfredo Artiles

The purpose of this chapter is to provide a critical synthesis of the literature on the intersections
of language differences and learning disabilities (LD1) using a sociocultural approach. Researchers
have traditionally ignored the complex intertwining of these markers of differences. For this
reason, we focus in this chapter on the growing population of emergent bilinguals2 with LDs.
We argue this population occupies a liminal space between language and ability differences,
which is consequential because institutional practices can thrust emergent bilinguals into odd
positions, sometimes stressing their language traits or needs; at other times, highlighting their
disabilities. Emergent evidence suggests that living in this in-between space can sometimes limit
these learners’ educational opportunities or create dilemmas, challenges, and/or puzzles for the
research, practice, and policy communities.
In order to examine the complexity of these intersections, we use narrative as a metaphor for
the stories that are being created around emergent bilinguals with LD. There seems to be a single
dominant narrative used to describe and address the educational needs of emergent bilinguals that
could be described as having a Labovian linear structure (Riessman 2008). Based on an individ-
ualistic stance informed by psychological and medical premises, this narrative’s plot envisions a
fragmented individual, which compels educators to determine the main determinants of devel-
opmental and learning processes—for example, does language acquisition trump learning diffi-
culties in explanations of student educational performance? In contrast, we posit there are several
narratives evolving over time about this population that can be described as narratives in action in
which researchers, practitioners, and policy leaders shape “turn-by-turn” (Ochs and Capps
2001, 2; Wortham 2001) the tropes of multiple narratives on this population based on alternative
assumptions about language differences, the role of culture in learning, and the ways in which
the intersections of language and ability differences shape school performance. The shifts at every
turn of these living narratives are contingent upon competing policies, practices, and interests
(i.e., interlocutors). With multiple interlocutors creating new turns in the conversations, these
narratives are not predetermined but rather unpredictable and “open to contingency, improvisa-
tion, and revision” (Ochs and Capps 2001, 62).

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T. Gonzalez, A. Tefera, and A. Artiles

Rather than subscribing to a linear narrative that would compel us to merely describe these
learners using a list of static markers, we first delineate the broader contexts in which the
narratives on this population are unfolding. We then narrow in on the emerging dispropor-
tionate placement of these students in special education as a case in point. We conclude with
an overview of research approaches used in studies on emergent bilinguals and a discussion
of the debates in these narratives. The central argument underlying our critique is that
addressing the complex intersections of differences under which these learners live will
require substantial systemic transformations and new turns in the narratives of emergent
bilinguals with LDs.

The Evolving Linguistic and Cultural Educational

Landscape of the United States
Across the U.S., the racial and linguistic make-up of the country is quickly evolving to be the
most diverse in its history. This increasing diversity acts as an interlocutor in the narratives of
emergent bilinguals and disability, in that emergent bilinguals are a heterogeneous population
with narratives that wind across and alongside that of disability narratives. According to the
Office of English Language Acquisition (OELA), from 1997 to 2008, the growth in the percent-
age of emergent bilinguals was 51% (OELA 2011).
While the number of emergent bilinguals is highest in the western and southwestern regions
of the U.S., the number in the southern and southeastern parts of the country has rapidly grown
in the last ten years (OELA 2011). This growing diversity is occurring not only in the often
expected racially and linguistically diverse urban regions of the U.S., but in the suburbs of major
metropolitan areas (Orfield and Luce 2012; Tefera, Frankenberg, and Siegel-Hawley 2011) as well
as rural parts of the country (Strange, Johnson, Showalter, and Klein 2012).
Of the 325 languages spoken in the U.S., in 44 states and the District of Columbia, Spanish was
the most-spoken home language for emergent bilinguals (see Table 11.1) (National Clearinghouse
for English Language Acquisition [NCELA] 2011). In fact, in 14 states, Spanish-speakers consti-
tuted more than 80% of all emergent bilingual students. NCELA also reported that a significant
number of emergent bilinguals also spoke Vietnamese, Chinese, and Arabic (see Table 11.1). While
the predominance of Spanish speakers may give the illusion of homogeneity, we argue that there
is an abundance of heterogeneity that is often overlooked.

Table 11.1 Top Ten Languages Most Spoken by Emergent Bilinguals at Home, 2009–2010

Language Number of Emergent Bilinguals

Spanish 3,582,884
Vietnamese 85,252
Chinese 69,821
Arabic 51,606
Hmong 46,311
Haitian 33,845
Tagalog 26,885
Somali 19,699
Navajo 10,507

Note: Adapted from NCELA (2011, 1).

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Contradictions and Consequences of Shifting Educational Laws

and Policies for English Learners and Students With Disabilities
The proliferation of multiple (often contradictory) policies has created many new turns in these
narratives. Historically, the U.S. has fought to maintain English as the dominant language in educa-
tion (Gándara et al. 2010). The struggle for fair and just educational policies and practices for emer-
gent bilinguals has, as a result, been arbitrated in U.S. courts over the last forty years. The landmark
Supreme Court case, Lau v. Nichols (1974) stated that students who speak English as a second language
have a right to a “meaningful education.” In their analysis of shifting education laws for Chicana/o
and Latina/o students, Artiles, Waitoller, and Neal (2011) identified three key cases—Diana v. State
Board of Education, 1970; Covarrubias v. San Diego Unified School District, 1971; Guadalupe Organization
Inc. v. Tempe School District No. 3, 1972—that were pivotal in addressing issues related to inaccurately
placing emergent bilinguals in special education. Together, these cases contributed to the passage of
the Education for All Handicapped Children Act, 1975 (now Individuals with Disabilities Education Act
[IDEA]). The primary intent of IDEA has been to provide a free and appropriate public education
(FAPE) for students with disabilities in the least restrictive environment (LRE).
While IDEA aimed to provide a fair and appropriate education for students with disabilities,
the publication of A Nation at Risk (Gardner 1983) induced a state of emergency, positing the
U.S. education system’s mediocrity as a threat to the nation’s ability to compete globally. This
resulted in a call for greater commitment to higher standards in education and was the impetus
for increased accountability for all learners. The report contributed to the 1994 Goals 2000 and
ultimately the 2001 reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA),
which was renamed the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). NCLB weaves an alluring yet flawed
narrative of equity with the requirement that all “subgroups” of students meet the same standard
via standardized test scores. Students facing the harshest consequences of NCLB are those Artiles
(2011) referred to as living “double-bind” identities, including racial and linguistic minority
students labeled with disabilities, for they are the least likely to have adequate opportunities to
learn and the most likely to face the negative repercussions of current policy.
In short, the educational policies intended to respond to the nation’s growing cultural and
linguistic diversity have resulted in the convergence and torqueing of multiple policies that are
narrowly designed with boxes in mind. Emergent bilinguals—a diverse group with sociocultural
(i.e., linguistic, historical, racial) differences—do not fit neatly into federal-policy-built boxes
such as NCLB and IDEA. While some narratives may benefit from neat boxes, others, at the
intersections of multiple differences, are stuck between converging policies and interests. Particu-
larly troubling is evidence that incongruent state thresholds for disproportionality determination
in special education has resulted in the illusion that many states do not face problems related to
disproportionality (Artiles 2011). The consequence of this cannot be overlooked as research
attempts to examine the special education placement patterns of emergent bilinguals, a topic that
is discussed in greater detail in the following section. The demographic shifts, competing and
contradictory policies, and persistent inequities outlined thus far serve as a contextual backdrop
to the emergent bilingual and disability narratives that are unfolding.

Educational Casualties in the Name of Equity:

The Case of Disproportionality
We suggest in the preceding section that the complexity of torqueing policies in narratives about
emergent bilinguals along with the health of such policies can deepen inequalities for the very
groups targeted in these policies. A case in point is the disproportionate representation of minority

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students in special education. Disproportionality is “the representation of a group in a category

that exceeds our expectations for that group, or differs substantially from the representation of
others in that category” (Skiba et al. 2008, 265), but it can also include “underrepresentation in
programs for students with gifts and talents” (Artiles, Rueda, and Salazar 2005, 283).
The U.S. educational system has historically underserved culturally and linguistically diverse
students, creating inequitable and disparate educational outcomes. For example, although Brown v.
Board of Education marked a new turn for historically underserved students by integrating schools,
it also marked new forms of stratification within schools in the form of policies that created
within-school segregation. Special education serves as one example of this within-school segre-
gation. It has served to help students with disabilities, but at the same time, it has contributed to
within-school racial stratification, not only through the labels assigned to students, but also
through the different services and experiences they receive (Artiles 2009; Ong-Dean 2009).
In large part, IDEA was an outcome of the Civil Rights Movement as a way to provide services
to students with disabilities. Although disproportionality can be based on socioeconomics, sex, or
language, racial disproportionality has been documented for about 45 years. Currently, African
Americans and American Indian students are the racial groups most heavily affected by dispro-
portionality, yet emerging analysis indicates that regionally Latina/os and emergent bilinguals are
also overrepresented in some disability categories (Artiles 2009).
At the national level in the United States, emergent bilinguals are not disproportionately iden-
tified for special education, but recently researchers have undertaken a variety of analytic approaches
for understanding the intersection of these narratives. These analytic approaches for studying
emergent bilinguals with learning disabilities include looking at within-group differences (Artiles
et al. 2005), longitudinal work examining change over time (Linn and Hemmer 2011; Samson and
Lesaux 2009), and state level identification and placement patterns (Sullivan 2011).
These studies, much like new interlocutors entering the telling of these narratives, have created
new turns that demonstrate new understandings in emergent bilingual disproportionality. We are
beginning to understand that in one researched southern California district, emergent bilinguals
with lower proficiency levels in their first language are more likely to be overrepresented in spe-
cial education (Artiles et al. 2005). We know that while emergent bilinguals are underrepresented
in special education in kindergarten and first grade, they are overrepresented in third grade, which
raises questions as to whether emergent bilinguals are receiving academic support too late because
of confusion between language proficiency and LD (Samson and Lesaux 2009). Contrary to the
Artiles et al.’s (2005) study, Sullivan (2011) found that districts in Arizona with high numbers of
emergent bilinguals were less likely to over-identify students with LDs and specific language
impairments. Sullivan’s study also showed that identification patterns changed over time. Linn
and Hemmer (2011) examined emergent bilingual identification patterns in Southeastern Texas
school districts over a seven-year time period, 2004–2010. They found significant emergent bilin-
gual over-identification, albeit with decreases, over time. Shifrer, Muller, and Callahan’s (2011) study
that analyzed various sociodemographic indicators (SES, parents’ language) found that students that
had participated in English as a second language (ESL) classes were significantly over-identified in
special education (see also Artiles and Kozleski 2010).
These recent analyses create a mosaic of understandings regarding emergent bilinguals in special
education. Attention to within-group diversity requires us to untangle the tightly woven braid that
history has created between race and disability. Although the braid is heavy and thick, attention to the
contours and the fibers begins unraveling the thread of language from this tight construct. Emergent
bilinguals serve as a powerful example to the heterogeneity within minorities in special education.
We should note that the bulk of research findings outlined thus far are grounded in a linear
narrative that privileges individual factors. Nevertheless, alternative narratives are emerging. For

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instance, the question arises as to whether the disproportionality of emergent bilinguals indexes
the creation of a “safety zone” (Lomawaima and McCarty 2006), which is based on ideological
constructions of a U.S. ideal. Society draws fluctuating boundaries between what are considered
“safe and dangerous cultural difference[s]” in response to perceived threat to the U.S. ideal
(Lomawaima and McCarty 2006, 5). Schools respond to “dangerous” cultural differences with
separate programs, separate curricula, and separate teachers that have been prepared in distinct
programs that often serve as a way to erase or lessen those differences, but also to create the illu-
sion of safety within the boundary between safe and dangerous. Language and ability differences
are two such constructs that are regulated with safety zones.
We posit that emergent bilinguals’ disproportionality in special education could be regarded
as an indicator (amongst others) of labor produced around safety zones. Artiles (2011) explained
how these threats (i.e., race, language, ability differences), or “notions of difference[,] have been
interlaced in complicated ways throughout the history of American education” (431). Not only
have race, language, and disability been woven together, but they have also been woven into an
ideological construct of danger (Artiles 2011). Different disabilities constitute different degrees
of danger to the U.S. ideal. Language and racial differences are threats that have been regulated, in
part, through disability identification that largely creates boundaries through separate programs.
Yet, the boundary between safe and dangerous is not only tied to time; it is tied to other factors,
as well (e.g., place, local histories), which is why research on the disproportionate representation
of emergent bilinguals in special education must be examined as a multidimensional concept. The
overrepresentation of emergent bilinguals in special education serves as a case in point to the
complexity of perceived safety zones across U.S. history and geography.
Researchers are building on this narrative using new analytical frameworks to create new narra-
tive turns and understandings, which has raised further questions about this intersection. While
some studies have replicated previous findings, we have seen that disproportionality research on
emergent bilinguals is highly contextual, in terms of not only geography, but also policies (e.g.,
language support programs) and over time.

Research Approaches
A review of research approaches on emergent bilinguals with disabilities cannot be restricted to
theory and methods since contextual, institutional, policy, and even disciplinary considerations
ought to be included in such analysis. We summarize the main trends in research approaches with
particular attention to LD because this is the largest group of the population with disabilities and
of emergent bilinguals with special needs. The scholarship on emergent bilinguals with disabili-
ties is organized around three types of study. These include (a) population issues, (b) antecedent
and contextual factors that mediate LD diagnosis (e.g., predictors of reading achievement, referral
issues, assessment practices), and (c) instructional interventions (Klingner et al. 2006).
One of the most notable limitations of the research on emergent bilinguals with and without
disabilities is the lack of attention to the heterogeneity of this population. Although over 70% of
this population speaks Spanish as a first language, the available evidence reflects a strikingly
diverse population in terms of nationality, age, social class, ethnicity, length of residence in the
U.S., and so forth (García and Cuellar 2006). This means that we know surprisingly little about
the profiles of emergent bilinguals that may be more vulnerable to disability identification. Artiles
et al. (2005) found an LEA-identified subgroup of emergent bilinguals in California that was more
vulnerable to disability diagnosis; nevertheless, the LEA’s definition of this subgroup was based on
questionable assumptions about language proficiency, rather than the unique sociocultural differ-
ences within the subgroup (e.g., literacy in native language, length of time classified as an English

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learner). Specifically, the vulnerable subgroup of emergent bilinguals was considered to lack
proficiency in their first language (L1) and second language (L2). This phenomenon has been
described as semilingualism, a notion that has been controversial for several decades. As Artiles
et al. (2005) explained, “[w]e should be mindful of the controversy surrounding this construct
and the difficulties inherent in assessing cognitive and other abilities with language-dependent
standardized tests for this group” (294).
Another factor that muddles our understanding of the emergent bilingual population is
the substantial variability across local education agencies (LEAs) and state educational agencies
(SEAs) to define emergent bilingual status, language proficiency, and monitor the trajectories of
these learners over time—i.e., generally this population is followed only for 2–3 years after they
are reclassified as English proficient. This variability complicates the aggregation of findings
because emergent bilingual samples across studies are defined with the disparate criteria of the
LEAs and SEAs where the students were recruited. The same critique applies to the multiple
measures of language proficiency used across geographical regions. In part because of the dearth
of knowledge about this population, but also due to universalist assumptions about human devel-
opment that privilege members of the dominant population, there has been a tendency to extrapolate
evidence from assessment and intervention technologies (e.g., literacy interventions) produced
with monolingual populations to emergent bilinguals with and without disabilities (Gutiérrez,
Zepeda, and Castro 2010). This is obviously problematic, considering the validity threats embodied
in this practice, and it flies in the face of advances in a cultural view of human development
(Gutiérrez and Rogoff 2003). Complicating this state of affairs is the absence of unified and system-
atic efforts to collect evidence on this population at the national level, which renders a fragmented
picture about these learners that cannot be monitored longitudinally.
The scholarship on antecedent and contextual forces is scarce, though multilayered and com-
plex. The instructional contexts, including teacher factors that shape emergent bilingual opportu-
nities to learn (e.g., quality of instruction) seem to play a role in emergent bilingual learning rates
and might constitute confounding factors in eventual decisions to refer emergent bilinguals to
special education (Lopez-Reyna 1996; Ruiz 1995). Perhaps more troubling, contextual consider-
ations related to these factors were rarely examined in diagnostic decisions for emergent bilinguals
(Harry and Klingner 2006). Investigations about pre-referral interventions with emergent bilin-
guals are rare and have not, with a few exceptions, provided substantial insights (Artiles and Ortiz
2002). Decisions to refer students are also largely influenced by institutional factors (e.g., assump-
tions about student competence, narrow evidence used to gauge the nature of learning due to the
kinds of assessments used) and tend to have a significant role in diagnostic decisions (Mehan 1991).
There is some evidence about the potential for disability misidentification with emergent bilin-
guals because these students could exhibit behaviors associated with learning a L2 that could be
construed as signs of LDs (Klingner et al. 2006).
The research on assessment is fraught with problematic practices and deep inadequacies. This
has been a consistent picture for at least two decades (Klingner et al. 2006). For instance, school
psychologists have reported knowing ethical principles and guidelines for effective practice with
emergent bilinguals, but not applying it in their own practice; other studies have also shown a
troubling lack of knowledge of best (ethical and technical) practices with this population among
school psychologists (Artiles, Trent, and Palmer 2004). Another troubling finding in this area of
inquiry that bears on diagnostic decisions is that even when assessment evidence on students’ first
language is available to eligibility teams, they can label emergent bilinguals without regard for
such data (Harry and Klingner 2006).
The research on predictors of learning (particularly reading) disabilities has been growing
steadily in the last 10 years, in part due to the funding available from federal and private agencies.

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This scholarship focuses on the role of early reading sub-skills and has consistently identified a
set of predictors of reading achievement that include phonological awareness, rapid naming,
alphabetic knowledge, and print awareness. Nevertheless, major syntheses of reading research that
included emergent bilinguals with and without disabilities have been critiqued for overemphasiz-
ing the aforementioned skills, even though other components, such as oral language skills, back-
ground knowledge, and vocabulary, had equally strong (or stronger) associations with early literacy
development (Gee 1999; Gutierrez et al. 2010). A consistent message from these critiques of
research syntheses is that “language and literacy development involves the lamination of compo-
nent skills and sociocultural variables that help form the social situation of development” (Gutierrez
et al. 2010, 336, emphasis added). A recent review of the National Early Literacy Panel report
identified a number of areas in substantial need for additional research for young emergent bilin-
guals (see Gutierrez et al. 2010, 335–337).
These research needs illustrate the dearth of fundamental knowledge in this area of inquiry
and serve as a reference for the theoretical puzzles and research lacunae in the scholarship on
emergent bilinguals with disabilities.
The last set of studies targets instructional interventions for emergent bilinguals struggling to
learn or with reading disabilities. Although we already identified significant knowledge gaps in
this domain, it is important to outline broad trends in the work produced in the recent past.
Intensive reading interventions tend to be designed with a reading approach that stresses sub-skill
acquisition and mastery. Klingner et al. (2006) concluded that “early intervention programs that
combine phonological awareness and other reading activities with ESL strategies may be the most
promising, yet further research is warranted” (120). A consistent finding across a small number
of studies is that the development of certain sub-skills (i.e., phonological awareness) and vocab-
ulary level in L1 and L2 mediate in significant ways the development of reading in L2. Moreover,
researchers have shown that emergent bilinguals with disabilities can benefit from reading com-
prehension strategy instruction. Not surprisingly, key differences have been identified between
emergent bilinguals that are more and less proficient, typically showing that the former outper-
form the latter group on various indices (e.g., vocabulary, use of comprehension strategies, use of
schematic knowledge). In addition, emergent bilinguals’ use of reading strategies in L1 transferred
to reading in L2 (Klingner et al. 2006).
To conclude, aside from the need to expand the number of studies on emergent bilinguals with
disabilities, it is necessary that researchers interested in this domain invest in several substantive issues
that were either implicit or briefly mentioned in the preceding paragraphs. First, this research com-
munity ought to transcend the limited visions and re-presentations of emergent bilinguals used in
this scholarship as monolithic, culturally static, and laden with deficits (e.g., poverty, lack of skills,
etc.). Artiles (2004) explained that this work requires more than adding details about samples’ traits.
Beyond documenting the breadth of diversity within the emergent bilingual population, it means
that researchers should understand the consequences of the cultural-historical re-presentations of
racial and linguistic minorities that construct them as the Other.
New representational practices will have implications for the historical narratives that constitute
the identity of the special education field in relation to emergent bilinguals. Borrowing from Rorty,
Artiles (2004) argued that LD’s historiography could be construed as a doxography, in which “the
key topics and scholars in the LD field are timeless and uncontestable, and it does not acknowledge
that societal changes and transformations in LD theory and research are perennially taking place”
(551–552). The dramatic changes in the nation’s demography that we summarized above and
interdisciplinary advances in learning research (e.g., neuropsychological basis of learning, learning
and gaming, youth’s hybrid linguistic and identity practices in formal and informal contexts)
demand that future research on emergent bilinguals with learning and other impairments redefine

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the field’s doxography. To date, we are only anticipating that these developments and innovations
will disrupt traditional research approaches and reframe research questions and practices.

New Debates
The emergent bilingual population and policy landscapes are shifting in unprecedented ways, just
as the special education field is undergoing important transformations that impact disability
definitions, prevalence of conditions, as well as theories and methods. Due to space constraints,
we comment briefly on two developments in the special education field—namely, inclusive edu-
cation and Response to Intervention (RTI)—and contextualize this discussion in terms of emerg-
ing population and policy changes.
The inclusive education movement gained international visibility in the 1990s. The U.S.
research community has historically grappled with questions on where and how to serve students
with disabilities, and thus, considerable debates ensued around different versions of the inclusive
education movement. Inclusive education is a concept with multifaceted definitions and discourses
on educational justice (Artiles and Dyson 2005).
Although the notion of inclusive education has become a proxy for placing students with
special needs in general education classrooms, its original theoretical aspirations were substantially
bigger (Artiles, Kozleski, Dorn, and Christensen 2006). Specifically, the idea of inclusive education
aimed at transforming entire educational systems so that their constitutive components (e.g., pol-
icies, curricula, pedagogies, assessments, parent involvement programs, professional development
efforts, etc.) would be sensitive and responsive to the range of human differences (e.g., socioeco-
nomic, gender, ability, linguistic, ethnic, racial, immigration and refugee status, etc.). The vast
majority of students with disabilities in the U.S. are educated in general education school build-
ings, though the question arises as to whether these students’ educational experiences take place in
truly inclusive environments, particularly in the current accountability era. Unfortunately, the
emerging evidence suggests accountability policies have deepened inequalities for the very stu-
dents that were targeted in the inclusive education movement (Darling-Hammond 2007). The
research evidence is mixed on whether emergent bilinguals are disproportionately placed in special
education in districts and states with sizable emergent bilingual representation (Artiles et al. 2005;
Sullivan 2011). Moreover, emergent bilinguals with disabilities can be placed in more segregated
programs than their counterparts with the same disability diagnosis (De Valenzuela, Copeland, Qi,
and Park 2006). It is also known that emergent bilinguals receive less language supports after being
placed in special education, which most likely affects learning opportunities for this population
(Artiles and Kozleski 2010), particularly since emergent bilingual placement in English-only pro-
grams increases the probability of their disproportionate representation in special education, com-
pared to emergent bilinguals receiving bilingual education (Artiles et al. 2005). In these cases,
therefore, it is ironic that the typical inclusive education approach (i.e., mere placement in ordinary
schools and classrooms with little L2 support) can constitute a substantial barrier to emergent
bilinguals struggling to learn and/or with disabilities, since the absence of appropriate supports
and accommodations would only restrict emergent bilinguals’ opportunities to learn.
RTI is the second major development in the special education field in the last decade that we
review briefly in this chapter. The distinctive features of RTI, which tends to be organized around
three or four tiers of intervention, are described as follows:

RTI integrates assessment and intervention within a multi-level prevention system to maxi-
mize student achievement and to reduce behavior problems. With RTI, schools identify
students at risk for poor learning outcomes, monitor student progress, provide evidence-based

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interventions and adjust the intensity and nature of those interventions depending on a
student’s responsiveness, and identify students with [LD] or other disabilities.
(National Center on Response to Intervention n.d., “Response-to-Intervention”)

The 2004 reauthorization of IDEA brought attention to RTI at the federal level as LD could
be identified, in addition to the discrepancy formula, through RTI strategies. Such visibility did
not necessarily have an immediate effect on state practices. To illustrate, in 2009 only a few states
had changed their LD diagnostic practices to rely solely on RTI (Southeast Comprehensive
Center 2009).
We should note there is considerable debate surrounding the strengths and impact of RTI.
First, RTI’s conceptualization embodies appealing features. For instance, RTI allows educators to
address the needs of struggling learners without having to sanction disability labels. This proac-
tive stance breaks the longstanding educational practice of waiting long periods of time before a
student is eligible to receive targeted interventions. Even a statement about being equity minded
has been made about RTI, since supporters anticipate that minority student disproportionate
representation in special education will likely be reduced in LEAs and SEAs that use RTI.
On the other hand, questions have been raised about the feasibility of relying on standardized
protocols and the imposition of unrealistic intervention fidelity requirements given the complex
nature of schools, particularly in contexts that serve emergent bilinguals and other diverse groups.
Other concerns include the lack of capacity among the teaching force to carry out this model,
and barriers to scaling up RTI systems (Gerber 2005; Kavale, Kauffman, Bachmeier, and LeFever
2008). A significant criticism is related to RTI’s apparent neglect of cultural and linguistic issues
(Artiles 2005; Klingner and Edwards 2006), even though some programs of research have begun
to include diverse samples in their projects (e.g., Linan-Thompson, Cirino, and Vaughn 2007).
An important critique was also raised against RTI’s “building blocks,” namely what counts as
response and intervention in this approach. Artiles and Kozleski (2010) provided a sociocultural
analysis of these basic components, which rendered crucial gaps and blind spots in the design and
implementation of RTI. With regard to “response,” these authors situated RTI’s closed ended
(largely cognitive) view of response (i.e., learning in RTI) in the field of learning sciences to
remind educators that the notion of learning is now theorized in more complex ways that take
sociocultural and psychological aspects of learning into account. When linguistic differences are
added to this picture, a stronger case can be made for a situated analysis of learners’ responses (or
lack of response) to instruction. This is particularly the case because emergent bilinguals’ engage-
ment and uses of sociolinguistic and pragmatics tools and strategies are qualitatively different
from native speakers, which could be misconstrued as non-responses, or even LDs.
In turn, interventions can be conceptualized as “contexts for thinking” from a sociocultural
perspective because interventions are tested in social conditions that differ markedly from the
circumstances under which learners participate and learn in classrooms. This fact creates serious
challenges to the applicability of experimentally derived RTI interventions in non-experimental
conditions. As Greeno (1998) explained in the context of arguing for a situated view of learning,
“we risk arriving at conclusions that depend on specific features of activities that occur in the
special circumstances that we arrange, and that these specific features will prevent generalization
to the domains of activity that we hope to understand” (7). This situation means that experimental
tasks and activities can often require engagement and participation that are not aligned with the
histories of participation or performance of students, hence heightening the risk of under-estimating
learners’ competence levels (Cole and Bruner 1971). These concerns raised about interventions
have consequential implications for the use of RTI with emergent bilinguals who are struggling to
learn or with LDs. “[F]or example, it would be important to know the students’ familiarity

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with reading text in English under timed conditions. How would their performance be affected
if they had a history of using only literacy materials in Spanish at home or if oral narratives had
been their main form of literacy?” (Artiles and Kozleski 2010, 952).
While RTI and inclusive education have not served as the holy grails of educational reform,
they serve as indicators that attention is shifting from fixing children to fixing systems. These
recent debates serve as a continued example of the struggle to support the students that fall
between the educational system’s standardized boxes.

Implications for Education

In this chapter, we examined how shifting demographics and competing policies have acted as
interlocutors in these living narratives. We borrowed safety zone theory as a way to understand
disproportionality as a barometer of perceived cultural and linguistic threats to the “U.S. ideal.”
We provided a brief history of disproportionality and how the emergent bilingual narrative has
intersected with the disability narrative, creating complex intersections of difference, followed by
an overview of shifting research trends in this field. We concluded by discussing how inclusive
education and RTI has been conceptualized in schools and what that means for emergent bilin-
guals with disabilities. What do the narratives on emergent bilinguals and disability mean for
education?
While the educational system has responded to learning differences through various means,
the shifting cultural and linguistic landscape of the U.S. has demonstrated that there are many
students that do not fit neatly into the standard boxes intended to respond to such learning
differences. In fact, emerging bilinguals with disabilities are caught between and betwixt
categories that are in some cases competing and contradictory. With this shifting landscape, the
narratives of emergent bilinguals and disability have appeared to run parallel, converge, twist,
diverge, and in some cases even torque. Our desire for cohesion and to work in neat boxes can
make the trajectory of these nonlinear narratives feel disconcerting, yet out of these narratives
that are being created in schools and through research come opportunities for “contingency,
improvisation, and revision” (Ochs and Capps 2001, 62).
As we improvise and as we revise the trajectories for emergent bilinguals with disabilities, we
cannot look at the narrative of emergent bilinguals in isolation from disability or vice versa. We
need to look at where and how these two narratives intersect to create their own complex story.
As mentioned in the previous sections, frameworks and methods for students with disabilities may
not adequately serve emergent bilinguals with disabilities. Researchers and practitioners are inter-
locutors participating in the construction of this narrative. As the U.S. becomes more diverse, this
issue of fitting into categories is becoming increasingly fuzzy. While we can build more boxes, or
specialization categories, we will battle with the same tensions of trying to force fits or making
decisions that afford some students opportunity at the expense of others. Another option is to
focus on the spaces between the intersecting narratives of emergent bilinguals and disability as
bellwethers for the new “U.S. ideal”; a new narrative turn for the living narratives of emergent
bilinguals and disability.

Further Reading
Artiles, A. J., Rueda, R., Salazar, J. J., and Higareda, I. 2005. Within-group diversity in minority dispropor-
tionate representation: English language learners in urban school districts. Exceptional Children, 71(3),
283–300.
McDermott, R., Goldman, S., and Varenne, H. 2006. The cultural work of learning disabilities. Educational
Researcher, 35(6), 12–17.

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 The Intersections of Language Differences

Ortiz, A. A., Robertson, M., Wilkinson, C. Y., Liu, Y. J., McGhee, B. D., and Kushner, M. I. 2011. The role of
bilingual education teachers in preventing inappropriate referrals of ELLs to special education: Implica-
tions for response to intervention. Bilingual Research Journal, 34(3), 316–333.
Solano-Flores, G. 2006. Language, dialect, and register: Sociolinguistics and the estimation of measurement
error in the testing of English language learners. The Teachers College Record, 108(11), 2354–2379.

Notes
1 LD is the largest population in the U.S. special educational system, and the most common disability
category emergent bilinguals are labeled with. Although we focus on disability, we also refer to LD
throughout this chapter.
2 In this manuscript we refer to English Language Learners (ELLs) as emergent bilinguals (Garcia, Kleifgen,
and Falchi, 2008). While this may feel like a cumbersome alternative to the ELL acronym, we feel it is
an important discursive practice that focuses on linguistic strengths rather than deficits, taking small
social steps toward alternative possibilities and narratives.

References
Artiles, A. J. 2004. The end of innocence: Historiography and representation in the discursive practice of
learning disabilities. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 37, 550–555.
Artiles, A. J. 2005, November. RTI for all: Reflections on sociocultural questions and challenges. Commemoration of
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Artiles, A. J. 2009. Re-framing disproportionality research: Outline of a cultural-historical paradigm. Multiple
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Artiles, A. J. 2011. Toward an interdisciplinary understanding of educational equity and difference: The case
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Artiles, A. J., and Dyson, A. 2005. Inclusive education in the globalization age: The promise of comparative
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 12
Theory and Advocacy for
Indigenous Language
Revitalization in the United States
Mary Hermes and Megan Bang

The current moment is one of crisis and opportunity. Educators, linguists and Indigenous people
have a rare opportunity to share perspectives and coordinate efforts to revitalize the Indigenous
languages of the United States. The very sites used to destroy these languages (schools) are now
the sites for reclaiming language (immersion schools). The disciplines used to colonize us as the
“other” (e.g., anthropology and linguistics) now have a role in helping bring back languages
through documentation. This chapter focuses on the work of coming together as we urge intel-
lectuals, citizens of tribal nations, and the United States nation to seize the deep and lasting
changes that this Indigenous movement has to offer.
In this chapter, we discuss some of the historical factors that have led to the endangered state of
what was at one time over 300 different languages (Reyhner 1995) in what is currently the geographic
area of the United States. Clearly this dramatic loss was an intentional part of the bigger policy to
exterminate Indigenous culture and peoples. This was not a natural de-evolution or language shift.
Only in the past two decades has this policy to exterminate Indigenous languages shifted course. Since
this shift, and in spite of policies against Indigenous languages, our languages survive. Drawing on these
efforts, we identify two issues core to revitalization: 1) the assumption of inherent value in these lan-
guages, and 2) the complex social political nexus implicated in redirecting language shift. Next, our
key findings are centered around the success of Indigenous revitalization in the immersion schools
worldwide, giving rise to efforts here in the States to use immersion-like methods as a catalyst for
revitalization. In the conclusion, we write about a few areas of research that are of strategic value to
this movement. First and foremost, there is a need to develop a pedagogy that is situationally based
and effective for restoring oral Indigenous language. Second, the collaboration of scholars and
Indigenous groups is vital for revitalization. And last, the ideology of “language death” needs to be
challenged. We end this chapter by returning to the broader implications for education, and offer
a vision of change and hope. What could be gained by taking Indigenous languages seriously?

Historical Perspectives
Indigenous languages have figured centrally into the unfolding of the Americas and continue to be
a critical site of resistance, loss, and strength that illuminates much about the role of language in the
course of human history. The role and relationships of Indigenous languages to the unfolding of

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the Americas has had dramatically different eras, ranging from multilingualism, in which early
missionaries actively sought to translate Christian agendas into Indigenous languages, believing
that this was the most effective way to assimilate Indigenous people, to a long and still active
period in which English-only policies emerged. There is an important change in understandings
of language and meaning implicit in this shift. In early colonial America, likely reflecting the
multilingualism of Europe, colonists were more concerned with content and meanings being
spoken. However, as English became the national language, the need for meaning to be spoken
in a particular tongue grew. The rising awareness of the relationship between language and
power, first as a reflection of victories in battles over territory, and later as the new colonists’ hopes
for a national unity, meant that early orientations towards language took on increasingly aggres-
sive efforts towards eradicating Indigenous languages. The most aggressive efforts of language
assimilation are largely understood by many community members to be rooted in the history of
the Native American boarding schools and what became known as the “boarding school era.”
Boarding schools systematically segregated children from their families, communities, and, in the
process, their languages and deployed physical abuse (among many other forms of abuse com-
mitted in boarding schools) on children who dared speak it. In response to the devastation these
policies caused and the ways in which language has figured into the domination and colonization
of Indigenous peoples, the language revitalization movement can be understood as much as a
political movement as it is an academic, social, or cultural endeavor.

Historical Perspectives of Indigenous Revitalization United States

In 1998, Michael Krauss published a paper estimating that over half of the world’s 7000 languages
were likely to disappear in the next 100 years (Krauss 1998). A clarion call to applied linguists, the
efforts for documentation of these “dying languages” quickly gave rise to this sub-field within
several disciplines: applied linguistics, linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics. At the same time, com-
munities, tribal nations, and Indigenous activists around the world were realizing the post-traumatic
effects of colonialism that meant their languages were not being transmitted at home and their
speakers were dwindling. Approaching the imminent death of first speakers of their language, many
tribal nations, or groups within these nations, also began to vigorously organize to revitalize lan-
guage use within their communities (Hinton 2011) But this is not completely accurate either.
Native people have fought for our rights to our own languages since colonization and language
eradication efforts began. Individuals have kept their languages and cultures alive, often in ceremo-
nies or other domains that were protected. The history of establishing tribal schools, bilingual
schools, and culture-based schools in response to the government-controlled schools is not often
seen as part of the history of language revitalization in the United States, but clearly it is. Seen as
one continuous movement that encompasses resistance, sovereignty, survival, and revitalization, the
language revitalization movement is the latest iteration of the ceaseless spirit of Native people to
remain and thrive. The Navajo, Māori, and Hawaiian nations provide an example of this spirit.
In 1966, the Rough Rock Demonstration School on the Navajo Nation was one of the first
post-colonial bilingual education programs in which an Indigenous language (Navajo) was the
language of instruction (McCarty 2002). This “island” of Indigenous language education was not
alone for long. On the other side of the world, Māori people were reasserting their linguistic and
cultural identity, developing bilingual and immersion schools along with language nests for the
very young. In 1982 the Hawaiians, following the Māori example, established language nests.
Built from the ground up, these early efforts have grown to encompass birth-to-doctoral level
programs in and through the Hawaiian language (Wilson and Kamanā 2011). As evidence that
these revitalization efforts are taking hold, the U.S. Census reported that Hawaiian language use

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in the home grew from 14,315 in 1990 to 27,160 in 2000, which is a 90% increase. In addition,
student peers within the immersion schools are using Hawaiian among themselves as a social
language (Wilson and Kamanā 2011). Cherokee, Mohawk, Ojibwe, Yupik, and Blackfeet nations
also have established immersion schools throughout North America (McAlpine, Ericks-Brophy,
and Crago 1996; Hermes 2007; Peter 2007). In California, where some language populations are
thought to be too small for immersion programs, an alternative means of language and cultural
transmission has developed in the form of Master-Apprentice programs in which aging Indige-
nous language speakers work with learners, performing tasks and communicating together in the
target language (Hinton 2011).
In 1992, the Native American Languages Act, and subsequently the Ester Martinez Act, turned
around two centuries of U.S. government policies designed to annihilate native languages. Over
the last 20 years, with some government support, language revitalization in the United States has
been growing. In contrast to these numerous examples of language vitality, the prevailing theory
and narrative surrounding revitalization has been one of certain death (Hermes 2012). The certain
vanquishing of American Indians originates in doctrines of Manifest Destiny and the national
construction of an “other” who was doomed to die out (Frost 2005).
The United States is a settler colonial nation and scholars have increasingly argued that settler
colonial nations different from colonial in some important ways. In trying to understand dynamics
of settler colonialism and colonialism, Veracini (2011) notes that colonial and post-colonial studies
typically focus on the ways colonialism employs a grammar of race and inferiority; settler colonial-
ism employs this grammar of race and inferiority but towards a logic of elimination. He writes,
“the settler colonial situation is premised on a foundational act where a settler body politic estab-
lishes its sovereignty by drawing different circles of inclusion and exclusion” (Veracini 2011, 2). The
circles of inclusion and exclusion establish a triangulation of relationships that form the core of
dialectic relationships in which the settler constructs himself as normative. Veracini (2011) argues
that this triangular relationship is structural and therein marks the critical difference between settler
colonialism—which is structural—and colonialism—which he says is an event. The settler-Indigenous
dialectical structure is defined by the desire to erase or assimilate Indigenous people alongside a con-
tinued symbolic Indigenous presence (Wolfe 2006). Wolfe (2006) suggests the process of erasure and
sustained symbolic presence codifies a binary logic of “virtuous settler” and “dysfunctional native”
that underpins the structure of settler identity. This settler identity dynamic creates for the settler the
perceived need to recuperate indigeneity in order to express its difference.
Much of the history of Indigenous language and language effort can be mapped to this under-
standing of settler-Indigenous dialectic. The rise of English-only policies reflects the transition of
settler presence in the Americas from one of colonialism to settler colonialism; that is, the settlers
had come to stay. The desire for permanency prompted the perceived need for eradication in many
forms. While the eradication often took the form of physical death early on, the rise of the “kill
the Indian, save the man” era meant policies and efforts that made more pointed and specific
eradication efforts—a key effort was that of language—in which settler identities, or language, in
this case, were constructed as normative. While generations of eradication efforts were disturbingly
successful, the call for language revitalization and the forms it took maintained a settler-Indigenous
dialectic structure defined by settler colonialism. In part, the call took up fully the “virtuous set-
tler” and “dysfunctional native” dynamic expressed by Wolfe (2006), as well as other discourses
fraught with colonially imposed narratives of Indigenous loss of authenticity.
These dynamics, in the form of loss narratives, sent our communities into crisis and fueled the
documentation approach to language preservation. Although key in many instances to revitalization,
documentation of endangered languages has generally been the territory of anthropologists and
linguists. While these efforts are crucial and not intentionally aimed at reproducing a colonial

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troupe, documentation isolated from community efforts has no theory of change that is of benefit
to revitalization and will simply memorialize our languages, keeping us locked in the settler
colonial paradigms. It is up to communities to retool documentation efforts towards productive
regeneration in communities. The move to revitalization and seeing our languages as living can
open up creative possibilities for communities, as we have described, rather than generating only
preservation efforts. Skutnabb-Kangas (2008) argues that the problem with the idea of language
death as a natural phenomenon glosses over the entire social political history of empire building that
has given rise to a “no contest” choice to retain and use Indigenous languages. While we embrace
thinking about our languages as living, both of these approaches (life or death) leave us in a binary
territory that contains us in a polarized colonial narrative. For this reason, a focus of this chapter is
to think about what theories of change exist in revitalization, and how we can contribute to a
counter-narrative of language revitalization.
Perhaps for the field of educational linguistics, the Indigenous language revitalization movement
is more than a study of communities that are struggling to keep their languages. It is a shared piece
of United States history that is not in the past, but is continuing now, and is especially visible in
schools and school policy. As the place-based movement suggests, the local place names and geo-
graphical features of the land call out with Indigenous words that speak to an understanding and
identity with place. Unlike race and class, languages do not discriminate, but rather pull people
together through a particular place, and this piece of identity is what our schools are in need of.

Core Issues and Key Findings

Why Are Indigenous Languages So Valuable?

Driving the field of Indigenous language revitalization is an assumption: Maintaining as many of
our planet’s Indigenous languages as possible is a good thing for all of humanity. Although con-
tested by some linguists (McWorter 2009) and questioned by others, it is generally assumed by
experts in many language fields, and by Indigenous people, that our Indigenous languages are
extremely valuable. But valuable how, and to whom? In competition with world hunger and
poverty, or even the achievement gap in the United States, do Indigenous mother tongues become
a priority, or is it a luxury to learn an Indigenous “second” language?
Indigenous people across the United States are developing programs, actions, language institutes,
conferences, and proficient second language speakers. Scholarly interest in the areas of Indigenous
languages, endangered languages, documentation of endangered language and language revitalization
cross between fields of applied linguistics, education, and Native American studies. In short, while
skeptics say “Why bother?,” substantial effort from many fields is converging on revitalization, and
scholars and activists are devoting their life’s work to the movement. The resounding “Yes!” from
Indigenous peoples can be found in any of the volumes published from 19 years of the Stabilizing
Indigenous Languages Symposium (for example, Reyhner and Lockhart, 2009). While it is not
assumed that all Indigenous languages will be revitalized, evidence from the Māori, Hawaiian, and
Mohawk peoples suggest that grassroots community efforts can revitalize an Indigenous language,
and in the process have many positive effects on community health and well-being.
Despite this intuitive and Indigenous knowing, Western research lags behind in understanding
and describing exactly how Indigenous languages contribute to the planet and our humanity as
a whole. Increasingly, as psychologists and linguists continue to uncover the relationship between
language and thought, work in bio-cultural diversity is connecting linguistic diversity to ecological
diversity (Maffi 2005). While assimilation efforts persist, standardized curricula and uniformity
of thought being the political and social doctrine of our times, increasingly the idea grows that

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with diversity of thought comes a multiplicity of solutions (National Academy of Science, 2005;
Rhoten and Parker 2004). Crocheting coral reefs to model hyperbolic geometry, Margaret
Wertheim (2009) illustrates how multiple and divergent perspectives often lead to breakthroughs
in thinking. The diversity of thought that comes from exploring a problem in both an Indige-
nous language and a European language, for example, is a potential we will lose unless our
Indigenous languages are valued.
Work to position Indigenous languages as an inherent right of Indigenous people has begun
(UN General Assembly 2007; Skutnab-Kangas 2008; Maffi 2005). Work in bio-cultural diversity
is also raising the general awareness and status by making the connection between linguistic diver-
sity and biological diversity. The idea that Indigenous languages, like cultural heritage, should be
a protected right is growing. However, if Indigenous people feel they must learn a larger world
language, and further that they need to talk to their children in that language instead of their
Indigenous mother tongue, policies that protect Indigenous languages are not very effective. What
kinds of policies and advocacy would allow Indigenous language to become a language of cur-
rency and status and then a true choice for people?
The “choice” is really located in the complex question of language and power. The decision
to speak a language for families is often linked to economic survival as well as cultural and family
values. Although schools, nations, and policies can declare languages official and provide funding
to support them, the day-to-day work of language acquisition still largely happens early on in the
home. Families able to choose their mother tongue, and speak it to their children as they are
learning to speak, are at the core of this issue. According to Fishman (1990) the most challenging
part about language revitalization has to do with how embedded language is in everything, and
in the end, language revitalization is about revitalizing communities and building relationships.
For Indigenous communities, recovering from near genocide and colonization, language revital-
ization is part and parcel of building relationships and community health.
Amidst this discussion of whether and how Indigenous languages have value, there is a deeper
shift at work. Indigenous languages and thinking represent an interruption of the dominant
discourse on schooling and monolingualism. Speaking and schooling in and through an Indige-
nous language within the borders of the United States means challenging the immigrant narrative
that glosses over Indigenous histories (Frost 2005). Living in peace with our differences having
been assimilated (e.g., languages) is a part of this “successful” immigrant narrative. Native lan-
guages represent a deep difference, not one that can be addressed in a one-day theme (e.g., Native
American Day). We are not one nation because we all gave up or were forced to give up our
identities; we are actually still many nations within one nation because of these unique and epis-
temic differences, which continue to exist. Speaking and using our multiplicities of languages
represents a difference that cannot be broken down into simple understandings or stereotypes. It
represents many generations of sustainable evolution in one place, a place that is threatened by
the unsustainable practices and languages of the colonial hegemony. Although schooling in an
Indigenous language is not a perfect solution (the schooling is largely a Western institution), it
has become a starting place for many communities for restoration of language, and the ideologies,
practices and life ways that come with these languages.

Key Findings
While much of the published work on revitalization tends to be descriptive in nature, research
that asks deeper or more specific questions or research that asks in systematic ways, across sites, is
just beginning. Immersion schools, emerging as the model and hope for revitalization in some
contexts (Hawai‘i, Mohawk, Navajo, Cherokee, Māori, Blackfeet, Yupik Nations), have started to

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conduct research to look at positive effects on identity, resilience, and overall benefits to community.
Some work in language policy and ideology is also starting to define the field. These two areas are
discussed in this section as “key findings.” However, it should be well noted that these are areas
evolving as research as part of a practical ongoing movement for sovereignty by communities gen-
erally excluded from academic research, not as research solely informed by an academic or publica-
tions perspective. In this sense, Indigenous research in the United States has a different agenda than,
for example, second language learning in the schools or immersion education. At the 2012 immer-
sion research conference, summary findings from the Indigenous research panel suggested that
re-venacularization of Indigenous languages is the goal (Wilson 2012). This means the day-to-day
oral, informal use of Indigenous languages throughout informal domains is necessary, but not the
current focus of, Indigenous immersion schools. While immersion education as a “school” is not
designed exclusively to achieve this goal, the immersion schools are currently seen as the most effec-
tive means to creating speakers and indirectly priming communities for this larger goal.
Indigenous immersion programs are situated within the larger goal of language revitalization
in communities and Indigenous nations (Hermes 2012; McCarty 2003; Smith 1999; Timutimu,
Ormsby-Teki, and Ellis 2009; Wilson and Kamanā 2001); thus, they are inherently embedded in
a nexus of power, politics, and cultural survival. Revitalization is deeply identity-driven. Some
suggest post-colonial political dynamics, internalized oppression, and identity politics present the
biggest obstacles and emotional challenges to successful immersion programs (Bishop, Berryman,
and Richardson 2002; Hermes 2007; Johnston 2002; May, 2013; Wilson and Kamanā 2011). The
goal of revitalization is intergenerational transmission (Fishman 1996; Hinton 2011), thereby
deeply influencing program design (Wilson 2012). The broader goal can also be thought of as
community building (Fishman 1996).

Immersion Program Models

There is no evidence to suggest one immersion model is superior to another (Aguilera and
LeCompte 2007). Rough Rock (Navajo) started as a bilingual program and now consists of three
immersion schools (McCarty 2008). Master-apprentice programs are in practice for smaller lan-
guage communities or informal learning environments (Hinton 2011; McCarty 2008). Information
below refers to recent (within the past 10 years) start-ups, based on Hawaiian/Māori pre-school
and school models. This includes local immersion schools in Minnesota and Wisconsin (Hickey
2011) but many United States based Indigenous immersion programs have been modeled on the
Hawaiian and Māori examples. There are several common characteristics across Indigenous
immersion schools. First, programs start in early childhood and are often total one-way immersion.
Second, these one-way immersion programs grow from the bottom up, adding a grade or two at
a time, as resources allow. Third, programs are often started by families who are not educators or
first speakers of the language. Fourth, English is introduced in later grades (3–5) with wide varia-
tion depending on the policies that demand testing in English only. Many immersion schools, for
example, are subject to No Child Left Behind (NCLB) policies, so early standardized testing in
English is mandatory. Schools are not in a position to continue if they are defunded or raise red
flags in terms of achievement, so often they must comply with this testing.

Immersion Research
Specific findings from Indigenous immersion research contexts show that language exerts a strong
effect on identity formation, regardless of the ethnic or racial identity (Timutimu, Ormsby-Teki, and
Ellis 2009; Wilson and Kamanā 2011). For example, in Hawai‘i it was found that children in

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immersion schools had very strong “Hawaiian” identities regardless of government definitions of
Hawaiian identity (Wilson and Kamanā 2011). Incorporating the unique goal of revitalization
into Indigenous immersion programs may complicate assessment practices. Not only do research-
ers wish to measure academic achievement, but they also seek a clear picture of how students’ (and
their communities’) cultural identities evolve through language learning. Some studies have
reported that Indigenous immersion students declare feelings of pride in their Native identities
(Harrison and Papa 2005) and describe a “ripple effect” of student learning that inspires commu-
nity enthusiasm (Luning and Yamauchi 2010; McCarty 2003). For example, the Waadokodaading
Ojibwe Immersion school in Wisconsin and the Niiganii School in Minnesota have been rallying
points for second language learners. In response, higher degree programs, especially for this kind
of specialized training, have started in various universities in both Wisconsin and Minnesota
(Masters and doctorate degree programs with a language revitalization focus and Ojibwe immer-
sion teacher education, for example).

Research Approaches to Revitalization

Perhaps the common thread in research on Indigenous language revitalization is that the research
itself is often dictated by the practical problem of revitalizing the language. Some research surveys the
community and the state of language. Using Fishman’s (1991) scale, domains where language is still
being used can be identified. Once languages are confined to a few domains and no longer being
transmitted intergenerationally in the homes, we can say they are, or will soon be, endangered.
Beyond knowing what state a language is in, strategic decisions can be made about document-
ing and revitalizing. “Who is making these decisions?” (McCarty 2003). Community members,
speakers of the language, linguists, teachers, or a combination of these individuals are. This is where
revitalization work is markedly different than other research; it involves not only community
consent, but also the motivation, organization, and will to take steps toward revitalization. Build-
ing relationships between these parties—who in the past have had different agendas—is just one
more facet of the community building work involved in revitalization.
Kinds of research methods coming out of Indigenous communities draw on this community
base and community desires. Drawing on community building and cultural revitalization, par-
ticipatory methods (Bang et al. 2013; Smith 1999; Tuck 2008) have long been the backbone of
deeper changes in American Indian education. How can these methods, and language work done
in these ways, now inform the language revitalization movement?
Through textual analysis, critical theory, and retrospective analysis of participatory design pro-
cess, Hermes, Bang, and Marin (2012) pull lessons about Indigenous language learning as commu-
nity building from a case study of an instructional materials project. This model of research speaks
back to ideas of second language learning in context, documentary linguistics, and ideas circulating
within language endangerment.

New Debates
The key problem and challenge for this academic and grassroots movement is still the question of
how to bring a language back into widespread use after it is has become endangered, or not been
in use at all. As identified above, this problem quickly becomes not just about isolated language
teaching and learning, but re-learning and re-instituting a language that does not offer the eco-
nomic power of English. Situated in Indigenous nations that are within the “belly of the beast,”
Indigenous language revitalization is a highly charged political movement that essentially pro-
poses to change language use as a part of a broader political movement to re-assert the sovereignty

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of Indigenous nations. Many Indigenous people and nations collectively assert that these political
rights are deeply reiterated in the spiritual nature of the languages and cultures that define the
identity of the peoples.
Just as languages are connected to many spheres—culture, politics, identity, power—the revi-
talization challenge is multifaceted. Current debates reflect this complexity, as the problem of
restoring languages to communities evolves. In this section we will name some areas that need to
be better understood. First, pedagogy. How do we actually learn and use language in these spe-
cific contexts, and how can this be promoted? That is, can language acquisition be shaped as
informal education work to restore endangered language? Does language learning from the
formal (school) transfer back to the community? Second, what is the relationship between doc-
umentation and revitalization efforts? This touches on the idea that academic knowledge has a
history of exploiting Indigenous knowledge, and yet now these communities are beginning to
have overlapping membership, stronger allies, and more reasons to collaborate. Last, what are the
ideas of change, and the theories of culture that could work to revitalize Indigenous languages?
How do current popular stereotypes of Native American people as “dying out” inhibit the gen-
eral understanding of the value of Indigenous languages?

1) Radical Pedagogy: Acquiring Language Outside of Schools

While educational linguists have been working to shift the paradigm in teaching languages in
schools to be about communication in the target language, the Indigenous language movement pushes
this quest with even more urgency. That is, the goal of language learning in Indigenous commu-
nities is fueled by a political, spiritual, and identity quest—and while this does not necessarily
affect the process of learning to speak a language, these goals and beliefs do orient the learning
context (learner, teacher, environment) much differently from that of someone attempting to
learn a world language in a classroom. Given the state of many of these languages within the
United States, the goal of teaching and learning is all about communication (usually speaking) in
the Indigenous language. Finding the most efficient means of doing this—often with limited
written resources, and often without a speech community to practice in—is the task at hand. The
challenges of learning and teaching an Indigenous, endangered language force learners to become
self-directed, seeking out situations in which to use or check their speaking skills, finding ways
to create time to be with Elders who may be speakers or may only remember some of their
language, and above all to be persistent in the face of the idea that they are only the first to
re-create this community, not the last ones who know how to speak in Mohawk or Dakota.
Hinton (2009) gives useful learning and teaching advice for adults working with a speaker in the
master-apprentice methods, much like a one-on-one immersion. Students need to be the teacher
and the learner.

2) Revitalization and Documentation Theory:

Working Between Different Discourses
Recent publications (Penfield and Tucker 2011; Hermes, Nichols, Roach, Sullivan, and Cowell
2011) point to the benefits for individuals engaged in documentation work to also collaborate with
the communities they are working with explicitly to promote revitalization. Likewise, for those
focused on just the languages, it has become more and more important to collaborate closely with
tribes and revitalization efforts. Some individuals who are both community members and academics
embody both. For example, in my own work, I (Mary Hermes) work with an immersion school
on a reservation; I have documented and created conversation archives; I have developed

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training, language learning methods, and curriculum for Ojibwe as a subject within schools; and last,
I continue to work to become a more fluent speaker myself. The efforts between these different
worlds are seamless, as they are all pieces of revitalization. There may be strategic decisions to just try
to document as much as possible before the last speakers of a language or dialect pass away, but usually
these efforts are in consort with those who are trying to learn the language. It may seem easier for
an outsider (academic) to side-step Indigenous community politics or to focus on individuals, not
taking the time to build relationships with the broader community. However, this effort is needed in
order to understand the context of their language need; it may not be a dictionary. There are numer-
ous examples of collaboration that contradict the colonial model of extracting information, and
ethical reasons for doing so (Dance, Gutierrez, and Hermes 2010).

3) Language Policy, Ideology, and Theory

Language policy, whether formal or informal, we argue, exists within all speech communities
(and within each domain inside that community), consisting of three distinct but interrelated
components: the regular language practices of the community . . . the language beliefs of
ideology of the community . . . and any language management activities, namely attempts
by any individual or institution with or claiming authority to modify the language practices
and language beliefs of other members of the community.
(Spolsky 2008)

The beliefs of U.S.-based Indigenous communities are not isolated from the beliefs, practices
and policies of the larger colonizing nation (the United States) in which we now reside. In this
sense, we are returning to the ideologies surrounding Indigenous revitalization as an important
part of language policy. The practices, beliefs, and management of Indigenous revitalization that
Spolsky outlines above as constituting “policy” are the practices and ideologies of both Indige-
nous citizens and U.S. citizens more generally. As described earlier, English is positioned as the
unifying national language and Indigenous languages as the “other” in the American identity
(Frost 2005). The meta-narrative of “language death” which circulates widely to describe Indig-
enous revitalization intersects with stereotypical notions of the “dying Indian.” Reinscribing
what contemporary thriving Americans are not, the idea of our Indigenous languages as dying
limits our own internal authoritarian voices and notions of language renewal. Work in American
Indian studies (Meek 2011; Leonard 2011) and cultural studies and curriculum (Hermes 2012)
has begun to critique this narrative, but so far, it does not theorize the idea of change and move-
ment-building in this context. More theoretical and practical work needs to be done to take apart
the prevalent norm of Native Americans as “Other”—as part of something so less-than, exotic,
and nearly gone that no one values these languages or sees that these are a part of a shared heritage
within the same geographical boundaries. As long as the Blinding Whiteness prevails, U.S.
public school children will be denied the opportunity to know this place in ways beyond the
settler narrative.

Implications for Education

The goals and politics surrounding Indigenous revitalization set it apart from other kinds of
immersion or dual language programs. Indigenous immersion educators often have limited
resources for developing curricula and materials; sometimes when starting a literate tradition,
they must make pivotal decisions as to how closely the programming will reflect the nature of
the Native community (Reyhner 2010). Rather than interpreting a standard Western curriculum,

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many schools opt for “indigenized” systems (Deloria and Wildcat 2001) that involve a clear
understanding and incorporation of Native values within the curriculum. The clear goal gets
murky, however, as we are “nations within nations,” and Indigenous school standards are account-
able to state and national standards as well.
The Indigenous language immersion movement raises again the possibility and need for a new
relationship to education and learning for Indigenous communities. The implications for educa-
tion emergent from Indigenous language immersion and revitalization efforts range from the
practical and immediate needs for materials production and adequate teacher preparation to
issues of language, knowledge production, and diversity of human thought, more broadly. In this
chapter we have argued that language revitalization is inextricably linked to Indigenous cultures
and communities. Further, normative notions of education (i.e., schools) have been the dominant
sites in which the language eradication efforts have been deployed. The language revitalization
movement has recognized the ways in which language and community health, wellness and cul-
ture, are linked and is just beginning to shape understandings of how language and Indigenous
knowledge at large are intertwined—thus, speaking our languages is central to the continuation
of Indigenous knowledge making. Restoration of Indigenous knowledge making requires the
critical analysis and disruption of cultural norms in the U.S. settler colonial society—norms that
define things like standards in school, traditional documentation practices, ideas about how and
where learning happens, and ideas of second language learning.
Let’s consider, for example, Indigenous language immersion, which is embraced as a fourth
type of immersion schooling within the immersion movement in education. There are critical
differences between second language learning and Indigenous immersion schools that have been
defined. Hinton (2011) defines five major differences between Indigenous immersion and other
kinds of language immersion. First, the primary goal for foreign language immersion is to gain
cross-cultural competence and language of a different culture; for Indigenous peoples, the goal is
nothing short of sovereignty and restoration of national languages. Second, learners of foreign
languages often are learning a second language to communicate with others; however, for Native
Americans, recovering and building a sense of identity and community is the goal. Third, whereas
there is a hope that Indigenous students learning language will re-vernacularize and pass the
language on in their own homes (when they are able), the expectation of foreign language stu-
dents is often centered on employment or enrichment. Last, a learner of a majority language has
that country to visit to immerse herself; for endangered Indigenous languages, not only is there
usually no place to be immersed, but often, there is a lack of materials and little availability for
learning opportunities (Hinton 2011).
U.S. educational policy and the standardization movement in public schools have direct
impacts on both the possibility for new materials production and the availability of learning
opportunities. Unfortunately, the need for curricular materials that are reflective of Indigenous
knowledges runs counter to standards-based or common core policies because they are based in
Western-European traditions. This relationship perpetuates the dynamics of manifest destiny by
presuming these forms of knowledge are more important for our youth to learn. The need to
balance the urgency and despair that loss narratives conjure in our communities with the depth
of the implications for the endeavors of language immersion cannot be underestimated. How-
ever, those communities that work outside or around these restrictions have the opportunity to
do nothing less than reimagine whole new ways of raising our children into our communities
and develop new insights that may have broad applications in the field of education. As teaching,
communication, and knowledge are intertwined, the more deeply we understand the relation-
ships between our languages and knowledge production, the more dramatically what it means to
teach will shift.

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For example, the teaching of languages for academic purposes, but not for oral proficiency, has
long been a problem in second language teaching and learning. This problem is amplified in Indig-
enous immersion, as the goal is clearly to achieve much broader use of language than just the aca-
demic or written domain (Wilson and Kamanā 2011). Further, Indigenous languages, which tend
to have oral histories and methods of teaching, are confronted with the exclusionary literacy prac-
tices that play a discursive role in all public school teaching. Are Indigenous languages without a
written system somehow less valid than Western languages that are written? Linguistic anthropol-
ogists have long recognized this Eurocentric standard (see Duranti 2009; Ahearn 2011), and yet in
our educational practices written literacy is equated with intelligence. These dynamics are firmly
entrenched in historically shaped narratives of worth and domination in settler colonialism.
As the broad recognition of and disruption of normative educational practices struggles to
bring into being a stance in which the intellectual and discursive recourses of all children enhance
and deepen learning, new forms of teaching and learning and the tools to engage in such an
endeavor are being created. The same is true in language immersion. The deep shifts and creative
forms of engagement with Indigenous languages begin to disrupt settler colonial cycles and
create and recreate truly self-determined Indigenous pedagogies. Educational linguistics spot-
lights the intersection between power and language as these forces course through education. As
the mainstream academic discourse begins to recognize the Indigenous language revitalization
movement, we begin to re-imagine the intellectual and cultural resources embedded in our
shared Indigenous languages, issuing a second clarion call. This call is not to save Indigenous
languages, but rather to engage Indigenous languages.
The Indigenous languages of North America, and the United States more specifically, represent
a diversity of human life unlike any other place in the world. Yet, they are seen to have little intel-
lectual, cultural, moral, and especially economic value in a country dominated by English and
general prejudice against the use of non-English languages. The widespread monolingual beliefs
and practices of our current educational system are embedded with a colonial mentality that has
completely normalized the language of the dominant colonial settler group. This “blinding
Whiteness” (Morrison 1992) obscures the inherent value of Indigenous languages to all of us. The
unique American national identity that could be forged by this recognition represents a sustainable
identity, not one that is based on exclusion of, or the eradication of, the first people.

Further Reading

Classics
Fishman, J. A. 1991. Reversing language shift: Theoretical and empirical foundations of assistance to threatened languages
(Vol. 76). Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters Limited.
Hinton, L., and Hale, K. L. 2001. The Green book of language revitalization in practice. London: Emerald Group
Publishing.
Hinton, L., Vera, M., and Steele, N. 2002. How to keep your language alive: A commonsense approach to one-on-one
language learning. Berkeley, CA: Heyday.
Krauss, M. 1998. The condition of Native North American languages: The need for realistic assessment and
action. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 132, 9–21.

Recent Articles and Books

McCarty, T. L. 2013. Language planning and policy in Native America: History, theory, praxis. London: Multilingual
Matters.
Skutnabb-Kangas, T. (2008). Linguistic genocide in education—or worldwide diversity and human rights? Delhi:
Orient Blackswan.

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 Theory and Advocacy for Indigenous Language

Wilson, W. H., and Kamanā, K. 2011. Insights from Indigenous immersion in Hawai‘i. In D. J. Tedick, D.
Christian, and T.W. Fortune (Eds.), Immersion education: Practices, policies, possibilities (pp. 36–57). Bristol,
UK: Multilingual Matters.

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Bang, M., Marin, A., Faber, L., Suzokovich III, E. S. 2013. Repatriating indigenous technologies in an urban
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 13
Visual Literacy and Foreign
Language Learning
Carola Hecke

This chapter deals with visual literacy in foreign language classrooms. Because an all-encompassing
definition of visual literacy does not yet exist, this essay first gives a working definition of the
concept of visual literacy and explains its importance for foreign language learning. Next, it gives
a historical account of the use of images in foreign language teaching from the 17th century to
the present and explains the didactic functions of images. Arguing for a pedagogy for visual lit-
eracy training in foreign language classes, this chapter finally discusses ways to improve students’
visual literacy by also addressing obstacles to the implementation of visual literacy in foreign
language courses.

A Definition of Visual Literacy

With the rise of visual media such as television in the second half of the 20th century, scientific
interest in human seeing processes grew and led to the first conference on visual literacy in the
United States in the late 1960s (cf. Avgerinou and Ericson 1997, 287). In its aftermath, John
Debes (1969) attempted an academic definition, stating that visual literacy was a set of vision-related
competences that allowed the human being to understand visual communication: “Through the
appreciative use of these competencies, he is able to comprehend and enjoy the masterworks of
visual communication” (27). However, Debes and his colleagues did not coin the term visual
literacy, as it had already existed in the 19th century. James Elkins’s (2008) research shows that it
appeared in newspapers and magazines and was merely used to describe a person’s ability to
identify famous artwork, like a painting by Raphael (1). Today, this idea of visual literacy seems
rather oversimplified, as visuality does not only refer to art but any artistic and inartistic visual
communication, and literacy in its basic meaning comprises receptive and productive compe-
tences. This conceptual shift is a natural consequence of the fact that visual literacy is related to
visual communication and routines of communication change as cultural habits change. With
shifts in the modes of existence, visuality and the competences related to it change, too; cultures
and visuality “are essentially constructed, and hence are mobile and situational in nature” (Dallow
2008, 96).
Not only due to its mobility, but also because of the complexity of visual communication, one
all-encompassing definition of visual literacy does not exist. Visuality relates to a vast number of

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Carola Hecke

heterogeneous visual phenomena, some of which include verbal elements, so that skills that might
be necessary for one type of visual communication are not essential for another. Also, as a
culture-specific competence, it is influenced by factors such as gender, ethnicity, and class, and
therefore cannot be seen as an independent set of skills (Dallow 2008, 96). For these reasons, the
following attempt of a working definition must be seen as a preliminary record of interrelated
competences.
Essentially, visual literacy is the ability to understand visual communication (cf. Dallow
2008, 92). This includes the ability to analyze a visual sign or picture and its context, becoming
aware of the picture’s “logic, emotion and attitudes” (Barry 1997, 6; cf. Curtiss 1987, 3; Debes
1969, 27; Doelker 2002, 146ff.). Context is a relevant matter, as visual communication occurs in
a social world and is social practice, as Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen (2006 [1996])
explain: Seeing is an interactive, social process between at least two instances, a person and another
or an object, and the interpretation of any sign is based on cultural values (6ff). Seeing is a cultural
routine, and at the same time it also affects culture. Kress and van Leeuwen argue that images do
not necessarily represent reality but can be ideologically marked (47). In such a case, as we inter-
pret a sign, the meaning perceived can influence our (cultural) habits. Thus, we can say that visual
practice is a cultural practice that shapes culture(s) and the world (cf. Billmayer 2008, 77).
Another core aspect that has already been mentioned is the productive or interactive side of
visual literacy: Visually literate people cannot only receive and comprehend visual communica-
tion, but they can also react and express themselves in terms of images. According to scholars, a
visually literate person can talk about images: “The teaching implications of visual literacy
include the need to . . . enhance verbal and written literacy skills and vocabulary to be able to
talk and write about images” (Bamford 2003, 5). More importantly, the person can create visual
signs him- or herself, following certain conventions of depiction (Pettersson and Abb 1988, 302).
These conventions are culture-specific (cf. Bamford 2003, 4; Stokes 2002, 12–13). Gunther Kress
and Theo van Leeuwen (2006 [1996]) affirm that pictures do not have a universal grammar. They
state that “[v]isual language is not—despite assumptions to the contrary—transparent and uni-
versally understood; it is culturally specific” (4). Some symbols, however, are used similarly across
cultures (cf. Stokes 2002, 12–13): For instance, in many ancient cultures a voluptuous female body
was a symbol of fertility; weapons stood and stand for war; nowadays, the heart is understood
across cultures as a symbol of love.
In addition to all these aspects, visual literacy encompasses the awareness and ability to
question and evaluate visual messages (cf. Bamford 2003, 1; Doelker 2002 [1997], 151). Ann
Marie Barry (1997) relates this ability to a critical attitude regarding visual interaction, “a quality
of mind developed to the point of critical perceptual awareness in visual communication” (6).
David Considine (1995) subsumes that visual literacy “moves from merely recognizing and
comprehending information to the higher-order critical thinking skills implicit in questioning,
analyzing and evaluating that information” (without page). In accordance with this, the afore-
mentioned recognition of a famous painting by Raphael cannot be considered proof of visual
literacy at all anymore.
The question arises how visual literacy develops. Despite common assumptions, mere contact
with visual media does not automatically make a person (more) visually literate. Human beings
are born with the genetic disposition to sight but not to cultural vision, as Peter Schneck (2005)
reminds us:
[H]uman vision is not simply a given biological disposition determined solely by genetics
and evolution. On the contrary, vision as a meaningful activity in the context of cultural and

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social interaction must be regarded as a product of learning and habit. Vision is a cultural
construction.
(3)
So, unlike vision, visual literacy is a learned competence.
Another aspect related to learning is knowledge. Visual literacy is a skill based on declarative
or procedural knowledge. For example, for the success of visual communication, people have to
know methods of interpretation (cf. Wileman 1993, 114), the meaning of culture-specific con-
ventions of visual communication such as gestures (cf. Schwan 2005, 130); structure and effects
(cf. Avgerinou and Ericson 1997, 286); and/or production techniques of visual signs, such as
drawing, using a computer program, or filming (cf. Bering 2002, 91–92; Ennemoser and Kuhl
2008, 18). In addition, visually literate people must be able to apply their knowledge in order to
perform certain activities, such as talking about art in a foreign language. In other words, knowl-
edge and successful performance are interrelated.
One might argue that visual literacy could be named differently, for example visual competence,
especially since the term visual literacy itself poses a contradiction: visual refers to seeing and lit-
eracy originally to reading and writing (cf. Elkins 2008, 1). Yet Mitchell (2008) reminds us that
visual competence could be understood rather as a basic skill, “the condition for the more advanced
and specialized skills” (14). Instead he suggests literary visualcy (Mitchell 2008). Other alternative
terms discussed are visual practices, visual skills, visual languages (Elkins 2008, 1–2) and image compe-
tence (Simons 2008, 87–89). Recognizing the problematic nature of the term in this essay, I will
use the term visual literacy, following all the authors quoted above.

Visual Literacy and Educational Linguistics

Educational Linguistics is the interface between Linguistics and Education. Of great interest for
this field is the impact of visual literacy on foreign language learning and teaching. In the fol-
lowing, I will outline the discussion on visual literacy in this field, focusing on German Teaching
Methodology, teaching English and teaching English as a Foreign Language, as this is the field I
come from. Modern foreign language teaching methodologists argue for a visual literacy training
of foreign language students because, firstly, intercultural communication involves visual commu-
nication and visual communication often is intercultural (Weidenmann 1989, 144–145). Ges-
tures, for instance, accompany and connote sentences spoken or heard in another language and
give them a deeper or different meaning. If successful intercultural communication is the main
objective of foreign language learning, visual communication has to be trained in foreign lan-
guage classes, too.
Secondly, scholars state that visual literacy is a precondition of foreign language performance
if a class is image-based because language production depends on the students’ ability to under-
stand the pictures (Schwerdtfeger 1989, 24). Image-based means that visual tools are used in lan-
guage instruction. These may include posters, films, online videos, art, or photos that are shown
in textbooks. Whenever students are to talk about images—for example, about their impressions
of a film—they must at least understand the stylistic means and know basic, medium-specific
terminology to verbalize their thoughts clearly (cf. Morgan 2012). Without these tools, they
cannot express themselves, their lack of knowledge rendering them involuntarily speechless. In
that case, the teacher will never know whether the student refused to put thought into the task,
was unable to string any words together at all, or simply lacked a few necessary terms to voice
a very complex thought. In addition, if a student lacks familiarity with visual conventions,

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he or she is likely to misunderstand a picture and his or her verbal comment will be less beneficial
to class discussion. Thus, visual literacy influences language performance.
Pictures play an important role in foreign language teaching. They have been a tool in foreign
language teaching for a very long time—verifiably since 1658, when Johann Amos Comenius
published his illustrated Latin textbook Orbis sensualium pictus, the first illustrated, printed book
for foreign language teaching in Europe. Agreeing with Comenius’ ideas—as published in his
theoretical writing—in the following centuries, more scholars advocated the use of images in
foreign language teaching. In those days, the pictures were to help students understand the mean-
ings of new words and learn about foreign cultures (cf. Hecke 2012b, 34ff.). While the use of
pictures had remained optional in the first half of the 20th century, with the introduction of the
audio-visual method in the 1950, images became a core element of language teaching. The
images showed the context of exemplary dialogues and were essential for the listening and
speaking phases of this method. Thus, language performance was strongly influenced by picture
comprehension, and, consequently, around this time a broader discussion on students’ visual abil-
ities began. Edgar Dale (1969) argued for a visual training: “Students should be taught how to
use a photograph [. . .].” Dale demanded from his teacher-readers to “[h]elp the student learn to
‘read’ pictures” (445). Like Dale, the German Hanno Schilder (1977) claimed that a “picture
lesson” should always include a training of “picture reading,” which he explained as the training
of the eye and the instruction of viewing techniques (259): “Die Bearbeitung einer ‘Picture
Lesson’ im Unterricht muß verbunden werden mit einem ‘Picture Reading’, worunter eine Schu-
lung des Auges zu verstehen ist, bzw. eine Technik des Betrachtens von Bildern zur Erfassung der
wesentlichen und sprachlich relevanten Einzelheiten” (Work in a ‘picture lesson’ has to be linked to a
‘picture reading,’ which means a training of the eye or a method of viewing pictures to capture all the impor-
tant details that are also relevant for language performance). A few years later, Jack Lonergan (1984)
declared “active viewing” a goal of foreign language classes on film (11). He exemplified that
viewing tasks should instruct and encourage active watching (cf. Lonergan 1984, 16). The tasks
he mentioned were aimed at directing the students’ attention to the important aspects of the images
(Lonergan 1984, 18–19). In 1989, Inge-Christine Schwerdtfeger went into more detail. She
explained in her book on teaching film that student performance in class depended fundamen-
tally on the students’ comprehension of the visual material, if used (24). She pointed out that
seeing skills influenced the students’ language performance strongly and teachers inevitably took
them into account evaluating student language performance. Therefore, viewing skills had to be
trained: “Ausgehend von den in diesem Kapitel bisher dargestellten Forschungsergebnissen bzw.
-zusammenhängen muß Seh-Verstehen als eine Fertigkeit gefordert werden, aus der sich Sprach-
produktion für den Fremdsprachenunterricht ableitet” (Based on the research results and their inter-
relation presented in this chapter, visual comprehension has to be required as a skill from which language
production results in the foreign language class) (Schwerdtfeger 1989, 24). Schwerdtfeger argues that
visual literacy has to be there, prior to language production; to her, the skill of visual comprehen-
sion is a prerequisite to language production. Schwerdtfeger did not speak explicitly of visual
literacy yet, and she also ignored its productive side. Bernd Weidenmann (1989)—a visual
psychologist—introduced the whole concept to German Foreign Language Teaching Method-
ology in the same year. He published an essay on teaching German as a second language in which
he argued that visual literacy had to be fostered as an important intercultural communicative
competence because communication was not only verbal, but instead either had a visual compo-
nent or was purely visual:
Visual literacy als pädagogisches Programm will Kompetenz vermitteln zur Interpretation wie
zur Produktion von Bildern. Damit wird die Parallele zum Sprachunterricht evident: wie

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das sprachliche soll auch das bildliche Symbolsystem in kommunikativen Situationen

mitteilend und verstehend kompetent genutzt werden können. Wenn Sprachunterricht
Kommunikationskompetenz vermittelt, darf dann Kompetenz in visueller Kommunikation
ausgeblendet werden?
(1989, 144–145)
Weidenmann called the concept of visual literacy by its name.
Nowadays, English and American scholars (e.g., Frey and Fisher 2008; Moline 2011; Stafford
2011) write the majority of publications on teaching visual literacy in (foreign) language classes,
setting an example to put more emphasis on visual literacy training in educational contexts. Steve
Moline (2011) calls visual literacy “a life skill” (13) and points out that not only the reading of
texts but also that of graphs, tables, and diagrams must be taught because reading illustrated mate-
rial is part of our daily life (Moline 2011, 13); we live in an “image-centered visual culture”
(Dallow 2008, 92). Notwithstanding the meaningful findings of German scholars in the 1980s,
publications on training visual literacy by German authors are so scarce that one might get the
impression that although visual literacy is undoubtedly an important objective of the foreign
language class in practical teaching, it has not become a major goal of the German foreign language
classroom.
The negligence regarding the formation of visual literacy is surprising because research has
proven the positive impact of pictures on foreign language performance. Yet the precondition for
learning progression through pictures is that students can understand the visual tools that are
meant to help them, as Russell N. Carney and Joel R. Levin (2002) remind us. They say that
pictures intended to aid students do not do so if the students cannot process them:
Realize that even professionally designed pictures and illustrations in textbooks are not
necessarily perfect, nor easy for students to comprehend or remember (e.g., Benson 1995;
see also Guri 1985). Thus, even though a particular textbook illustration may be designed
to be cognitively useful, it may turn out to be functionally useless unless the learner perceives
the illustrated content or process in the intended manner.
(22)
If students are able to comprehend these pictures, they can benefit greatly: For example,
Karlheinz Hellwig (1990) has proven that pictures, in his case reproductions of artwork, encour-
age language production (357–359). Gabriele Blell and Karlheinz Hellwig (1996) explain that
any artwork in the foreign language classroom leads to processes of individual perception and
language procession that results in an increase in language skills and, finally, the production of
new texts (8). Regarding the acquisition of new vocabulary, research has shown that new words
are understood and learned more easily with the help of pictures as they narrow down the poten-
tial meanings and help memorize them (cf. Hecke 2012b, 175). Therefore, it is easier for foreign
language students to understand and memorize texts in the foreign language if the texts contain
representational illustrations of the events, organizational visualizations, or interpretational tables
or graphs with important data, as Carney and Levin (2002) have shown in their research survey on
the topic (10–17). My own experiences indicate that studying graphic novels allows students of
foreign languages deal with complex matters on the story level in the foreign language at an early
stage, instead of being limited, language-wise, to simple topics, which is frustrating to them. The
images often help them grasp the meaning of the text as long as image and text deal with similar
matters (cf. Hecke 2013, 123–126). In addition, pictures can be used for grammar practice: Talk-
ing about images can require a certain grammar phenomenon that students train while discussing
the images. Joachim Balser (2008) suggests practicing the Spanish past tenses by talking about a

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picture story on Columbus’s life, using the pretérito imperfecto for the surrounding actions, habits,
and appearance of objects or persons and the pretérito indefinido for the actions (31). Also,
grammatical structures can be explained with simple drawings (arrows, circles around words or
syllables, etc.) to illustrate morphological or syntactic phenomena (cf. Scherling and Schuckall
1992, 106–107).
The positive effects of pictures should not be ignored, but used to help and integrate learners.
For example, the international PISA survey (Programme for International Student Assessment)
has shown that a high percentage of 15-year-old German students fail to solve reading problems
for linear texts. Constanze Niederhaus (2011) claims that reading non-linear, picture-involving
texts is an even more complex task than reading conventional text-only passages and reminds
us that picture and text combinations are becoming more and more important in our daily life.
Consequently, she argues that students need integrated verbal and visual literacy training (2).
Referring to the results of German students, she goes on, saying that students of second-generation
immigrant background would especially benefit from this training because PISA has shown that
their performance is substantially worse than that of students whose parents were born in
Germany (Niederhaus 2011, 2).

Research on Pictures: A More Inclusive Learning Environment

In the course of the visual turn of the 1980s and 1990s, scholars of Educational Linguistics from
all over the world began to conduct studies on the use of imagery for language learning, reading,
and so on, or showed a stronger interest in image studies conducted by related departments.
Research regarding the interrelation of verbal and visual language showed, for example, that the
mental lexicon as the boundary of speech sets the boundaries to visual perception, too (Cycowicz
et al. 1997, 171; Johnson and Pascual-Leone 1989, 1; Kowalski and Zimiles 2006). Scholars say
that explicit verbal knowledge guides one’s perception so that one only sees what one knows (cf.
Cycowicz et al. 1997, 171; Johnson and Pascual-Leone 1989, 1; Kowalski and Zimiles 2006;
Mittlmeier 2006, 61). This is of interest for cultural learning in foreign language classes and
strengthens the claim for a conjunct visual and verbal training.
An even stronger argument for visual training poses the interdependency among visual liter-
acy, the ability to talk and to ask question about a picture, and the didactic effects of pictures
serving as teaching tools for foreign language instruction. Visual literacy is the basis of any pos-
itive effects of pictures in foreign language classes. As shown above, research proves that visual
media can serve important didactic functions. They can be motivating, elicit speech, clarify the
functions of grammar, train the use of grammar, explain the meaning of words or texts, structure
information, support intercultural learning, and strengthen students’ recollection of new infor-
mation (Hecke 2012b, 34ff.). In addition, studies prove that the use of comprehensible images
can close the gap between students with very little and very much previous knowledge. If stu-
dents see informative pictures before they are introduced to a new subject matter, the pictures
can increase their pre-existent knowledge or the structures of thought that are needed to com-
prehend the new material. These pictures have “an equalizing effect, bridging the advantage due
to prior knowledge” (Dean and Enemoh 1983, 26) and can therefore help create a more inclusive
learning environment.
Paula Kluth (2008) observes that learners who are labeled “with special needs” benefit
especially from visual material. Based on her research, she says that deaf and hearing impaired
students, as well as students with autism or with learning disabilities, understand and remember
the content of a class better if the teacher uses graphic representations, “including handouts,
movies, diagrams, charts, and graphic organizers, illustrated books, learning-related objects

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(e.g., globe, manipulatives), PowerPoint presentations or overhead transparencies, pictures,

and checklists” (170). Kluth explains that for these students the visual is the most important
channel of perception and that words are less influential, being only their “second language”
(Kluth 2008, 170).
The supportive effect of images is especially relevant for reading performance and depends
on the students’ visual literacy: Reading Psychology has shown that images can improve text
comprehension—given that readers understand the visualizations. Illustrations are more useful
the more complex and difficult the text is, implying that low-achieving readers benefit most from
pictures (cf. Carney and Levin 2002, 21; Filippatou and Pumfrey 1996, 272–273).
Students do not only benefit from visual training in terms of their reading performance;
visual literacy training can also help them become more critical media users—which is of
great importance, given the increasing media presence in their lives. Research shows that there
is a demand for this formation as visual perception of many teenagers is indeed “imprecise and
fragmentary” (“unpräzis und lückenhaft” [Huber 2003, 100]): Many teenagers treat highly
complex and ideologically marked photos as if they were random images, and do not question
their impressions or messages (cf. Glas n.d., 10). Of course, this is problematic, and critical
seeing should be encouraged. For this purpose, students must practice critical approaches
repeatedly. Only regular repetition will accustom them to scrutinize pictures and their effects—
and to do so even beyond the foreign language classroom (cf. Salomon 1987). A brief training
will keep up their critical attitude only for some time, as Salomon’s study on teenagers’ TV
habits focusing on their critical TV consumption revealed: A previously encouraged critical
attitude lasted two weeks, and then the teenagers returned to watching TV without questioning
anything (Salomon 1987, 88–89).
One way of developing visual literacy is the production-oriented approach. This means that
students produce visual media such as films, photos, and comics themselves in the foreign lan-
guage class, experiencing visual means and their effects at first hand so that they become aware
of ways to convey a certain impression and influence the audience. Lothar Mikos (2003) argues
that visual connoissance transforms people into more critical viewers and heightens their
appreciation for special effects without ruining the audience’s fun (50). In addition, picture
production can support learners from marginalized student populations as well as students with
disabilities: Their personal stories and needs can become topics in the films, comics, posters, and
so on, raising public awareness for their situation and making people understand their needs.
For instance, in the German town of Pirna (Saxony) a group of students with and without
migration background made a short film on how immigrants can find their way through Pirna’s
bureaucratic maze (CJD n.d.). Another example is a project at my school for which 55 inter-
national students from Bosnia, Czech Republic, Germany, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and
Sweden recently met for a week and made a short film, doing everything themselves—from
writing dialogues to arranging costumes and set design to filming and cutting. Most of the time
they used English as a link language so that in addition to their visual literacy, they trained their
foreign language skills. In addition, in the course of making the movie they learned about
autism; the difficulty of a person suffering from Asperger’s syndrome to show and understand
emotions was a topic in the film. The character’s reflections were not entirely fictional, as the
character was based on a person who was present. At the end of the project, it seemed as if the
participants saw this person with different, more understanding, eyes, such that I would say that
the film project affected personal relations and attitudes. I believe that such a productive visual
literacy training helps students understand and accept difference and can promote integration
and inclusion if difference, marginalization, and the personal experiences of persons concerned
are made topics in the visual media.

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The Implications of Visual Literacy’s Impact on Educational Linguistics

Images can only fulfill meaningful didactic functions in foreign language courses if students
comprehend them. If a student misunderstands a text illustration, it will not help her or him grasp
the text’s gist; if he or she does not know the gestures belonging to a foreign culture, he or she
will not be able to integrate these visual signs into his intercultural communication. To tap the
full didactic potential of visual media, teachers have to train their students read visual signs in
class. They must assist their students in developing visual literacy because the skills necessary for
successful visual communication—especially across cultures—cannot be taken for granted.
In order to aid students’ comprehension of visual art, as well as other visualizations, teachers
can draw upon methods from Visual Studies or Visual Culture (German Bildwissenschaft). Visual
Culture professor Monika Seidl (2007a) proposes several techniques, among them Erwin Panof-
sky’s traditional Iconology, Symptomatic Reading (derived from Louis Althusser and Pierre
Macharey’s critical reading approach), and Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen’s fairly new
Grammar of Visual Design (Seidl 2007a, 8). Grammar of Visual Design leads the viewer to the
investigation of the kind and quality of relations between the different participants of an image
(i.e. the interaction of objects and figures, including the viewer) (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006
[1996]). Symptomatic Reading guides the viewer to investigate potential contradictions and
falsification and fosters a critical attitude. Iconology leads the viewer to an interpretation
and allows the use of pictures as historical documents. According to Seidl, when instructed to use
these methods, students are not only able to comprehend and interpret images, but they also learn
to question their impressions and the messages a picture sends out.
My personal experience from teaching high school and college students is that Iconology
in its basic structure is a helpful tool that facilitates students’ understanding of artistic and non-
artistic pictures. Iconology is a technique developed by Erwin Panofsky in the 1930s for the
interpretation of artistic paintings (1932). It consists of four steps that—although the method was
devised for the interpretation of two-dimensional art—can be used for any image, two- or
three-dimensional (cf. Eberlein 1996, 191). The first step is an analysis to identify what is shown
and to determine how it looks. The objects and their appearance are to be described. Secondly,
the identified objects are related to each other and interpreted without referring to any historical
context, yet. That happens in step three: The students research the image’s content, its motives,
the story related in the picture, the vitae of the artist and his patron, plus the conditions under
which the image came into existence and was received. Taking the relevant information into
consideration, they can contextualize and interpret the image. In the fourth step, the students use
the interpretation to gain insight into the image’s context, exploiting the image as a historical
source itself.
In my English and Spanish classes, I use this method to give students orientation when they
study historic photos, political caricatures, or even graphs. The first two steps prevent them from
brushing over any important details and guide their seeing. Next, research and contextualization
keep them from uttering non sequitur interpretations so that they can learn something from a
picture, exploring it as historical document. Some training is needed, but then students are used
to the procedure, analyzing pictures and their contexts before interpretation.
However, the usefulness of Iconology in the classroom cannot conceal that it is a controversial
method: Although Iconology was meant to lead to an objective reading of a picture, the final
interpretation is subjective, nevertheless, as it depends strongly a) on the individuals’ subjective
choice of sources for the reconstruction of the context and b) on their relation of the recon-
structed background to the picture (cf. Schulz 2009, 61). Not surprisingly, there is an ongoing
discussion and, while on the one hand Iconology is widely and seriously applied by different

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branches of Visual Studies (Art History, Political Sciences, Sociology, etc.), on the other hand, it
is dismissed by scholars who are looking for alternative or additional methods, such as the
semiotic-structuralist Grammar of Visual Design.
Camilla Badstübner-Kizik (2002) has argued against the use of Iconology for the aforemen-
tioned reasons (18, 20, 25). In contrast, Anna Pou (2012, 11) and I (Hecke 2012a) have demon-
strated how Iconology can help students access art or applied art, nevertheless, because it gives
them a basic structure to hang on to and prevents them from merely projecting vague, already
existing ideas into a picture. I believe that a subjective interpretation that takes the image’s context
into consideration is better than a purely subjective or nonsensical interpretation (or no interpre-
tation at all). In addition, Iconology is still taught in many Art classes in German high schools, so
students may even be already familiar with it. The most important thing is to show students a
way to access images, as opposed to letting them struggle with complex imagery on their own,
which inevitably leads to frustration among the less skilled. Teaching even a controversially
discussed technique is better than shying away from it at all because the expectable interpretations
might not be one hundred percent objective. Students need strategies to help them deal with
visual communication, and the methods discussed can serve this purpose. This is important
because pictures are essential teaching tools of the foreign language classroom, a lot of lessons
focus on them, and the didactic effects of visual media are highly beneficial for foreign language
learning, but only if the learners can access and make sense of the pictures. For instance, an
illustration supports reading comprehension and the understanding of unfamiliar words if the
students do not mistake the persons’ gestures and actions; drawing arrows and circles around
words and syllables aids grammatical awareness if students understand the markings. In all, pictures
help foreign language development. Therefore, Iconology, as well as the newer techniques from
Visual Studies such as Grammar of Visual Design, must be introduced to foreign language classes,
so that their applicability can be put to a test. However, as empirical research on visual matters is
still very rare in the area of Teaching Methodologies, and scholars have to rely on the results from
other disciplines, this will probably not become a reality in the near future.

Research Approaches
Research approaches to visual literacy are manifold because images, literacy, and visual literacy are
discussed across a large number of disciplines. Many of the topics are of great interest for
Educational Linguistics. Psychology, Cognitive Science, Neuroscience, and other fields conduct
empirical studies to investigate, for example, the cognitive and emotional effects of images during
learning processes, including learning from text and language learning. Doing so, researchers
compare, for example, the performance of two groups completing the same task with illustrated
and unillustrated material. For example, in a widely known experiment, John D. Bransford and
Marcia K. Johnson (1972) asked their subjects to read a brief text about an unusual setting and
to describe the situation. Not surprisingly, the readers who had gotten an illustration of the text
performed more successfully than the test group that read an unillustrated text (718). Russell N.
Carney and Joel R. Levin (2002) give a broad overview of the studies conducted until 2001.
Mary Ann Evans and her colleagues (2006) showed that young children’s exploration of the
illustrations of picture books aids their language acquisition.
In Humanities, research is usually hermeneutic, and the discussion on visual literacy often has
a philosophical quality, focusing on select aspects such as terminology (e.g., Mitchell 2008;
Simons 2008), necessary skills or strategies (e.g., Dallow 2008), and the impact of visual literacy
(e.g., Burmark 2008). In American Literary Studies, for example, visual literacy is discussed as a
precondition for understanding text genres complemented by images, such as comics or graphic

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novels (cf. Frey and Fisher 2008). From the characteristics of the media, scholars infer the skills
needed by the users to be visually literate.
In my field, Teaching Methodologies of English as a Foreign Language, empirical research on
the impact of visual literacy in the foreign language classroom is at its start. So far, the discourse
has been based on the visual literacy discourse in Visual Studies and on the results of their
studies—if it is based on more than personal observations at all (see the section of this article on
new debates). The discourse on visual literacy focuses on fostering visual literacy a) in specific
contexts or with regard to certain lesson content, such as American Super Bowl Commercials or Images
of Africa (Gessner 2007; Feuerle 2007), b) with the help of special methods (e.g., Schwerdtfeger
1989; Seidl 2007a) or c) with various media (e.g., Hecke 2012a; Carter 2008). However, visual
literacy is still considered a minor detail by too many. Consequently, the curricula do not list it
among the basic skills but instead pair it up with listening, merely discussing the receptive side of
this double-skill. Nevertheless, methodologists who are familiar with the concept unanimously
agree on its relevance, see visual literacy as a vital objective of foreign language learning (e.g.,
Hallet 2008, 220ff.), and suggest how visual literacy could be fostered in foreign language classes
(e.g., Seidl 2007b). For this purpose, exemplary lesson plans are published regularly. Yet, a major
detail is left open—namely, a definition or working definition of visual literacy for the language
instruction curricula. This is the missing link between the resolution to train visual literacy and
the implementation of visual literacy in foreign language courses (Hecke 2012b, 13).

New Debates on Visual Literacy in Educational Linguistics

The biggest challenge is the disregard for visual literacy. Despite its impact and the omnipresence
of visual media, visual literacy remains optional content in high school and university curricula,
and (foreign) language and other courses keep focusing on the written word, considering visual
signs as secondary. James Elkins (2008) declared that “college-level curricula throughout the
world continue to be mainly text-based, with intermittent excursions into visual art and
culture” (3). This means that the discourse on visual literacy that has been led by renowned
scholars such as W. J. T. Mitchell for two decades and has led to the insight that visual skills are
vital for participation in social interaction has left barely any traces on the frameworks of education
(Elkins 2008, 3).
The exclusion of visual training from college curricula leads to another dilemma: When it
comes to training visual literacy in the foreign language classroom nowadays, teachers are asked
to square the circle if they themselves have not had any training in this field and, therefore, might
not be any more visually literate than their students. In fact, regarding new media, many teachers
might be less skilled than the teenagers they are supposed to teach. How are they to help their
students develop skills that they themselves lack?
The missing definition of visual literacy poses another obstacle to the implementation of
visual literacy: For successful instruction, teachers must know their objectives. Only if a goal is
clear can you pursue it in your instruction and monitor student performance, which is essential
for the evaluation in competence-oriented courses. However, in the case of visual literacy, the
goal is vague, and we have to ask ourselves how foreign language teachers without any experience
in the field of Visual Studies or compulsory visual training at college are supposed to specify it.
To solve this problem, foreign language scholars and the Ministries of Education, which in the
case of Germany determine school curricula, naming the competences and subcompetences that
are to be developed by each subject, must define the meaning of visual literacy for language instruc-
tion. This will imply a didactic reduction, deciding which aspects of visual literacy are necessary in
intercultural communication and for the context of the foreign language class. Also, there has to be

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a scale, allowing teachers to measure student performance, to monitor to which degree students have
attained the different goals and to differentiate. My doctoral thesis presents one model for discussion
(Hecke 2012b, 172ff.). An official definition of visual literacy for foreign language instruction is
necessary because publications on the use of pictures in the foreign language classroom are of
little help regarding this matter, as many authors still ignore visual literacy. To them, pictures are
self-explanatory tools that serve merely explanatory or motivational purposes.
In all, the awareness of visual literacy’s impact on language performance has to be heightened.
Among other things, future foreign language teachers need visual training to be able to guide
their students’ picture studies and development of visual literacy. When they are well prepared,
teachers can use visual media more confidently and will be encouraged to practice visual com-
munication with their students. If future foreign language scholars received image training, too,
we could also hope for fewer didactic publications that ignore the necessity of training visual
literacy or suggest exercises that in fact even foil its development. My research for Germany has
shown that surprisingly few teaching methodologists consult Visual Studies or Image Sciences
(German: Bildwissenschaft) for their hermeneutic work on pictures in the foreign classroom obvi-
ously considering Visual Studies optional even beyond university (2012b, 25–27). To raise aware-
ness, Visual Studies must become a subdiscipline of Educational Linguistics and courses in Visual
Studies must be compulsory for foreign language students.
In addition, teaching methodology must develop or assemble methods of visual literacy
instruction (cf. Hecke 2012b, 215ff., 235ff.). It is of little use to have each teacher devise tech-
niques from scratch. Instead, there should be a pre-existing pool of useful methods to choose
from and to adapt to each student’s needs. The methods should not only be in accordance with
the principles of modern language instruction, such as competence-, action- and process-
orientation, but also agree with practices from Visual Studies. If they differed—as it is nowadays
often the case—students would be confused in Art, Media, or Art History classes. These meth-
ods should also leave room for the old instrumental approach of foreign language teaching that
recommended pictures for the mere sake of facilitating foreign language learning. The lessons
devised should do both—exploit the didactic functions of images (e.g., use artwork as interest-
ing source on aspects of life of a foreign culture) and help students become visually more
competent.

Further Reading
Elkins, J. (Ed.) 2008. Visual Literacy. New York: Routledge.
Frey, N., and D. Fisher (Eds.) 2008. Teaching Visual Literacy Using Comic Books, Graphic Novels, Anime, Cartoons,
and More to Develop Comprehension and Thinking Skills. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.
Hecke, C. 2012b. Visuelle Kompetenz im Fremdsprachenunterricht: Die Bildwissenschaft als Schlüssel für einen
kompetenzorientierten Bildeinsatz. PhD dissertation. Retrieved from http://ediss.uni-goettingen.de/
handle/11858/00–1735–0000–000D-EF96-D
Seidl, M. (Ed.) 2007b. Visual Literacy: Bilder verstehen. Der fremdsprachliche Unterricht Englisch 41(87).
Weidenmann, B. 1989. Das Bild im Sprachunterricht: Lehrhilfe oder Lerngegenstand? Anregungen am
Beispiel ‘Wirtschaftskommunikation’. Jahrbuch Deutsch als Fremdsprache 1989(15): 132–149.

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 14
When Language Is
and Not the Issue
The Case of “AAVE” Literacy Research,
Teaching, and Labov’s Prescription
for Social (in)Equality

Elaine Richardson

A fairly recent article by William Labov (2010), “Unendangered Dialect, Endangered People:
The Case of African American Vernacular English,” offers a telling case in the field of socio-
linguistics, with regard to how we should think about the distinct language use associated with
African Americans. As a language scientist and one of the foremost fathers of variationist
sociolinguistics, Labov has led the way in developing theory and providing legitimacy to what
he refers to as African American Vernacular English (AAVE), a language variety that was once
thought to be sloppy speech, errors, and a sign of mental retardation. Labov’s (1972a) work has
argued the case of “Academic Ignorance and Black Intelligence,” wherein he has showed that
Black speakers display intricate and complex narration, reasoning, and argumentative skills. He
demonstrated the systematicity of Black vernacular speech, in terms of its grammaticality,
syntax, morphology, and phonology. Labov’s (1972b) research was detailed in his seminal text
Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black English Vernacular. An underlying premise of
this work, perhaps since its inception, is that one day Black and White vernaculars would
converge—with Black vernaculars assimilating to their White neighbors. This perspective is
perhaps the logical end to a liberal egalitarian view of the world. In his quest to contribute to
this vision, Labov’s current work lays this argument bare and raises serious concerns about the
workings of sociolinguistics for social (in)equality and the implications of Labov’s work for
the future of Black language and literacy research and pedagogy for social justice and linguistic
diversity.
Labov sought to persuade and inform European American and middle class educators to view
the language and culture of inner city Black people as different and legitimate and teachers’
understanding of such as beneficial to education. In 1972, he writes:
A . . . position held by linguists and many anthropologists locates the problem not in the
children, but in the relations between them and the school system. This position holds that
inner-city children do not necessarily have inferior mothers, language, or experience, but
that the language, family style, and ways of living of inner-city children are significantly

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Elaine Richardson

different from the standard culture of the classroom, and that this difference is not always prop-
erly understood by teachers and psychologists. Linguists believe that we must begin to adapt our
school system to the language and learning styles of the majority in the inner-city schools. They
argue that everyone has the right to learn the standard languages and culture in reading and
writing (and speaking, if they are so inclined); [emphasis mine] but this is the end result, not the
beginning of the educational process. They do not believe that the standard language is the only
medium in which teaching and learning can take place, or that the first step in education is to
convert all first-graders to replicas of white middle-class suburban children.
(Labov 1972a)
Here, Labov argues that Black mothers, Black language, and Black experience should not of
necessity be viewed as problems. It is the schools that should adapt to the language and learning
styles of inner-city children. He is careful to point out that “students have the right to learn the
standard languages and culture in reading and writing.” And though he might find the acquisition
of spoken standardized language advantageous, he leaves that to personal inclination. We might
say then that Labov’s position is for mild linguistic assimilation, or bidialectalism, to use the prom-
inent terminology in mainstream linguistic discussions of Black speech during that time. Black
students should learn standardized reading and writing, even if by non-mainstream methods,
but they also have a right to maintain their spoken home language. This position encourages
educational institutions to rethink their policies, philosophies, and curricula.
In 1974, following Labov and the field of sociolinguistics, the Conference on College
Composition and Communication (CCCC) followed with a language policy statement, “Students’
Right to Their Own Language” (SRTOL), based on state-of-the-art sociolinguistic principles and
concepts, to provide educators with knowledge to assist them in accepting language diversity and
creating pedagogy that supported it, while teaching students standardized reading and writing.
The statement reads:
We affirm the students’ right to their own patterns and varieties of language—the dialects
of their nurture or whatever dialects in which they find their own identity and style.
Language scholars long ago denied that the myth of a standard American dialect has any
validity. The claim that any one dialect is unacceptable amounts to an attempt of one social
group to exert its dominance over another. Such a claim leads to false advice for speakers
and writers, and immoral advice for humans. A nation proud of its diverse heritage and its
cultural and racial variety will preserve its heritage of dialects. We affirm strongly that
teachers must have the experiences and training that will enable them to respect diversity
and uphold the right of students to their own language.
(College Conference on Composition and Communication 1974, 1)
This statement is contextualized by an introduction and overview of twelve concepts
[A-L]: the nature of language as an oral, symbolic system by which human beings interact and
communicate; the history of English and how it continually changes vocabulary in syntax,
and in pronunciation; the nature of dialects; language acquisition; phonology; morphology;
syntax; grammar and usage; semantics; lexicography; experience; and the role of change.
Following the concepts is a final section, “Language Varieties, Linguistics Profiling, Housing,
Civil Rights and Employability,” and, finally, a bibliography with state of the art research in
sociolinguistics to undergird pronouncements and claims. The CCCC reaffirmed the SRTOL
in 2003, at which time the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) adopted the
policy. Among other language and literacy policies, CCCC and NCTE also have a National
Language Policy.1

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 When Language Is and Not the Issue

Throughout the next decade, Labov (1987) charts major American cities’ sound changes and
notes the divergent nature of language used by inner city (segregated, impoverished) Black people
who have minimal contact with European Americans and middle class Black Americans who
interact with European Americans considerably. Labov asserts:

There is no doubt that the divergence that we have witnessed on the linguistic front is
symptomatic of a split between the black and white portions of our society. It may also be
a further cause of divergence in widening the distance between the English of the classroom
and the vernacular that the child brings to the classroom. . . . I see the primary cause of
educational failure is not language differences, but institutional racism.
(Labov 1987, 10)

Labov holds a somewhat equivocal position here. Black students’ educational failure is caused
by both institutional racism and widening distance between a Black child’s divergent language
and a curricular approach based on standardized, dominant, monolingual, monocultural orienta-
tion. Though he emphasizes that language differences are not the culprit, he does indirectly
indicate them as problematic. He decries the dismal state of the American racial divide and lack
of policies to alleviate racial isolation or segregation.
By 1995, Labov writes that “the problem of continuing reading failure . . . is one that would
be predicted by the continued isolation and drift of AAVE in a context of increasing residential
segregation”(19). Here we can see that Labov is explicitly stating that AAVE’s divergence is a
cause of reading failure. He also indicts inadequate teaching of reading and the social conditions
in which impoverished Black people are expected to excel: “It is not simply that efforts to
improve reading have been inadequate, but rather that the material conditions that created the
problem have worsened. . . . A reversal of reading failure is only possible if the curriculum is
revised to provide help primarily for those who need it” (19). Labov identified several AAVE
features (e.g., consonant cluster reduction on word endings, final consonant absence, differential
pronunciation patterns, and others) that would interfere with the acquisition of written and
spoken school English and with decoding skills. Since AAVE was further/est away from stand-
ardized English upon which the curriculum is based, AAVE causes reading difficulty, and is thus
an accomplice to educational failure. He also cites teacher attitudes against AAVE speakers as a
contributing factor, but all of these, Labov argues, are symbolic of the larger sociocultural conflict
and residential segregation that are the major causes of linguistic divergence.
To deal with the situation, Labov suggests that linguistic principles be embedded within recognition
of Black children and Black culture on their own terms, while simultaneously promoting standardized
language as a path to economic opportunity, without which Black people are condemned to
impoverished lives in the inner city. And now we come to Labov’s (2010) current position:
Recent research implies that, if residential integration increases significantly, AAVE as a
whole may be in danger of losing its distinctiveness as a linguistic resource. While many of
us would regret a decrease in the eloquent syntactic and semantic options of AAVE and its
possible withering away, we must also consider that the loss of a dialect is a lesser evil than
the endangerment AAVE speakers currently confront.
(15)

The argument he sets forth reflects longtime contradictions and conceptualizations of the
culture of poor Black Americans and its role in the perpetuation of poverty. This argument also
exemplifies the limits of sociolinguistics in its quest to uphold equality, diversity, and social justice
(points which will be elaborated below). Labov’s argument is slightly different from Moynihan’s

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Elaine Richardson

as these issues are rehearsed by Steinberg (2011) in a recent Boston Review article “Poor Reason:
Culture Still Doesn’t Explain Poverty.”

Although he [Moynihan] acknowledged that past racism and unemployment undermined

black families, he held that the pathology in ‘the [African] American family’ had not only
assumed a life of its own, but was also the primary determinant of the litany of problems
that beset lower-class blacks.
(Steinberg 2011, para. 7)

An extended examination of Labov’s (2010) argument will make my point clearer. On the
one hand, he holds that AAVE is not a pathology, that it is eloquent in its syntax and semantics,
that AAVE is the “great resource, an elegant form of expression that [Black people] use when
they reflect most thoughtfully on the oppression and misery of daily life” (24). On the other
hand, he places AAVE, in its 20th century developments/divergences from mainstream White
speech, within segregation and institutionalized racism. In Labov’s (2010, 24) words, “AAVE has
developed its present form in the framework of the most extreme racial segregation that the
world has ever known.” AAVE is represented as interconnected with inadequate instruction,
which is connected with reading failure, both of which are linked to poor schools, poverty,
unemployment, high crime rate—all forms of social pathology. There are several major reasons
that this argument is problematic. AAVE is reduced to its entanglement with oppression and
pathology.

Labov uses words like resource and elegant, but he seems to be seeing its use as restricted
to those times when African Americans “reflect most thoughtfully on the oppression
and misery of daily life”—a very narrow and pessimistic view of AAVE. . . . Labov
equates regressive and discriminatory practices with the existence, persistence and spread
of AAVE. The end to segregation brings—in Labov’s view of the world—linguistic
assimilation, loss of AAVE, improved reading scores and generally a happier, more
congenial U.S.
(Lippi-Green 2012, 196)
As Morgan (1994, 135) has pointed out, this brand of mainstream sociolinguistics has
helped to perpetuate the dominant society’s construction of AAVE as a symbol of poverty and
oppression and does not do enough to highlight African Americans’ own views of their social
reality and what and who exactly constitutes African American speech community member-
ship. Morgan (following Spears) notes that many middle class African Americans have
acquired standardized American English despite lack of integration; they socialize mainly
among mixed classes of African Americans. This points up the fact that social mobility does
not necessarily lead to a loss of African American cultural identity, though since Labov and
many mainstream sociolinguists have located AAVE in poverty, lack, and pathology, they
minimize the history and cultural function of Black Language within the African American
speech community and its function in relation to standardized American Englishes (Morgan
1994, 128).
Moreover, as Rickford (2010) has shown, some African Americans have been surrounded by
European Americans and their vernacular speech patterns and did not pick them up.
We need to distinguish between integration and assimilation. Many African Americans want
integration in the sense of access to middle-class jobs and housing and schools and other
institutions. But others are also seeking housing in Black neighborhoods (like Baldwin Hills,

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 When Language Is and Not the Issue

Los Angeles) within large urban centers like Los Angeles; Washington, DC; and Atlanta,
determined to retain some of their distinctive cultural traditions. Perhaps, in a Jesse Jackson
conception of race mixing in a salad bowl rather than a melting pot, there will be room for
distinctive linguistic traditions as well.
(Rickford 2010, 32)
Labov’s prescription, focusing as it does on AAVE, assimilation and integration of Black peo-
ple into European American culture, and autonomous reading (a point to which I shall return)
as means to economic and cultural empowerment, ignores the African American struggle for
liberation and self-determination.
From a language planning perspective, the language of Black America (Smitherman 1977)
has long represented a tension in the field. As argued by Debose (2007), what we call it and how
we define it matters deeply. Mainstream linguists, or orthodox linguists such as Labov, classify
AAVE as a dialect of English rather than a separate language. The criteria they use for language
include speakers’ attitudes, mutual intelligibility, and presence or absence of an army and navy
(Black people lack the status and power to name their speech a language and make it stick).
Orthodox linguists describe and codify structural features and grammatical patterns and use
word lists. They emphasize AAVE’s similarity to English (or its divergence from it) and recog-
nize it as a subform of English, a non-autonomous dialect. “Ebonics” scholars, on the other
hand, focus on the sociohistorical context/experiences of the people in their search/quest to
define their own history and identity. “Ebonics” or “African American Language” reflects this
desire to avoid undesirable symbolic designation as subordinate to English. Ebonics scholars
focus on Black people’s distinctive ways of speaking and social context, settings, modes of speak-
ing, topics, messages, particular speech acts, autonomous grammar, and Africanisms in structure
and style. Smitherman’s (2006) definition of the language of Black America does not reduce it
to poverty and pathology:
Black or African American Language (BL/AAL) is a style of speaking English words with
Black flava—with Africanized semantic, grammatical, pronunciation, and rhetorical pat-
terns. AAL comes out of the experience of U.S. slave descendants. This shared experience
has resulted in common speaking styles, systematic patterns of grammar, and common lan-
guage practices in the community and gives you a sense of personal identity. AAL served to
bind the enslaved together, melding diverse African ethnic groups into one community.
Ancient elements of African speech were transformed into a new language forged in the
crucible of enslavement, U.S. style apartheid, and the Black struggle to survive and thrive in
the face of dominating and oppressive whiteness.
(3)
Labovian orthodox linguists seek (limited) recognition for AAVE while Ebonics scholars
seek fullest recognition of the language of Black America. Ebonics scholars do not espouse
the superiority of standardized English but support it as a means of survival (Debose 2007).
Full recognition of African American Language (AAL) faces many political obstacles. Though
he does not intend for it to be so, Labov’s current centering of AAVE in poverty and pathol-
ogy is one such obstacle, since AAVE is set in opposition to learning and progress. Black
people and AAVE are oppressed by the very social pathologies that press Labov into a senti-
mental lamentation for the loss of AAVE as something that must give way to dominant
English.
Though Labov acknowledges and decries racist structural problems oppressing vulnerable
Black people, these receive scant attention. The major policies, practices, and entities responsible

189
Elaine Richardson

for the oppression of African Americans are obscured by nominalizations, implied subjects, and
agentless passives, in the framework that he sets out:
The first and overarching condition is the degree of poverty . . . with its interlocking rela-
tionships with other forms of social pathology. Unemployment is of course the primary
cause of poverty. Unemployment rates for young Black men who have not graduated high
school have recently been reported at 72 percent, as opposed to 19 percent for the corre-
sponding population of Latino youth. . . . Unemployment, underemployment, and poverty
jointly reduce or eliminate the economic base for the Black family. Inability to participate
in the formal, legal economy leads directly to participation in the informal, illegal economy
with a rapid increase in crime rates. . . . The incarceration rate of young Black males has
tripled in two decades, rising from two percent per year in 1981 to almost six percent in
2002. . . . Coupled with increasing reinforcement of child support laws, young Black males
are removed from the formal economy during and after their prison terms. The economic
base of the largely female-headed Black family is then further eroded.
Poverty in the inner city also affects the quality of schooling. . . . Underfunding of
schools plainly contributes to inadequate instruction and—to reading failure. The cycle
closes as reading failure leads to further unemployment. . . . Reading failure reinforces the
cycle of poverty, unemployment, and crime.
(Labov 2010, 20–22)
What is not discussed above is the very real way in which “power relations are maintained
through ideological representations in language” (Pennycook 2001, 38), Thus, the historical and
current actions that created these conditions are obscured. And again, even the way that the
language and the people’s oppression have been conceptualized and studied in mainstream soci-
olinguistics disempowers Black people. The sociolinguistic order parallels the socially stratified,
market-based, and racist practices of society. Fairclough explains:
The relationship between social classes starts in economic production, but extends to all
parts of a society. The power of the capitalist class depends also on its ability to control
the state: contrary to the view of the state as standing neutrally “above” classes, I shall
assume that the state is the key element in maintaining the dominance of the capitalist
class, and controlling the working class. This political power is typically exercised not just
by capitalists, but by an alliance of capitalists and others who see their interests as tied to
capital—many professional workers, for instance. We can refer to this alliance as the
dominant bloc.
(1989, 33)
As such, the sociolinguistic order is not natural and follows the social order, based on societal
prejudices that are accepted as normal and inculcated into societal fabric. The fact is reality is
socially constructed. Concepts such as language and dialect are the product of politics, education,
socialization, advertising, and public relations (Debose 2007, 36).
In his discussion of racism and cultural forces and traits that disempower and impoverish the
Black community, Wilson’s (2009) work focuses on the intersection of race and poverty and cites
structural factors as they affect Black males in particular. Structural forces omitted from Labov’s
representation of the problem that contribute to the unemployment of Black males is decreased
demand for low skilled American labor as Americans now compete with workers in countries
such as China, India, and Bangladesh, who can be paid less than a living wage. Wilson also cites
decreased opportunity for manufacturing jobs—especially auto manufacturing jobs. This has

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stemmed a source of better-paid employment that began for Black Americans around World War II.
Another contributing factor is decreased union representation.
Labov cites the high percentage of “Black men who have not graduated high school” and
corresponding high unemployment rate and how these factors, coupled with poverty, eliminate
the economic base of the Black family. One should note Labov’s representation of the situation
with Black males as the active subjects and agents of the action here who are the cause of their
own school failure and unemployment. Although there are a constellation of factors that con-
tribute to the failure of schools to graduate Black males and educate them for life, movements
such as Afrocentric curriculum, which has as its focus the struggle for African American
liberation, the promotion of a counterhegemonic system of meaning embedded in African
American culture, and the promotion of African unity and empowerment throughout the dias-
pora (Debose 2007) remains a distant dream for all but a miniscule percentage of Black youth.
The active involvement of a web of laws, regulations, and informal rules reinforced by social
stigma is very much a part of the poverty matrix. The War on Drugs, with unfair sentencing prac-
tices for small amounts of crack cocaine, and the Prison Industrial Complex, as well as ex-felons’
inability to re-enter the community and find gainful employment, have wreaked havoc on the Black
community (Alexander 2010, The New Jim Crow). Understanding the Prison Industrial Complex
as discussed by Angela Davis (1998) is crucial, and her analysis is worth repeating here:
To deliver up bodies destined for profitable punishment, the political economy of prisons
relies on racialized assumptions of criminality—such as images of Black welfare mothers
reproducing criminal children—and on racist practices in arrest, conviction, and sentencing
patterns. Colored bodies constitute the main human raw material in this vast experiment to
disappear the major social problems of our time. Once the aura of magic is stripped away
from the imprisonment solution, what is revealed is racism, class bias, and the parasitic seduc-
tion of capitalist profit.
(1998, The Color of Imprisonment)
Though he may not intend for it to be so, Labov’s argument implicates AAVE as part of the
social pathology of racial and economic segregation. This is substantiated in Labov’s emphasis on
AAVE’s divergence from other vernaculars. Labov hopes for AAVE’s linguistic convergence with
European American mainstream and middle class speech as a means to change oppressive condi-
tions. His sentiments make good common sense. He wants poor Black AAVE speaking students
to have equal access to a quality education and a chance at societal parity by integrating language
and literacy education and, hopefully, society. Nonetheless, Winters-Evans and Esposito’s (2010,
17) critique of integrationist ideology sheds light on the problem with Labov’s prescription. The
integrationist perspective downplays the significance of race, propagates a stance of neutrality,
objectivity, and White middle class normativity, with White middle class values as the ideal ways
of thinking or behaving. Thus, AAVE’s divergence is abnormal.
Labov’s major claim is that Black people are endangered because they are isolated and entrapped
in a context rife with conflict, struggle, and survival. Even if too hastily, Labov rightfully cites these
factors, yet focuses his argument on AAVE—that it has developed and flourished and diverged in
appalling conditions of segregation and poverty, and it interferes with reading and school success.
Labov’s argument, roughly, is that reading and effective education will alleviate the conditions
spawned from poverty, ghettos, crime, incarceration, economically torn families, and so on.
Literacy in dominant discourses is advantageous, but the problem is not that Black people are
illiterate AAVE speakers. The problem is that poor Black people are trapped in a cycle of struc-
tural racism, and it will take more than changing our syntax, phonology, and vocabulary to fix

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that. The problem is reflective of modern capitalist nations. In this way, Labov’s argument is
closely aligned with the literacy myth:
a belief . . . that the acquisition of literacy is a necessary precursor to and invariably results in
economic development, democratic practice, cognitive enhancement, and upward social
mobility.
(Graff and Duffy 2008, 41)
Labov and his associates have developed programs such as Portals, which is implemented in
the California schools, and The Reading Road, implemented by the Penn Reading Initiative.
These programs include attention to pertinent syntactical, phonological, and lexical aspects of
AAVE, as well as incorporating the real-life conflicts and injustice children experience into the
materials to thwart the trend of alienation and irrelevance Black children have faced with
traditional reading materials. Labov (2010) states:
Whether our efforts will be effective enough to cut into the pattern shown [in his framework
of residential segregation] is a question still to be resolved over time.
(22)
Even if everyone spoke alike, a serious redistribution of wealth would need to occur, with-
out which segregated upper middle class Whites, the elite, and the corporations which they
control will continue to be well resourced and insulated in segregated communities. Another
important point is that Labov’s conception of reading aligns with an autonomous model of
literacy. As New Literacy Studies theorists have shown, literacy is not simply a set of isolated
skills that can be taught; acquisition of language and literacy is socialization into particular
discourses and worldviews (Scribner and Cole 1981; Heath 1983; Street 1993; Gee 1999).
Literacy is informed by an array of socially constituted practices, understandings, and ways of
being in the world, and literacy varies with sociocultural needs and is bound up in relations of
power (Macedo 1994). If Labov’s pedagogy does little to confront these realities, it upholds
structured inequality.
Pennycook’s (2001) work on critical applied linguistics would locate Labov’s prescription
somewhere between liberal ostrichist and emancipatory modernist approaches to sociolinguistics:
[It is ] dominated by a bland egalitarianism that does not help us in framing questions of
inequality, language, and power. Often based in liberal pluralist politics and structuralist
approaches to academic work, the approach advocates the isolation of politics from aca-
demic work. Thus, the structuralism of linguistics and sociolinguistics that permits the
view that all dialects are equal is also the view that has not allowed for an adequate under-
standing of how languages are complexly related to social and cultural factors, ignoring
therefore, the profound questions of social difference, inequality, and conflict. . . . [T]his
position accepts and even celebrates the inevitability of the global spread of English
[the death of AAVE, in this case] while rather lamely calling for support for other
languages. . . .
(165)

This version of sociolinguistics relates language to class or gender in concrete and critical
terms, while in the context of the global spread of [dominant] English, it raises concerns to
do with linguistic imperialism and language rights; the tendency in emancipatory modernist
frameworks is to locate language in inequitable but static and deterministic social condi-
tions. . . . The modernist emancipatory approach tends to deal with difference, therefore,

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only in terms of an inclusionary aspect of its vision of critical democracy rather than as an
engagement with a broader notion of possibility.
(167)
To imply and argue that Black speakers’ language must be intervened upon as a means to
social “equality” (integration, economic/political empowerment) is to argue that racism, cultural
imperialism, political and economic disenfranchisement, social differences, and attitudes will never
be overcome by dominant middle class White persons, their adherents, and the institutions they
control. This may well be the case. If so, the ideal of democracy is a sham. Multicultural education
and diversity are dead end roads and we might as well stop fighting against social injustice. Labov’s
linkage of Black language and Black illiteracy with Black impoverishment and Black segregation,
taken together with his assertion that some forms of cultural diversity . . . need no help to survive leads to
the inference that poor Black people are responsible for and sustain the cycle of oppression in
which they have been entrapped. The argument also suggests that taking Black language out of the
equation will play a significant role in reversing the effects of segregation. We know that conquered,
colonized, and (descendants of) enslaved people of color, such as Black Americans, Native Ameri-
cans, Native Hawaiians, Alaskan Natives, Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, who were forced into
the United States (non-immigrants) are generally failed by the educational system (Ogbu and
Simons 1998), and their languages are disempowered, as are their cultures and histories.
To reverse these traditions, we must push education to open new possibilities.
. . . [If] schools (and people) are not passive mirrors of an economy, but instead are active
agents in reproducing and contesting dominant social relations, then understanding what
they do and acting upon them becomes of no small moment. For if schools are part of a
“contested terrain,” if they are part of a much larger set of political, economic, and cultural
conflicts the outcomes of which are not naturally preordained to favor capital, then the hard
and continuous day-to-day struggles at the level of curriculum and teaching practice in
schools is part of these larger conflicts as well. The key is linking those day-to-day struggles
within the schools to other actions for a more progressive society in that wider arena
(Apple and Weis 2013, 84)
African American language is a repository of Black culture, history, and identity.
Respecting and embracing the fullness of this position does not mean that Black students
should not learn how to speak, read, and write more prestigious, standardized forms. This position
underscores the point that promoting the dissolution/eradication of African American Language
(AAL) is a form of miseducation that will perpetuate the cycle of dominance, racism, and inter-
nalized racism against and among Black people and the devaluation of Black humanity, history,
and culture. It also promotes monolingual ideology and linguistic and sociocultural imperialism.
This position simultaneously pushes for economic integration and educational reparations for
Black people and Black language.
New Literacy scholars are advocating approaches that incorporate youth language and literacy
practices to address social issues. Literacy education for social justice forces us to confront the
politics of knowledge and power as part of reading, writing, listening, and speaking holistically
about ourselves in society. In this school of thought, the lived experiences of the people are fodder
for critical literacy education and social change.

Note
1 NLP was established by CCCC in 1988 and adopted by NCTE in 1998.

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References
Alexander, M. 2010. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York, NY:
The New Press.
Apple, M., and Weis, L. 2013. Seeing Education Relationally: The Stratification of Culture as Lived. In
M. Apple (Ed.), Knowledge, Power, and Education: The Selected Works of Michael W. Apple, (pp. 69–91).
Independence, KY.
College Conference on Composition and Communication. 1974. Students’ Right to Their Own Language,
Special Issue of CCC, 25(3 Fall), 1–32.
Davis, A. 1998, September 10. Masked Racism: Reflections on the Prison Industrial Complex. Retrieved
from Colorlines: http://colorlines.com/archives/1998/09/masked_racism_reflections_on_the_prison_
industrial_complex.html
Debose, C. 2007. The Ebonics Phenomenon, Language Planning, and the Hegemony of Standard English.
In H. S. Alim and J. Baugh (Eds.), Talkin Black Talk: Language, Education and Social Change. New York:
Columbia University Teachers College Press. 30–42.
Fairclough, N. 1989. Language and Power. London: Longman.
Gee, J. 1999. An Introduction to Discourse Analysis: Theory and Method. New York: Routledge.
Graff, H., and Duffy, J. 2008. Literacy Myths. In B. V. Street (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Language and Education
(2nd ed., Vol. 2). 41–52.
Heath, S. B. 1983. Ways with Words: Language, Life, and Work in Communities and Classrooms. Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press.
Labov, W. 1972a, June. Academic Ignorance and Black Intelligence. The Atlantic Monthly. Retrieved from
www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/95sep/ets/labo.htm
Labov, W. 1972b. Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black English Vernacular. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press.
Labov, W. 1987. Are Black and White Vernaculars Diverging? Papers from the NWAVE XIV Panel Dis-
cussion with Ralph W. Fasold, William Labov, Fay Boyd Vaughn-Cooke, Guy Bailey, Walt Wolfram,
Arthur K. Spears and John Rickford. American Speech, 62(1), 3–80.
Labov, W. 1995. Can Reading Failure Be Reversed? A Linguistic Approach to the Question, In V. Gadsden and
D. Wagner (Eds.), Literacy Among African-American Youth: Issues in Learning, Teaching, and Schooling. Cresskill,
NJ: Hampton Press. 39–68. Retrieved from ftp://ling.upenn.edu/facpapers/bill_labov/RFR.html
Labov, W. 2010. Unendangered Dialect, Endangered People: The Case of African American Vernacular
English, Transforming Anthropology, 18(1), 15–27.
Lippi-Green, R. 2012. English With an Accent: Language, Ideology and Discrimination in the United States
(2nd ed.). New York/London: Routledge.
Macedo, D. 1994. Literacies of Power: What Americans are Not Allowed to Know. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Morgan, M. 1994. The African American Speech Community: Reality and Sociolinguistics. In M. Morgan (Ed.),
Language and the Social Construction of Identity in Creole Situations. Los Angeles: CAAS Publications, 121–148.
Ogbu, J., and Simons, H. 1998. Voluntary and Involuntary Minorities: A Cultural-Ecological Theory of
School Performance with Some Implications for Education. Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 29,
155–189.
Pennycook, A. 2001. Critical Applied Linguistics: A Critical Introduction. Mahwah, NJ/London: Lawrence
Erlbaum Associates Publishers.
Rickford, J. 2010. Geographical Diversity, Residential Segregation, and the Vitality of African American
Vernacular and Its Speakers, Transforming Anthropology, 18(1), 28–34.
Scribner, S., and Cole, M. 1981. Unpackaging Literacy. In M. Farr Whiteman (Ed.), Writing: The Nature,
Development, and Teaching of Written Communication. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. 71–87.
Smitherman, G. 1977. Talkin and Testifyin: The Language of Black America. Houghton Mifflin/Reprinted by
Wayne State University Press, 1986.
Smitherman, G. 2006. Word From the Mother: Language and African Americans. New York/London:
Routledge.
Steinberg, S. 2011, January 13. Poor Reason: Culture Still Doesn’t Explain Poverty. Boston Review. Retrieved
from www.bostonreview.net/steinberg.php
Street, B. V. (Ed.) 1993. Cross-Cultural Approaches to Literacy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wilson, W. J. 2009. More Than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City. New York/London: W. W.
Norton and Company.
Winters-Evans, V., and Esposito, J. 2010. Other People’s Daughters: Critical Race Feminism and Black Girls’
Education. Educational Foundations, 24(1–2), 11–24.

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Critical Pedagogy and
Language Education
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 15
Reframing Freire
Situating the Principles of Humanizing
Pedagogy Within an Ecological Model
for the Preparation of Teachers

María del Carmen Salazar

The current state of education in the United States can be symbolically represented by the Greek
mythological figure Sisyphus. A king and mere mortal, this deceitful man was condemned by
Zeus to roll a rock up to the top of a hill only to have it roll back down again for all of eternity.
Referenced by Homer in The Odyssey, the legend of Sisyphus is captured in the following
passage:

Bracing himself and thrusting with hands and feet he pushed the boulder uphill on to the
top. But every time, as he was about to send it toppling over the crest, its sheer weight turned
it back, and once again towards the plain the pitiless rock rolled down. So once more he had
to wrestle with the thing and push it up, while the sweat poured from his limbs and the dust
rose high above his head.
(Homer as cited in Rieu 1946, 187)

This metaphor for the U.S. educational system depicts the “Sisyphean challenge” (Yearwood
2012, 23) faced by teachers in the public school system to close the unyielding achievement gap,
or opportunity gap, for students of color.
The challenge can appear insurmountable, given existing statistics on academic disparities
between students of color and White students. One of the most persistent gaps is in mathematics,
as indicated by national assessments (Kulm 2007). For example, while the National Assessment
of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores in mathematics for students of color have increased
recently, the scores have only recently gained parity with levels that White students attained over
20 years ago (Kulm 2007). Additionally, the gap in national fourth- and eighth-grade reading and
writing scores between students of color and Whites did not change significantly from 1992 to
2000 (Hemphill and Vanneman 2011).
As our nation grapples with persistent academic disparities, policymakers pursue one-size-fits-
all approaches to closing the gap through value-added measures such as standardized testing. This
approach negates the complexity of the systems that interact to deny equal educational opportu-
nities for students of color. As a result, the humanity of these students and their teachers is stultified

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María del Carmen Salazar

by sterile, static, and hegemonic practices; thus, dehumanization has become the status quo in
education (Balderrama 2001; Villegas 2007).
Teacher educators play a vital role in reproducing or interrupting the dehumanization of
students of color through shaping the dispositions of pre-service teachers toward students of
color and their communities (Balderrama 2001; Villegas 2007). Often unintentionally, teacher
educators reproduce inequities and reify dehumanizing approaches by failing to provide
pre-service teachers with specific dispositions and competencies to meet the needs of students
of color (Villegas 2007). Moreover, when teacher educators do acknowledge the needs of
students of color, they often emphasize “quick fix” (Anast Seguin and Ambrosio 2002)
approaches without acknowledging the complexity of the systems that interact to support or
constrain the humanization of students of color (Cochran-Smith 2004; Tedick and Walker,
1994; Villegas 2007).
In contrast, teacher educators can be a conduit for interrupting dehumanization in education.
As such, teacher educators can prepare pre-service teachers by: (a) nurturing the dispositions,
knowledge, and skills necessary to humanize education (Franquiz and Salazar 2004), (b) unveiling
the complexity of systems that interact to deny the humanness of students of color (Aloni 2002),
and (c) promoting teaching as a catalyst for systemic change (Nieto 2003; Lytle and Cochran-
Smith 1994). With the aforementioned approaches, teacher educators can equip candidates with
the resources needed to foist the proverbial ‘rock’ over the crest.
In this chapter, I articulate the values that guide my practice as a teacher educator, and I eval-
uate the consistency between my practice and my beliefs. I examine the following question: How
do I live my values more fully in my practice? Paulo Freire’s educational philosophy on human-
ization serves as the compass that guides my values and practices. I reframe Freire’s conception of
humanization in education by situating the principles of humanizing pedagogy within an eco-
logical model to promote the development of ecologically-minded humanizing dispositions for the
preparation of teachers. As a result, I generate a curriculum map that delineates existing and
potential learning experiences for pre-service teachers that promote the development of such
dispositions. The results of the curriculum mapping process lead me to reflect on one particular
learning experience that reveals a catalyst for the development of ecologically-minded humaniz-
ing dispositions. I conclude the chapter with a call for a colectivo (collective) of teacher educators
and teachers committed to humanizing education.

Naming the Questions

LaBoskey (2009) asserts that teaching is inherently a principled practice, defined as “an active,
decision-making praxis . . . informed by a set of well-grounded dynamic principles that can guide
and interpret interventions and outcomes in relationship with goals of equity and social
justice” (73). In teaching pre-service teachers, my practice is based on the following principle:
Before pre-service teachers are immersed in the technical practice of teaching, they need to
be immersed in learning experiences that compel them to: (a) interrogate the complexity of
the systems that constrain the humanity of students of color, (b) perceive the humanity of
students of color as a valuable resource for their learning, and (c) envisage teaching as a cat-
alyst for systemic change. Ultimately, one’s principled practice is shaped by what they value
(LaBoskey 2009). In this study, I pose the question: How do I live my values more fully in
my practice? My question aligns with my desire to articulate the values that guide my prac-
tice, and evaluate the consistency between my practices and my beliefs. The educational
philosophy of Paulo Freire serves as the compass that guides my values and practices.

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 Reframing Freire

Naming the Theory

Humanizing Pedagogy
My practice is informed by Freirean philosophy on humanization. Humanization is the process
of becoming more fully human as social, historical, thinking, communicating, transformative,
creative persons who participate in and with the world (Freire, 1972, 1984). Freire asserts that to
become more fully human, women and men must become conscious of their presence in the world
as a way to individually and collectively re-envisage their social world (Dale and Hyslop-Margison
2010; Freire and Betto 1985; Schapiro 2001). Moreover, Freire adds that humanization is the onto-
logical vocation of human beings and, as such, is the practice of freedom in which the oppressed
are liberated through consciousness of their subjugated positions and a desire for self-determination
(Freire 1970). Freire (1970) proposes that the process of humanization fosters the transformation
and authentic liberation of the oppressed; thus, “to transform the world is to humanize it” (Freire
1985, 70).
Freire’s construct of humanizing pedagogy extends his theory of humanization into the
practical realm of instruction. Freire (1970) describes humanizing pedagogy as a revolutionary
approach to instruction that “ceases to be an instrument by which teachers can manipulate
students, but rather expresses the consciousness of the students themselves” (51). Teachers who
enact humanizing pedagogy engage in a quest for “mutual humanization” (56) with their stu-
dents, a process fostered through problem-posing education in which students are co-investigators
in dialogue with their teachers. This dialogic approach to education should be pursued with the
goal of developing “conscientizacao” (26) or critical consciousness, which is “learning to per-
ceive social, political, and economic contradictions, and to take action against the oppressive
elements of reality” (17). There are limitless possibilities for Freire’s pedagogical philosophy, and
Freire urges his followers to reinvent his ideas in the context of their local struggles.
Freire presents humanizing pedagogy as a philosophical approach that fosters critical, dialog-
ical, and liberatory practices (Glass 2001; Huerta and Brittain 2010; Huerta 2011; Jennings and
Smith 2002; Roberts 2000). Humanizing pedagogues have expanded Freire’s teachings over the
past four decades to illuminate the application of humanizing pedagogy in educational settings.
In a recent article in the Review of Research in Education, I synthesize four decades of educational
research on humanizing pedagogy through the identification of its five principles (Salazar 2013):
(a) the full development of the person is essential for humanization; (b) to deny someone else’s
humanization is also to deny one’s own; (c) the journey for humanization is both an individual
and collective endeavor toward critical consciousness; (d) critical reflection and action can trans-
form structures that impede our own and others’ humanness, thus facilitating liberation for all;
and (e) educators are responsible for promoting a more fully human world through their peda-
gogical principles and practices.
Pedagogy, or the art and skill of teaching, is fundamental to the practice of teaching (Korthagen
2008). While Freire conceptualized a humanizing pedagogy as a philosophical approach, the
focus on pedagogy is often on discrete knowledge and skills that are causal, linear, and lead to
“correct” practice (Luke 2006). Educators searching for pedagogical recipes criticize Freire’s lack
of specific technical methods, describing his concepts as vague, imprecise, generic, and oversim-
plified (Dale and Hyslop-Margison 2010; Schugurensky 2011).
Bartolomé (1994) describes a humanizing pedagogy as being inclusive of both philosophical
orientations and instructional methods that humanize education. Bartolomé stresses that educa-
tors should not reject the use of teaching methods and strategies, but rather, they should disavow
uncritical approaches to teaching and learning in favor of reflection and action. This focus allows

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educators to “recreate and reinvent teaching methods and materials by always taking into con-
sideration the sociocultural realities that can either limit or expand the possibilities to humanize
education” (177). Bartolomé’s focus on the instruction that builds on the realities of students’
lives breathes practical life into Freire’s philosophies. Ecological theory compliments humanizing
pedagogy through a focus on students’ lives as complex interactions between individuals and
systems.

Ecological Theory
Ecological theory brings together complex and dynamic perspectives, peoples, practices, and
environments (Luke 2006; Shimahara, Holowinsky, and Tomlinson-Clarke 2001). Ecological the-
ory examines five key elements: (a) interactions; (b) interrelationships; (c) adaptation; (d) succes-
sion; and (e) transformation. First, ecological theory examines interactions between individuals and
their contexts as defined by social systems, including cultural and sociopolitical systems (Levine,
Perkins, and Perkins 2005). Second, the theory examines the interrelationships between social sys-
tems, thus stressing the interdependence among the levels of the system and making the assertion
that a change in one ecological setting can influence other settings and their relationships
(Suarez-Balcazar, Fabricio, Garcia-Ramirez, and Taylor-Ritzler, 2013). Third, ecological theory
explores the adaptation of a person to their complex environment; such adaptation is often fraught
with challenges and power struggles (Levine, Perkins, and Perkins 2005). Trickett, Kelly, and Todd
(1972) describe adaptation in the following passage:

Adaptation is the ongoing interaction between individuals and the ecological environments
in which they live, work, study, and play. This interaction is an ongoing, dynamic interplay
between the individual and the environment. As the environment places demands on the
individual, the individual adapts, and as the individual places demands on the environment,
the environment adapts to changes.
(7)

Fourth, ecological theory describes issues of succession. This concept acknowledges the fact
that change is an ever-present reality for the environment and for the individuals within it. Addi-
tionally, the complexity in interacting systems may increase over time until stabilization occurs
(Suarez-Balcazar et al. 2013). It is in the interactional space of constant change where individuals
and multidimensional systems interact that the fifth key element, transformation, can occur. Trans-
formation can be understood as the “capacity to initiate social transformation” (Olsson, Folke,
and Hahn 2004, 2).
Shimahara, Holowinsky, and Tomlinson-Clarke (2001) delineate ecological systems that impact
student learning, including microsystems, mesosystems, exosystems, and chronosystems. First, Shimahara,
Holowinsky, and Tomlinson-Clarke (2001) assert that the microsystem focus on the individual,
self-understanding, and interpersonal interaction. The self is defined in multiple contexts, includ-
ing understanding ourselves as racial and cultural beings and contrasting how we define ourselves
with how society defines us (Tomlinson-Clarke and Wang 1999). Additionally, the influence of
“significant others” is relevant in the microsystem, including those who have the most immediate
influence on the learner and are most likely to impact their behaviors, such as parents, siblings,
extended family, teachers, and peers (Alfaro, Umaña-Taylor, and Bámaca 2006; Wang, Haertel, and
Walberg 1994).
Second, the mesosystem focus is “a system of microsystems that includes peer group, classroom,
school, or family, is particularly important in the young person’s experiential framework” (Marks

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 Reframing Freire

2000, 157). The mesosystem is inclusive of institutions that reside within communities in which
individuals are directly influenced. Sarason (1976) asserts that communities are influenced by com-
plex multicultural ecological settings that are influenced by a variety of sociocultural factors.
Third, the exosystem focus is on social, cultural, and political institutional structures that influ-
ence policies where the mesosystem resides. The exosystem includes aspects such as educational
policies that govern school reform. According to Cochran-Smith (2004), pre-service teacher
preparation programs do not provide teachers with the analytical skills they need to interrogate
exosystem influences on teacher performance and school reform. Cochran-Smith asserts that
pre-service teachers need to be able to negotiate their conceptions of best practice within the
constraints generated by the exosystem.
Fourth, the chronosystem focus accounts for the temporal element of the ecological model that
reflects how historical shifts have gradually contributed to the marginalization and emancipation
of students of color and their communities (Shimahara, Holowinsky, and Tomlinson-Clark 2001).
The elements described above are closely aligned with Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Theory
(1992), a model that is used to understand how systems interact and impact individuals and
communities.

The Link Between Ecological Theory and Humanizing Pedagogy

An ecological approach can be used to understand how students’ lives are impacted by systems
that reproduce or interrupt educational inequities (Suarez-Balcazar et al. 2013). In adopting an
ecological perspective, educators can “develop the capacity to evaluate and transform the context
and oneself in accordance with the community’s fabric . . . thus transforming social systems”
(Suarez-Balcazar et al. 2013, 21).
Thus, an ecological approach complements humanizing pedagogy through the examination
of the interconnected systems that reinforce asymmetries of power and humanize or dehumanize
students of color. Saleebey (2001) eloquently captures the intersection between ecological theory
and humanization in the following:

Ecological theory pushes us to understand the significance of the social and physical spaces
where individual and environment meet (the interfaces) and recognize that in those spaces
the work of supporting human development and the nurturing of esteem and competence
is done; in those spaces the dirty work of oppression can also be done, along with the stifling
of human possibility and the deepening of vulnerability.
(215)

It is in the social and physical spaces where the individual and the environment meet that the
theoretical frameworks of humanizing pedagogy and ecological theory can thrive.
In the next section, I examine the following question: How do I live my values more fully in
my practice? To answer this question, I analyze the learning experiences embedded in the summer
orientation of the University of Denver’s Teacher Education Program (TEP), which consists
of two courses, Teaching and Learning Environments and Second Language Acquisition. These
courses are intended to instill ecologically-minded humanizing dispositions in pre-service teachers
as a foundation for the enactment of technical instructional practices. Ecologically-minded
humanizing dispositions are defined as attitudes, beliefs, and values needed to interrogate complex
systems that impact the learning of students of color and advance their dignity, humanity, and
learning. The result of the analysis yields a curriculum map that delineates the existing and poten-
tial learning experiences for pre-service teachers that are rooted in an ecological model and are

201
María del Carmen Salazar

aligned to principles of humanizing pedagogy. Additionally, I delve deeper into my questions and
present one particular learning experience that can serve as a catalyst for the development of
ecologically-minded humanizing dispositions.

Naming the Results

Generating a Curriculum Map

In examining my practice toward the development of ecologically-minded humanizing disposi-
tions, I reframe Freire’s conceptualization of humanization in education by situating the princi-
ples of humanizing pedagogy within ecological systems in a curriculum map. I use the elements
of an ecological system (Shimahara, Holowinsky, and Tomlinson-Clarke 2001); five principles of
humanizing pedagogy (Salazar 2013); and elements of backward design (Wiggins and McTighe
2005), including enduring understandings, essential questions, and learning experiences. In cre-
ating this chart and starting with the end in mind—nurturing ecologically-minded humanizing
dispositions—I was able to document the current learning experiences that aligned with ecolog-
ical theory and humanizing pedagogy. Moreover, I was able to brainstorm potential learning
experiences to continue to move our pre-service teachers toward ecologically-minded human-
izing dispositions. The existing and proposed experiences are identified in Table 15.1.
Engaging in the creation of this curriculum map was a powerful experience for me. It allowed
me to articulate my beliefs and align current learning experiences to my values. Furthermore, it
allowed me to identify curricular strengths, gaps, and opportunities to generate new ideas for
learning experiences. Last, it allowed me to fully articulate my values and goals for immersing
pre-service teachers in learning experiences that develop ecologically-minded humanizing
dispositions.

Exploring a Catalyst for Change

While articulating my philosophy of practice and aligning my practice and beliefs, I came to
realize another important element: I believe pre-service teachers need a disruptive experience that
can serve as a catalyst for the development of ecologically-minded humanizing dispositions.
Moreover, they need to draw on their own lived experiences in order to develop a deep and
sustained commitment to understanding the complexity of students’ lives and engaging in
humanizing education. This assertion aligns with Clandinin and Connelly’s (1995) conceptual-
ization of teacher knowledge as a “body of convictions, meanings, conscious or unconscious, that
have arisen from experience” (7).
I have used one particular pedagogical tool in the TEP program for six consecutive years, a
simulation designed to submerge pre-service teachers into the experience of an English language
learner (ELL). I refer to this as a submersion experience because students are compelled to “sink-
or-swim” in response to my instructional strategies. In this experience, I teach a 60-minute lesson
in Spanish on a topic most of the pre-service teachers do not have background knowledge of:
Cesar Chavez. This icon of the U.S. civil rights movement is often invisible in American history,
and typically unknown to my predominantly middle class White students. I put the students in
a high stakes environment by indicating that they will need to pass a Spanish proficiency test at
the end of the lesson, and that the results of this test will determine their opportunities for place-
ments and jobs. Throughout the lesson, I strategically use instructional strategies that support my
students in their efforts to excel, or “swim,” yet I also purposefully allow them to fail, or “sink.”
For example, to make it easier for students to learn, I use sheltered instruction strategies such as

202
Table 15.1 Curriculum Alignment to Ecological Theory and Humanizing Pedagogy

Theory Enduring Understandings Essential Questions Learning Experiences

EES1: The microsystem Students will Who am I? What Identity quilt:

(individual-family understand how aspects of my identity Create “I” quilt to
context) impacts their own identity are most salient? visually represent
student learning. is influenced by Who are my own identities.
HPP1: The full contextual factors, students? How *Identity hands:
development of the including beliefs, can I meet the Engage K–12 students
person is essential values, family holistic needs of in placement sites
for humanization. traditions, ethnic my students? in creating identity
background, SES, hands to visually
gender, preferences, represent identities.
values, beliefs, etc.
*Written reflection:
Students will Compare and contrast
understand the needs own identities and
of the whole child students’ identities.
(typical patterns in
*Child Study: Analyze
child and adolescent
the experiences
development,
of a student (ELL,
including language,
special needs, or
racial identity,
gifted) inside and
socioemotional,
outside of school.
cognitive, etc.)
EES2: The mesosystem Students will What is the Submersion experience:
(community understand the experience of Reflect on a
context) impacts experiences of marginalized dehumanizing
student learning. differential treatment, communities experience of being
HP2: To deny prejudice, and inside and outside submersed in a
someone else’s discrimination faced of school? foreign language with
humanization is also by marginalized How do family, limited supports.
to deny one’s own. communities. community, and Community cultural
HPP3: The journey Students will school influences wealth quilt: Create
for humanization is understand family, impact student a quilt representing
an individual and community, and learning? the cultural wealth
collective endeavor school influences on How can I of the community
toward critical student learning. demonstrate asset surrounding
consciousness. Students will perspectives and the school.
understand the respect for diversity? Dialogic interactions:
importance of Engage in critical
asset perspectives reflection on
and valuing and readings, media,
respecting diversity and guest speakers
beyond a surface through probing
culture approach. questions that
address issues of
equity in classroom
discussion,
blogs, and group
discussion boards.

(Continued)
Table 15.1 (Continued)

Theory Enduring Understandings Essential Questions Learning Experiences

EES3: The exosystem Students will How are Dialogic interactions:

(societal-policy understand systemic communities of Engage in critical
context) impacts inequities that color marginalized reflection on
student learning. impact the learning through readings, media,
HPP4: Critical of marginalized institutionalized and guest speakers
reflection and action communities. practices and through probing
can transform Students will educational policies? questions that
structures that understand how How have address issues of
impede our own and culturally and communities of equity in classroom
others’ humanness, linguistically diverse color and their discussion,
thus facilitating communities and allies resisted blogs, and group
liberation for all. their allies have marginalization? discussion boards.
engaged in democratic Privilege walk:
participation to resist Critically reflect on
marginalization. own background
of privilege and
the resulting
inequities.
EES4: The Students will Why should I Description of
chronosystem understand the be invested in Context: Use
(historical context) importance of a closing the gap primary and
impacts student sense of urgency in for marginalized secondary sources
learning. interrupting oppression communities? to document the
HPP5: Educators and promoting equity. What can I do to historical and
are responsible make a difference? current experience
for promoting a of marginalized
more fully human communities in
world through their the school.
pedagogical principles *Philosophy of
and practices. Education: Articulate
a philosophy of
education that
addresses the
essential questions:
What is the purpose
of education? Why
teach? Why should
I be invested in
closing the gap
for marginalized
communities?
What can I do to
make a difference?

Note: Asterisk (*) indicates potential learning experience that is not currently used in the program.
 Reframing Freire

total physical response, gestures, and visuals. However, I also use strategies that make it difficult
for students to learn, such as complex and rapid speech, high-pressure focus on testing, and lack
of visual supports. This experience facilitates a mesosystem approach to teacher education, in that
students experience the marginalization that communities of ELLs experience; moreover, this
experience is based on the principle of humanizing pedagogy that to deny someone else’s human-
ization is also to deny one’s own.
I specifically submerge students in a disruptive experience so that they begin to understand
the differential treatment, prejudice, and discrimination faced by marginalized communities
because of their language abilities. Stibbards and Puk (2011) describe an ecological approach that
can be used to frame this learning experience through three foci: complexity, emergent out-
comes, and transformation. First, the authors describe the complexity inherent in ecological mod-
els as ambiguous parameters. Second, the authors describe that emergent outcomes arise from
complexity; these are not the result of linear relationships; rather, outcomes emerge from complex
and dynamic interactions that provoke new insights as a result of chaotic interactions that ensue
in a learning experience. The results of this experience cannot be predicted or controlled by the
facilitator, but instead allow each individual to make meaning for themselves. Third, according
to Stibbards and Puk, participants experience transformation by examining their own beliefs and
identifying possible ways they might integrate the meaning they take from the experience into
their teaching practice. By connecting the material to pre-service teachers’ lives, the possibility
for change becomes a reality.
At the completion of the submersion experience, pre-service teachers were asked to com-
plete a graphic organizer that included the following reflection questions: How did this sub-
mersion experience make you feel? How did you communicate your feelings to your instructor
and/or peers? How can this experience help you understand the challenges ELLs face in the
classroom? What specific strategies can you use to make language and content comprehensi-
ble for ELLs? The graphic organizers have indicated that students grappled with the experi-
ence of ELLs by naming the complexity of their own feelings. Of the 155 students who
responded, 149 students used negative terms to describe their feelings, as displayed in recurring
terms in Table 15.2.
Of these responses, the most common negative terms used were: frustrated, left out, nervous,
anxious, inferior, inadequate, overwhelmed, disengaged, and powerless. Of the 155 respondents,
only six provided positive terms to describe their feelings during the submersion experience,
these were: enlightened, valuable, excited, excelled, perseverant, and privileged.
Students also identified emergent outcomes from the submersion experience related to improving
their practice for ELLs by providing more time and a slower pace; creating a safe learning environ-
ment; being more patient; giving ELLs more opportunities to participate; increasing visual supports;
using gestures and total physical response strategies; increasing repetition; using cooperative

Table 15.2 Negative Terms Used to Describe Feelings Resulting From Submersion Experience

uncomfortable annoyed divided powerless nervous anxious frustrated

inferior inadequate hopeless disengaged upset embattled fearful
conflicted bored out-of-control exhausted disadvantaged unconfident sinking
stressed overwhelmed discouraged stumbling closed off confused puzzled
left out frustrated lost filled with checked out isolated mute
contempt
insecure timid distracted silent frantic avoidant angry

205
María del Carmen Salazar

learning; incorporating students’ native language; frontloading vocabulary; using frequent checks for
understanding; differentiating assessments; and integrating culturally relevant content.
Last, as a result of the disruptive experience, pre-service teachers indicated that they would
transform their practice to meet the needs of ELLs. The highest number of respondents indicated
the following transformation: (a) realization that ELLs are being left behind; (b) commitment to
protecting these students from the negative feelings that they experienced during the submersion
experience; (c) increased compassion and empathy for the challenges faced by ELLs; and (d) greater
appreciation for the strengths these learners bring to the teaching and learning experience. Only
one student out of 155 articulated a negative emergent outcome as a result of the experience; the
student stated that s/he does not feel responsible for supporting non-English speakers and these
students should learn to speak English as quickly as possible.
In sum, the simulated submersion experience immerses pre-service teachers into a disruptive
learning experience where the candidates personalize the experience of ELLs; this can serve as a
catalyst for interrogating the systemic marginalization of students of color based on language, in
addition to a commitment to humanize the experience of these students. Thus, this chapter
informs the field of educational linguistics through an innovative approach to language use and
language learning in the context of teacher preparation.

Naming the Conclusion

The focus on preparing pre-service teachers to understand the language use and language learn-
ing needs of their students informs the field of educational linguistics and provides a resource for
educators who are committed to meeting the needs of English language learners. As a result of
this work, I found that ecologically-minded humanizing dispositions can be nurtured through
learning experiences that compel pre-service teachers to grapple with the elements of ecological
theory and the principles of humanizing pedagogy. Through this experience, I have been empow-
ered to articulate my values, improve my practice, expand my students’ learning, and interrupt
oppression and dehumanization. Furthermore, this work has re-energized me as an educator; I
have an increased commitment to stir up an “ecological ripple effect” (Watson and Steele 2006,
16) through a colectivo (collective) of ecologically-minded humanizing pedagogues, inclusive of
teachers and teacher educators, that strive for internal and external transformation. Together, we
can foist the rock from the “sisyphean challenge” (Yearwood 2012, 23) over the cliff once and
for all; that is the challenge of humanizing education in an era of standardization in order to meet
the needs of culturally and linguistically diverse learners.

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 16
Heritage Language Education
Minority Language Speakers,
Second Language Instruction,
and Monolingual Schooling

Jennifer Leeman and Kendall A. King

Most discussions of heritage language education begin with a consideration of the term “heritage
language,” which arose in Canada to refer to languages other than English or French (Duff and Li
2009). This definition of heritage languages as any “languages other than the national language(s)”
has been adopted and applied to a wide array of international contexts, leading to extensive dis-
cussion and debate. On one hand, scholars have sought to fine-tune our understanding of
the meaning of “heritage languages”—for instance, by distinguishing among colonial, Indigenous,
or immigrant languages (Fishman 2001). On the other hand, scholars have critiqued the term
itself, noting that “ancestral languages,” “community languages,” or “minority languages” are
widely used outside of the U.S. context (Brutt-Griffler and Makoni 2005; De Bot and Gorter
2005; Wiley 2005), and hence proposed the use of a more inclusive term, such as “heritage and
community languages” (Wiley 2005).
For many researchers, policy makers, activists, and educators, “heritage language education”
refers to any and all education provided in languages other than the official or national languages.
The educational programs that fall within this category vary widely with respect to aim, struc-
ture, and pedagogy, and include schooling offered completely in the (minority language) mother
tongue of pupils; maintenance and transitional bilingual education; complementary schools that
offer heritage language instruction on weekends; and immersion or revitalization programs
designed for students who do not speak their heritage language. Labeling them all as “heritage
language education” obscures the significant differences among these various types of programs
and models. Further, as Brutt-Griffler and Makoni (2005) suggest, the use of a single term down-
plays substantial variation across languages and language communities by failing to recognize the
particular local sociolinguistic, ideological, and policy contexts.
In addition to this broad definition of heritage language education, however, there is also a
more narrow and specific meaning. In the United States, the term “heritage language education”
has been used since the 1990s to refer to “foreign” language instruction for students who have prior
home or community-based exposure to this language (Valdés 2005). Simplifying somewhat, the broad
definition includes all instructional programs in which the heritage language primarily is the
medium of instruction; in contrast, within the narrow definition the heritage language tends to be

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the object of instruction. Of course, educational programs that use the heritage language as the
medium of instruction might also have a second language or language arts component.
In this chapter, we focus on heritage language education narrowly defined. The field of her-
itage language education is one of the fastest growing areas of second language acquisition and
educational linguistics research and pedagogy. Instructional programs ranging from single classes
to multi-course tracks for heritage students exist in pockets across the United States, sometimes
with distinct heritage language courses for students with varying degrees of productive and
receptive abilities. Active lines of scholarship address the linguistic and affective characteristics of
heritage language learners; heritage language learning processes; discourses surrounding heritage
languages and students in classrooms and teaching materials; and heritage students’ educational
needs and the pedagogical approaches that can best meet them, among other theoretical and
applied topics.
In addition to providing a brief overview of the field, we analyze the language ideologies
embodied in this educational and research paradigm. We argue that although the roots of heritage
language education are intertwined with minority language and civil rights movements, offering
special ‘foreign language’ classes for heritage speakers does not challenge the established linguistic
hierarchies that frame monolingualism in the majority language as the norm and relegate minority
languages (and their speakers) to the margins. Hence, to some extent, the term heritage language
education as well as the scholarship and practice surrounding it are complicit in the construction of
heritage speakers as an aberration. These ideological forces, we suggest, help to explain why her-
itage language education, both as a field of scholarship and as instructional programming for
learners, remains marginalized, underfunded, and often an after-thought within the United States.

Historical Perspectives
The social and political struggles of ethnic and regional minorities and Indigenous communities
around the world have brought attention to minority language issues, including language dis-
crimination, access to public services, governmental representation, and educational policy. Since
the 1960s, heritage language activists have intensified calls for mother tongue education and
bilingual education to allow for more equitable educational opportunities for minority language
students, as well as to promote minority language maintenance. As a result of such activism,
together with a substantial body of research documenting the individual and societal benefits of
mother tongue education, recent decades have seen growing international recognition of the
importance of education in students’ home languages (see García and Woodley, this volume, for
a discussion of bilingual education).
However, despite widespread scholarly agreement regarding the academic, cognitive, and
social benefits of mother tongue education, and of multilingual education more broadly, pro-
gram creation and implementation are constrained by context-specific language ideologies and
educational policies (Hornberger 2005). In the United States, for instance, the strength of the
one language–one nation ideology and the concomitant suspicion of multilingualism, together
with a vocal anti-immigrant movement, have led to federal and state educational policies that
increasingly favor English-only education for minority language speakers (Wright 2007;
Gándara and Rios-Aguilar 2012). In such contexts, instruction in languages other than English
is largely restricted to “foreign language instruction,” which, when available, is often limited to
the secondary and post-secondary settings. Even these meager offerings have seen limited sup-
port, despite political lip service to the importance of linguistic competence for 21st-century
competitiveness.

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The restriction and elimination of mother tongue and bilingual education in the U.S. has
coincided with exponential growth in heritage language instruction and research. This appar-
ent paradox can be understood through consideration of the ideological differences between
these two pedagogical models—both of which are designed for students who speak non-
English languages at home. Bilingual education is most common at the elementary school level
and employs a non-English language to teach academic content during a significant portion
of the school day. Bilingual education, and bilingualism more broadly, have received a great deal
of negative attention in public discourse, and are often portrayed as impeding the assimilation
and scholastic achievement of minority language children, fostering divisiveness, and serving the
interests of minority leaders more than those of minority language children (Crawford 1998).
In contrast, heritage language education programs are most commonly found in secondary and
post-secondary foreign language settings. Because they are limited to foreign language classes,
which typically meet for a few hours each week, heritage language programs do not involve a
reduction in English-language instructional time, nor do they involve the teaching of core
content in a non-English language. Even community-based heritage language schools, which
often operate more like mother tongue educational programs, providing cultural as well as
linguistic content, typically hold classes in the evening or on weekends, outside of normal
school hours, and thus complement rather than replace the students’ regular education in English.
Thus, unlike bilingual education, which is seen as threatening the hegemony of English, her-
itage language education leaves the English-only educational paradigm largely intact (Leeman
2010). This confluence of forces, on one hand, has resulted in restricted options for bilingual
schooling, and on the other, has contributed to the rise of heritage language education as a field
in the United States.
Another factor contributing to the prominence of the United States as a site of heritage language
education is that the mostly widely spoken minority language in the country is also the most com-
monly taught foreign language. Almost 13% of the population over five years of age speaks Spanish
at home, more than twice the percentage of all other non-English languages combined (American
Community Survey 2011). With respect to foreign language instruction, post-secondary enroll-
ments in Spanish as a second language surpassed those of all other languages in the 1970s (Draper
and Hicks 2002), having already done so at the high school level before mid-century (Snyder,
Tan, and Hoffman 2005). Not surprisingly, specialized instruction for heritage speakers first
emerged in Spanish. Similar to struggles for Spanish mother tongue and bilingual education in
primary education, calls for Spanish as a heritage language instruction at the post-secondary level
were linked to the Chicano and Puerto Rican rights movements, as students enrolled in college
courses to enhance their knowledge of what was seen as the language of Latina/o identity and
political consciousness (Leeman and Martínez 2007). Scholars and educators recognized that
students who had grown up in Spanish-speaking homes had different linguistic and pedagogical
needs than their monolingual English-speaking classmates for whom foreign language instruction
was tailored, and developed materials and teaching practices specifically for what were frequently
called “bilingual,” “native speaker,” or “Spanish-speaking students” (Valdés 2005).
Interest in heritage language education grew in the 1980s and 1990s, with the term “heritage
student” adopted within the foreign language teaching profession following the 1996 publication
of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages’ Standards for Foreign Language
Learning (Valdés 2005). The growth of heritage language education as a field is clearly related to
demographic shifts, migration, and globalization, as students enrolled in foreign language classes
are increasingly likely to have home or community experience with multiple languages. Accord-
ing to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 2011, almost 22% of children between the ages of 5 and 17 spoke

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a language other than English at home, with roughly 72% of these children speaking Spanish
(American Community Survey 2011).
Moreover, recent years have seen an expansion of second language offerings at the post-
secondary level, and courses in ‘less commonly taught languages’ often include heritage speakers
of those languages, thus broadening the interest in heritage language education beyond Spanish.
For instance, approximately 90% of students in college-level Korean language courses are herit-
age speakers (Lee and Shin 2008). The years following 9/11 saw a heightened awareness of
military, intelligence, and national security agencies’ needs for individuals proficient in ‘critical’
languages such as Arabic and Hindi, among others. Researchers have suggested that the most
efficient means of meeting these needs is not to rely on second language education but to
develop the proficiency of heritage speakers, thus fueling even greater interest in heritage lan-
guage education generally, and for languages other than Spanish in particular (Van Deusen-Scholl
2003; Wiley 2007).
Another important shift in recent decades concerns the framing of heritage languages.
Whereas discourses surrounding early heritage language programs tended to emphasize the
affective and cultural importance of heritage language maintenance for students, the domi-
nant discourses in the 21st century tend to stress job market advantages for individuals as well
as the security and commercial interests of the nation-state (Leeman and Martínez 2007). This
trend was already evident in both foreign and heritage language instruction at the end of the
last century, but it became more pronounced post-9/11, as military, intelligence, and national
agencies stressed their need for individuals proficient in ‘critical’ languages. Discourses of
international competitiveness and national security are abundant in recent heritage language
education initiatives of agencies such as the Alliance for the Advancement of Heritage Lan-
guages, the National Foreign Language Center, and the National Heritage Language Resource
Center, many of which stress the instrumental value of the nation’s heritage language ‘resources’
(Ricento 2005).

Core Issues and Key Findings

Characteristics of Heritage Language Students

In addition to disagreement regarding the definitions of “heritage language” and “heritage
language education,” scholarly debate also exists around who is a “heritage language learner.”
While some researchers include anyone with a familial, ethnic, or identity connection to the
heritage language (independent of linguistic ability), others reserve this term for students who
have some degree of linguistic competence in the language. Within the field, there is often an
assumption that heritage students have at least some receptive or productive proficiency in the
language (Bale 2010).
Even so, there is tremendous diversity among heritage students in terms of their experiences
with the heritage language, as well as in their linguistic abilities. Heritage students include immi-
grants and members of Indigenous groups, as well as children and descendants of immigrants.
Some have had extensive education in the heritage language, either domestically or abroad, while
others have had none. Their linguistic backgrounds and familial language practices are also varied.
For example, some heritage students hail from monolingual heritage language households, while
others come from homes where the majority language dominates. There is also great variability
in heritage language educational experiences, availability of heritage language reading materials,
and opportunities for heritage language use.

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Not surprisingly, heritage students’ linguistic abilities are also heterogeneous. The earliest and
most influential line of work examining the characteristics of the language spoken by heritage
language speakers is that of Carmen Silva-Corvalán, who analyzed language change and variation
among Spanish-English bilinguals or English-dominant-heritage language speakers of Spanish in
Los Angeles (1986; 1994a; 1994b). Silva-Corvalán’s research, and the subsequent work inspired
by it, explored the (often combined) impact of “incomplete acquisition” of the heritage language;
attrition (individual language loss, typically through disuse); and language contact. Silva-Corvalán’s
findings suggested a continuum of bilingual proficiency among Spanish-speakers in Los Angeles,
with fully proficient speakers at one end, and those who are restricted to “emblematic” uses of
Spanish that serve primarily to perform a Latina/o identity, on the other.
In one of the relatively few heritage language education studies to look comparatively across
language groups, Carreira and Kagan (2011) surveyed 1,732 learners of 22 different heritage
languages from different areas of the United States. Their findings suggested a general profile of
heritage language learners as students who have (1) acquired English in early childhood, after
acquiring the heritage language; (2) relatively strong aural/oral skills but limited literacy skills;
and (3) limited exposure to the heritage outside the home. In surveys and interviews with 20
beginning-level Spanish heritage language learners, Beaudrie and Ducar (2005) found that
although most participants had ample opportunities to overhear Spanish, few spoke it with
their parents or other relatives. Thus, while recent immigrants might have greater proficiency
in the heritage language than the national language, students who are generations removed
from immigration often have little or no productive ability in the heritage language (Beaudrie
2009). Another frequently documented characteristic of heritage students is the tendency to
suffer from linguistic insecurity or shame regarding their heritage language abilities (Abdi
2011; Basham and Fathman 2008; Beaudrie and Ducar 2005; Curtin 2007). Heritage speak-
ers often face a double stigma in that they speak a minority language and they speak a non-prestige,
low-status, contact variety of that language.
In addition to this research describing the characteristics of bilinguals and heritage lan-
guage speakers in their own right (or by implicitly comparing them to monolingual native
speakers), other work has investigated similarities and differences between heritage speakers
and second language learners, or among different types of heritage learners. For example, Au
(2008) reported that heritage speakers showed advantages in phonology, but not in morpho-
syntax, a finding consistent with the observations of numerous language educators. Further,
many heritage speakers have not had formal instruction, and thus are less likely to have
acquired metalinguistic knowledge or literacy in the heritage language. One additional dif-
ference between heritage students and (advanced) second language students is that the latter
might have acquired academic registers in the second language but be less adept at negotiating
various social situations in that language, while the former might be comfortable conversing
with friends and family but have less control of linguistic registers associated with public or
formal settings.
While these generalizations resonate with many in the field, Kondo-Brown’s research
problematizes the simple dichotomy between heritage student and second language learners. Kondo-
Brown (2005) compared the Japanese grammatical knowledge, listening, and reading skills,
and self-assessed use and competencies of four groups of students of Japanese: (a) students
with at least one Japanese-speaking parent, (b) students with a Japanese-speaking grandpar-
ent, (c) students of Japanese descent without Japanese-speaking parents or grandparents,
and (d) students of non-Japanese descent from non-Japanese-speaking families. She found
that only those students with at least one Japanese-speaking parent performed significantly
differently from the others. Kondo-Brown’s work underscores that low proficiency heritage

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learners’ linguistic abilities might not always differ from those of second language learners
(see also Lynch 2008).

Heritage Students’ Pedagogical Needs and Best Educational Practices

Given these characteristics of heritage students, heritage language education has emphasized the
development of literacy skills in the heritage language. In addition, because many heritage stu-
dents speak less prestigious varieties of the heritage language (e.g., contact varieties with influence
from the majority language, or varieties associated with rural areas or socioeconomically disad-
vantaged groups), many heritage language educators have seen “dialect acquisition” of the pres-
tige variety as a key goal. Valdés (1995) delineates the four goals of Spanish heritage language
instruction as: (1) Spanish language maintenance, (2) acquisition of the prestige variety of Spanish,
(3) the expansion of the bilingual range, and (4) the transfer of literacy skills. However, many
heritage students are less interested in acquiring an international “standard” language variety than
in developing their proficiency in local varieties (Ducar 2008; Leeman, Rabin, and Román-
Mendoza 2011). Other heritage students’ motivation is to develop their ethnic identity or
strengthen ties to the culture(s) associated with the heritage language (Jensen and Llosa 2007; Lee
and Shin 2008; Wong and Xiao 2010).
Another goal of some heritage language programs is to foster students’ language awareness
and sociolinguistic knowledge. For example, Carreira (2000) calls for heritage language educa-
tion to help students to understand linguistic variation and the contextual nature of linguistic
hierarchies that favor some language varieties or linguistic features at the expense of others.
Researchers and educators adopting a critical approach argue that students benefit from under-
standing the social and political implications of linguistic hierarchies (Correa 2011; Leeman
2005; Martínez 2003; Villa 2002). Discussing the connection of language and identity,
Hornberger and Wang (2008, 15) note that “it would also help [students] to understand that
multiple memberships are necessary and possible in their negotiation of self-identity and
empowerment.” Student empowerment is also stressed in Leeman’s (2005) call for heritage lan-
guage educators to promote students’ critical agency in deciding when, and whether, to con-
form to the norms of prestige varieties.
Early heritage pedagogies often adopted a deficit orientation regarding students’ linguistic
competence and sought to “improve” heritage speakers’ language by eradicating nonstandard
linguistic features and replacing them with more prestigious forms (Valdés 1981; 2005). While
this negative framing of students’ language varieties and practices is still too common, there is
growing consensus that educators should value students’ home experiences and language(s). For
instance, based on their research with 15 adult heritage language learners of Alaskan Athabaskan
languages, Basham and Fathman (2008) recommend that educators learn about the life experi-
ences of their students, their attitudes, and their abilities, and carefully consider these in designing
adult programs. For these learners in particular, “it is important to show latent speakers what they
already know and to give them confidence in their ability to reactivate their latent knowledge,
speak their heritage language and ultimately pass it on to others” (593).
As for instructional practices, Martínez (2003) proposes specific in-class activities designed to
help students explore community language practices and linguistic variation. In line with critical
pedagogical approaches, Leeman (2005) advocates bringing students’ home language practices
into the classroom and argues that the in-class discussion of non-prestige varieties should include
linguistic analysis of those varieties, rather than “translation” to prestige varieties or prescriptions
of what to avoid. Further, educators are urged to engage students in the critical analysis of lan-
guage ideologies and their consequences.

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In recent years, researchers have also explored ways of expanding the heritage language cur-
riculum beyond traditional heritage language classes. For example, Martínez and Schwartz (2012)
instituted the innovative Medical Spanish for Heritage Learners Program, which includes special-
ized training in medical Spanish as well as service learning in local clinics. A key element of the
program is students’ consideration of language ideologies and the linguistic barriers to medical
care. Providing students with opportunities to combat linguistic injustice while simultaneously
having their linguistic knowledge validated and valued outside of the classroom were also goals
of a critical service learning program in which post-secondary students offered a Spanish heritage
language program for elementary school children (Leeman, Rabin, and Román-Mendoza 2011).

Research Approaches
Research on heritage languages education has increased dramatically in recent decades. Below we
outline the general approaches and assumptions of these major lines of work, and discuss some
studies that illustrate these strands. We divide this research into three broad categories: psycho-
linguistic studies of individual heritage speaker/learner capacities; sociolinguistic and cultural
analyses of heritage language use and identity; and educational research on materials, policies, and
pedagogies for heritage learners.

Psycholinguistic Approaches
Psycholinguistically oriented research has analyzed various aspects of heritage language (HL) learn-
ers’ productive and receptive language skills, usually through comparison with native (monolingual)
speakers, and sometimes with second language (L2) learners of that language. This body of work
tends to focus exclusively on linguistic development measured quantitatively—for instance, through
grammaticality judgments or standard second language elicitation tasks.
One significant line of inquiry has addressed whether HL speakers are “linguistically supe-
rior” to L2 learners and, if so, whether this advantage is limited to phonology or extends to
morpho-syntactic features of language. For instance, Montrul (2010) compared 24 Spanish L2
learners and 24 Spanish HL learners’ knowledge of clitic pronouns and word order to examine
this claim. Results from an oral production task, a written grammaticality judgment task, and
a speeded comprehension task indicated that HL learners, overall, seemed to possess more
nativelike knowledge of Spanish than their L2 counterparts. In other words, the “advantage”
of HL learners, in this case, was not limited to phonology, as past work had suggested (cf. Au
2008).
By including heritage language participants, this psycholinguistic research builds on and
potentially contributes to the well established body of cognitively oriented second language
acquisition research, which had, until recently, focused almost exclusively on the acquisition of
second languages by monolinguals. Yet this approach, while offering detailed linguistic analyses
of development and differences across learner types, has tended to assume a single monolingual
prestige variety of international Spanish to which all learners aspire.

Sociolinguistic Approaches and Cultural Identity

A second, more methodologically diverse, body of work has investigated identity construction
and development among HL learners, often drawing from qualitative, ethnographic, or interpre-
tive data and analysis. Much of this work seeks to gain deeper understanding of how learners

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conceptualize themselves in relation to language and culture and, in some cases, how learners’
identity stances shape individual investment in language learning.
Wong and Xiao (2010), for instance, conducted interviews with 64 heritage language students
of Mandarin with varied dialect backgrounds in order to explore how their identities were “pro-
duced, processed, and practiced in our postmodern world” (153). Through their qualitative,
inductive analysis, they found that HL learners identified with an “imagined community” of
Chinese speakers, with some heritage language dialect speakers adopting the dominant Mandarin
to maintain, or even reinterpret, their own identities. Another interesting strand of sociolinguistic
research, such as Dressler’s (2010) case study of German HL learners, has identified “reluctant”
HL learners who decline to identify with the heritage language. This research highlights the
importance of expertise, affiliation, inheritance, and cultural artifacts in learner identification.
Other studies have examined the language ideologies embodied in heritage language teaching
materials, classroom interactions, and departmental discourses (e.g., Leeman and Martínez 2007;
Showstack 2012; Valdés, Gonzalez, Garcia, and Marquez 2003).
While the bulk of this sociolinguistic work is anthropologically oriented, some researchers
have utilized quantitative techniques to examine how heritage language speakers identify with
their HL. For instance, Chinen and Tucker (2005) distributed questionnaires designed to meas-
ure ethnic identity, attitudes towards Japanese school, and self-reported Japanese proficiency to
31 Japanese-American adolescents enrolled in a Saturday Japanese heritage school in Los Angeles.
Chinen and Tucker (2005) reported that these positive attitudes towards Japanese identity
and language proficiency were closely related. Their data also suggested that the older students
had a stronger sense of Japanese identity than the younger students and that students experi-
enced positive gains across all three measures in just six months.

Educational Research
A third and highly methodologically diverse body of work has examined heritage language
learning and teaching specifically within educational and classroom environments. This research
varies widely in research assumptions, methods, and foci. Although some of these studies also fall
within the categories of psycholinguistic or sociolinguistic research, we discuss them in this section
because they focus specifically on identifying heritage learners’ educational needs and improving
pedagogical materials and practices.
In a study that sought to profile heritage students’ language experience, goals, and preferences,
Jensen and Llosa (2007) surveyed 128 students enrolled in university heritage language classes
(Korean, Russian, Thai, and Vietnamese). Findings indicated that most students were interested in
achieving university-level academic reading proficiency, yet reported spending little time reading
in their heritage languages (despite the availability of print materials). Jensen and Llosa suggest this
might be due to lack of transfer of literacy skills from English as well as students’ self-perceptions
as slow readers. Most participants reported that their motivation was to maintain their cultural
identity, and thus wished for more culturally and historically rich texts in the classroom.
Other (more psycholinguistically oriented) work has compared heritage language and second
language learners with respect to the effect of instruction. Potowski, Jegerski, and Morgan-Short
(2009), for instance, attempted to extend the literature on the effect of instruction by investigating
the impact of “processing instruction” (VanPatten 2004) and traditional output-based instruction
on 127 learners’ acquisition of past subjunctive. While there were no statistically significant dif-
ferences between the two instructional treatments, overall, second language learners seemed to
make greater gains than HL participants. Potowski et al. (2009, 563) suggest that this may be due

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to the second language learners’ greater experience and familiarity with classroom instruction,
or to the need for a different type of instruction “to oust” a previously acquired non-standard
form (vs. acquiring a new form).
One of the earliest researchers to critically analyze the assumptions and implicit messages of
Spanish heritage language pedagogy was Valdés (1981), who condemned some HL programs’
framing of students’ home varieties as inferior and in need of ‘eradication.’ More recent studies
have analyzed the erasure of linguistic variation in representations of Spanish and the reproduc-
tion of linguistic hierarchies that privilege prestige language varieties and monolingual practices
(Ducar 2009; Leeman 2005; Martinez 2003; Villa 2002). Other valuable lines of educational
research have evaluated placement and assessment (e.g., Fairclough 2012) or made recommenda-
tions for heritage language teacher training (e.g., Potowski 2002).

New Debates
As noted at the outset of this chapter, the term “heritage language” has been variably defined and
interpreted in both the academic literature and in educational practice. While this point has been
widely recognized (e.g., Wiley 2001; Valdés 2001), it is only more recently that the ideological
assumptions embedded in the term have received scholarly attention. Critical to understanding
the position of both heritage language education programming and scholarship is the fact that
across both the broad and narrow definitions, “heritage language” reifies monolingualism in the
national language and concomitantly subordinates multilingual and minority language speakers.
Adopting the broad definition of heritage language and designating certain individuals as
“heritage students” implies that most students do not have knowledge of any other languages
than the dominant ones. In reality, of course, many, if not most, of the children in the world grow
up hearing more than one language and, indeed, about half of the world is bi- if not multilingual
(Grosjean 1982). Recent demographic data suggest increasing numbers of international migrants
(214 million in 2010, and as many as 405 million by 2050) (International Organization for
Migration [IOM] 2010), many of whom will lead multilingual lives.
The implicit assumptions about “heritage language education” are especially salient when
“heritage language” is applied to highly multilingual contexts, such as those within many African
nations. Brutt-Griffler and Makoni (2005), in particular, have noted that the term “heritage
language” is largely foreign and meaningless in African contexts. They argue that in the countries
in which it has been adopted, namely Zimbabwe and South Africa, “heritage language” has
taken on political dimensions of xenophobia and is used to exclude or target certain groups of
individuals.
In the United States, heritage language instruction is highly constrained by federal and state
educational policies, as well as monolingual ideologies. In particular, the strong emphasis on
English-medium standardized tests dis-incentivizes schools to invest in quality heritage language
instruction. The exclusive emphasis on English prevails, despite the lack of evidence that heritage
language instruction negatively affects academic achievement or English language learning, as
Wright (2007) demonstrated through eight years of research on heritage language programming
for Khmer (Cambodian), Spanish, and Native American HL learners. Similarly, Little and McCarty
note the growing pressures faced by Indigenous heritage language immersion programs, despite
the evidence that heritage-language immersion is “superior to English-only instruction even for
students who enter school with limited proficiency in the heritage language” (2006, i).
According to García (2005), the focus on heritage language instruction has come about largely
as a “fall-back” position, when the potential for bilingualism and biliteracy became restricted in light
of federal policy. In her words, “in the U.S., we have gone from the two solitudes of our two languages

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in bilingualism, to our sole solitude in English, with whispers in other languages. Our multiple
identities have been silenced, with one language identity reduced to that of a heritage” (605).
Even settings dedicated to the teaching of minority languages reproduce many of the ideologies
that privilege monolingual elite varieties and construct monolingual individuals as the unmarked
norm (Leeman 2010; Valdés et al. 2003). One common way that this ideology is enacted is in the
construction of second language sections as “normal” and heritage language tracks as “special.”
In this light, it is hardly a coincidence that the term is most commonly used in contexts such as
the United States, where monolingualism is the imagined norm (demographic realities aside).
Considering “heritage” as a special designation only makes sense if all students are assumed to
have no knowledge of the language being studied. Even within the “monolingual” U.S., fully
one in five students comes from a home in which a language other than English is spoken
(Institute for Education Sciences [IES] 2012). And in many U.S. school districts, the majority
of students come from multilingual backgrounds (New York Times 2012), suggesting that in
many cases, heritage students could be considered the norm and monolinguals the ones in need
of ‘special’ tracks.
These monolingual ideologies are also evident in heritage language research that tacitly posits
monolingual acquisition as the norm and assumes that heritage language speakers that utilize
non-prestige or contact forms or practices do so as a result of individual, cross-linguistic interfer-
ence or a deficient or fossilized linguistic system. As Pascual y Cabo and Rothman (2012) point
out in their critique of the notion of “incomplete acquisition,” heritage speakers’ experiences and
the input to which they are exposed are simply different from the imagined monolingual norm,
rather than inherently deficient. This view is supported by Polinsky’s (2008) case study of two
heritage speakers of Russian, in which she found that the heritage speakers’ linguistic development
continued, even with limited exposure to Russian. Such research underscores that heritage speakers’
linguistic systems are neither simply cases of fossilized first language acquisition nor determined
solely by interference from a speaker’s dominant language.

Implications for Education

This restrictive policy context raises substantial questions for future research. The reality is that
relatively few heritage language students have access to heritage language instruction of any sort.
Wiley (2005) notes the substantial gaps in course offerings, with large heritage language com-
munities totally underserved. For instance, although there are more than one million Vietnam-
ese, more than 1,200,000 Tagalog, and over 900,000 Korean speakers in the United States, we
do not know of any heritage language offerings in these languages. The great majority of lan-
guage offerings in U.S. schools (99%) are in a handful of languages (e.g., Spanish, French,
German, Italian, Latin, Japanese, Russian, and Mandarin), meaning that for the vast majority of
heritage language students, no instruction at all is provided. Even for the largest heritage
language group in the U.S., Spanish speakers, fewer than 2.1% are enrolled in courses aimed at
heritage language learners in secondary school. One major question for the field, then, is how
to continue to advance heritage language education in light of severe policy restrictions and
corresponding financial cutbacks.
Noting that “ideological spaces for multilingual language and education policies” have been
closed in many contexts (e.g., the U.S. following NCLB in 2001), Hornberger (2005) suggests
that it is essential for language educators and language users “to fill up ‘implementational’ spaces
with multilingual educational practices, whether with intent to occupy ideological spaces opened
up by policies or to prod actively toward more favorable ideological spaces in the face of restric-
tive policies. Ideological spaces created by language and education policies can be seen as carving

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out implementational spaces at classroom and community levels, but implementational spaces can
also serve as wedges to pry open ideological ones” (606).
In addition to too few heritage language programs, there are also too few high quality heritage
language programs, and too little research on best practices. Kondo-Brown (2003) asserted more
than a decade ago that the field of heritage language education faced three major challenges: lack
of evaluation research that judges the effectiveness of special heritage tracks or programs offered
at post-secondary institutions; problematic methodologies adopted in research that investigated
the differences in linguistic skills of post-secondary heritage language and non-heritage language
students and the social-psychological factors associated with the levels of heritage language pro-
ficiency among adult HL learners; and the urgent need for developing appropriate assessment
tools for adult HL learners. We concur that these remain important directions for future research
and advocacy.
Yet while work on these issues specific to heritage language educational programming is
pressing, concomitantly, we also argue that it is important to continue to challenge the linguistic
hierarchy in which heritage language education is located. This work entails pointing out and
correcting the monolingual biases in our instructional assumptions (e.g., that instruction be car-
ried out entirely in one language with an idealized monolingual variety as the aim) (Cummins
2005), and also addressing the biases in our collective notions of who language learners are; what
second, foreign, and heritage language education is; and how it should be practiced.
Core assumptions within the field of educational linguistics (e.g., native speaker, domain,
speech community) have been critiqued and fallen into disuse in light of world events (e.g.,
globalization, transmigration) on one hand, and serious theoretical challenges on the other. The
concept of ‘heritage language’ faces similar pressures. The field of educational linguistics increas-
ingly grapples to address, both theoretically and empirically, the fact that many language leaners
conduct their lives within highly diverse social and linguistic environments, with scholars striv-
ing to understand individual learners as dynamic, transnational, emergent multilinguals who
utilize particular language varieties, registers, and styles for context-specific purposes. As herit-
age language programming is increasingly institutionalized, it is crucial for researchers and
educators to recognize the complex multilingual lives, experiences, and ambitions of these
learners.

Further Reading
Beaudrie, S., and Fairclough, M. (Eds.) 2012. Spanish as a heritage language in the US: State of the science.
Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.
Brinton, D., Kagan, O., and Backhaus, S. (Eds.) 2008. Heritage language education: A new field emerging. New York:
Routledge.
Colombi, M. C., and Alarcón, F. (Eds.) 1997. La enseñanza del español a hispanohablantes: Praxis y teoría. Boston:
Houghton Miflin.
Heritage Language Journal. Retrievable at http://hlj.ucla.edu
Peyton, J. K., Ranard, D. A., and McGinnis, S. (Eds.) 2001. Heritage languages in America: Preserving a national
resource. Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics.

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 17
Disentangling Linguistic
Imperialism in English
Language Education
The Indonesian Context

Setiono Sugiharto

As the first foreign language taught in schools, English has been extensively taught and learned in
Indonesia not only in formal contexts, but also in informal ones. The flurry of interest in the
English language education in Indonesia has recently prompted the government (i.e., the Ministry
of Education) to issue a policy that endorses the so-called “international pilot project state-run
schools” known locally as Rintisan Sekolah Berstandar International (RSBI), the eventual goal of
which is to establish international standard schools. The legal basis that strengthens its operation
is Article 50, paragraph 3, of Law No. 20/2003 on the System of National Education. This con-
troversial policy was made concomitant with the inexorable increase of privately run schools
(primary, secondary, junior, and high schools) bearing various labels, such as international standard
and international curriculum. The word international used in these schools has been taken to mean
the following: (1) the use of the English language as the sole medium of instruction and interaction
in schools, (2) the use of imported curricula and textbooks (mainly from the U.K., the U.S., and
Australia), and (3) the assessment and certification system approved and legalized by the schools
affiliating in these countries. Interestingly, while the campaign of the English-only policy nation-
wide through the “internationalization” of the state-run schools has been inveighed and opposed
by local educational practitioners and local education pundits via a legal action, the government
has been adamant and insisted on endorsing the policy. Clearly, all of these indicate that Indonesia
suffers from what Stephen Krashen (2006) dubs “English fever”—an overwhelming desire to learn
and acquire English.
In this chapter, I will first discuss the genesis of English language education in the Indonesian
context. Then, using Phillipson’s (1992, 15) notion of linguistic imperialism (a sub-type of lin-
guicism) as “a particular theory for analyzing relations between dominant and dominated cul-
tures, and specifically the way English language learning has been promoted,” I will argue that
the Indonesian government’s efforts to “internationalize” local state-run schools via the use of
English as a sole medium of instruction has perpetuated the idea of Western and European
hegemonic pedagogy by facilitating its infiltration in the national language education through
the policy it has made. Two of the most conspicuously devastating consequences of the fervent
promotion of the English learning in the national education will also be discussed: (1) the

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creation of social stratification, inequality of access to education, and the marginalization of chil-
dren from low income families; (2) the depreciation of native language education, which poses a
serious threat of the extinction of Indonesia indigenous languages; and (3) resistance against the
national language planning. Finally, I will discuss two conflicting camps related to how the
national education should be grounded. To this end, I will demonstrate that critically interrogat-
ing the presence of English hegemony in education is difficult, as this attempt is severely con-
strained by deeply rooted and entrenched traditional values and norms (particularly Javanese
philosophies) that permeate people’s everyday lives and govern their demeanors.
The present study is ethnographic in its approach, as it is situated in the periphery context
(i.e., Indonesia) and attempts to offer “the naturalistic-ecological perspective” (Nunan 1992, 53).
To unravel the dominance of English hegemonic power in educational system in Indonesia, I
collected the data using two broad techniques:

• Observable techniques: participant observation (i.e., field notes).

• Non-observable techniques: archival materials, such as documents issued by the Indonesian
Ministry of Education and Culture, which include the national curricula of English lan-
guage teaching and the written policy on the establishment of the international pilot-project
state schools, and interviews with local and foreign language experts.

These data were analyzed by exposing ideas that show the dominance of English hegemonic
force in the Indonesian context. The interpretation of the results of analysis will be informed by
Phillipson’s (1992) three arguments in linguistic imperialist discourse: (1) English-intrinsic argu-
ment, (2) English-extrinsic argument, and (3) English-functional argument. The focus of the
analysis in this chapter is not only on a macro-societal aspect (i.e., a global issue on the creation of
power inequality by the governmental and cultural institutions on issues related to education), but
also on the micro-societal aspects (i.e., the inequality of power taking place in school contexts).

Historical Perspectives
The importance of English education in Indonesia has long been recognized since the Dutch
colonial period (Dardjowidjojo 1997; Jazadi 2004; Mistar 2005). Historical documents recorded
that English was taught to the native Indonesians in 1914 (Dardjowidjojo 1997). However,
because it was not the language of the colonialists, English was used only as a school subject,
rather than as the medium of classroom instruction and communication. In other words, English
was intended only for academic purposes, rather than for serving any social function.
Since then, the use of English as a school subject has continued and been mandated by the
Indonesian Education and Culture Ministry through the adoption of English teaching curricula
primarily from western countries, most notably from the United States. Dardjowidjojo (2000)
and Sumardi (1993) have recorded that Indonesia has adopted several methods or approaches
from U.S. English teaching curricula. Over the years, they have included the Grammar-Translation
Method, Direct Method, Audiolingual Method, and Communicative Language Teaching. Apart
from these methods, a competency-based language teaching approach was also used, but its
employment was relatively short-lived. Though undergoing several alterations in the curriculum,
the aim of English teaching in Indonesia remained constant: to equip students with academic
preparedness.
In addition to the recognition of the importance of English throughout education, the language
has been deemed the most important foreign language. This is unlike Indonesia’s neighboring

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countries, such as Singapore, the Philippines, and Malaysia, where English is considered a second
language and in which local varieties of English have developed. Thus, Indonesia belongs to the
Kachruian “Expanding Circle,” in that it relies heavily on the developed norms of both British
and American English (Kachru 1992).
In its development, English language education in Indonesia has hitherto undergone a rad-
ical shift of orientation. The goal was no longer to assist students to attain academic success, as
in passing the examination and reading books and references written in English, but to make
them able to perform interactional functions in all domains of life. This orientation shift is
motivated primarily by the gained prominence of English as a global language that must be
mastered by the Indonesians, prompting the government to initiate the idea of international-
izing local schools through the promotion of English as the medium of classroom instruction
and interaction.
The problem, however, is that the excessive promotion of English in Indonesia could bring
about tremendous consequences inimical to the country’s ideology and sociopolitical context, as
such a promotion unwittingly leads to the dominance of English hegemony. Given the absence
of published studies that critically interrogate the practice of English language education in the
Indonesian context, this chapter can help generate insights that contribute to our understanding
of how linguistic imperialism operates in a foreign language context, as well as what implications
it may have for educational linguistics.

Core Issues and Key Findings

In this section, I will show how the dominance of English has seeped not only into governmental
and cultural institutions (macro-societal), which create a power imbalance in issues related to edu-
cation in general and English language education in particular, but also into schools (micro-societal),
thus providing further evidence of linguicism in action (Phillipson 1992) or of linguistic hegemony
experienced by the periphery communities in their daily lives (Canagarajah 1999). I then proceed
to discuss the effects of this English hegemonic force on the equity of national education, the pres-
ervation of local languages, and resistance against the national language policy.

The Promotion of English Through Education in the Indonesian Context:

Arguments of Linguistic Imperialist Discourse
Phillipson (1992) proposes three important arguments that are used to legitimize English linguis-
tic imperialism in the wider context of a hierarchy of languages. They encompass the English-
intrinsic argument (i.e., the appeal of the nature of the English language), or what English is; the
English-extrinsic argument (i.e., the use of both material and immaterial resources derived from
the center countries whose language is English), or what English has; and the English-functional
argument (i.e., the potential of English in dealing with modern and globalized world), or what
English does. Of these three arguments, the second and third arguments are often used to justify
and legitimate the promotion and relevance of English in the educational policy-making in
Indonesia.
Both the English-functional and extrinsic arguments, for example, have been used as the basis for
the development of international standard schools, which is evident in the following document:

Kurikulum diperkaya dengan standard internasional, mutakhir, canggih sesuai perkembangan

ilmu pengetahuan dan teknologi global. (The curriculum is enriched with the international
standard and is advanced, sophisticated in line with the global science and technology.)

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Memiliki SDM (Sumber Daya Manusia) yang professional dan tangguh dengan manaje-
men yang dikembangkan secara professional. (To possess professional and strident human
resources equipped with professionally developed management.)
Didukung oleh sarana prasarana yang lengkap, relevan, mutakhir, canggih dan bertaraf
internasional. (Supported with full, relevant, advanced, sophisticated, and internationally
standardized infrastructures.)
(Kebijakan Sekolah Bertaraf Internasional, Direktorat Jenderal
Mandikdasmen Kementrian Pendidikan Nasional, http://dikdas.
kemdiknas.go.id/docs/Kebijakan-SBI.pdf)

For one thing, there is diffidence among the Indonesian educational policy makers to resort
exclusively to the national curriculum developed locally, thus prompting them to seek resources
from other, more developed, English-speaking countries that they presume can enrich the avail-
able curriculum. However, the enrichment of local curricular contents with the internationally
standardized ones seems to imply that the locally designed curriculum is less advanced, less
sophisticated, and doesn’t accord with the development of global science and technology.
For another, there is a sense that the education provided is inferior unless students are trained
in schools that are equipped with professional human resources and supported with advanced,
sophisticated, and internationally standardized infrastructures. Although the aforementioned state-
ments mention no direct alignments to the need for English, such positive-sounding ascriptions as
‘international standard,’ ‘advanced,’ ‘sophisticated,’ ‘professional,’ and ‘global’ are meant to “credit
English with real or potential access to modernization, science, technology, etc., with the capacity
to unite people within a country and across nations, or with the furthering of international under-
standing” (Phillipson 1992, 272). The statements are also meant to glorify the adequacy of resources
English has to support and justify the development of international standard schools.
The similar arguments of linguistic imperialist discourse apply to the promotion of English
literacy as manifested through the design of English teaching curriculum intended for high
school students:

Pendidikan bahasa Inggris harus dipandang sebaga usaha pengembangan literacy. Ini diperlu-
kan sebab di negara yang berbahasa Inggris pun, para penutur asli harus bekerja keras untuk
memperoleh kompetensi berbahasa Inggris tingkat tertentu. Pendidikan ini disebut sebagai
literacy education yang diarahkan pada pengembangan kompetensi komunikatif. Ini dimak-
sudkan mendorong siswa untuk berpartisipasi dalam penciptaan berbagai teks bahasa Ing-
gris. Pendidikan bahasa Inggris di Indonesia perlu mempertimbangkan macam teks yang
menjadi target pendidikan literacy penutur asli. (English language education ought to be
viewed as an attempt to develop literacy. This is needed because in English-speaking coun-
tries, the native speakers must work hard to attain a certain level of English competence.
Such an education is called literacy education, which is geared to the development of com-
municative competence. This is intended to encourage students to participate in the creation
of English texts. English language education in Indonesia needs to take into consideration a
variety of texts that become the target of native speakers’ literacy education.)
Ada tujuh prinsip pembelajaran bahasa yang berbasis literasi (literacy-based approach) yang
dirumuskan oleh the New London Group (Kern 2000), yaitu: intrepretasi, konvensi, kolab-
orasi, pengetahuan budaya, memecahkan masalah, refleksi, dan menggunakan bahasa.
Maksudnya, pengalaman pembelajaran yang dirancang hendaknya berdasarkan pertimban-
gan prinsip-prinsip di atas. (There are seven principles of literacy-based approach language
learning formulated by the New London Group (Kern 2000), namely: interpretation,

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convention, collaboration, cultural knowledge, problem solving, reflection, and language use.
This means that the designed learning experience should be based on the considerations of
the above principles.)
(Kurikilum 2004 Standard Kompetensi Mata Pelajaran Bahasa
Inggris Sekolah Menengah Pertama dan Madrasah Tsanawiyah,
Departemen Pendidikan Nasional, 2004, 18)

The assumption here is that the adoption of the New London Group’s literacy-based approach
not only offers an ‘ideal’ framework for literacy education (what English has), but also works
universally in all contexts (what English does), including in Indonesia, and therefore needs to be
infused in the teaching of English literacy for high school students. As such, the literacy model
is believed to facilitate students’ literacy acquisition in English. Clearly, as the pedagogical norms
are taken blithely from the country where English is the main language, it reflects a monolin-
gualist orientation and exemplifies linguistic imperialism in action.
The linguistic imperialist arguments are even most conspicuous in the mission statement of
the Regional English Language Office (RELO), a cultural-educational organization operating
under the auspices of the American Embassy in Jakarta, Indonesia:

The Regional English Language Office supports English teaching and learning in Indonesia.
English competence brings greater opportunities in business, education, and communica-
tion, and closer ties with the United States, especially through State Department exchange
programs such as Fulbright.
(Regional English Language Office [RELO],
http://jakarta.usembassy.gov/relo.html,)

The Indonesian education practitioners’ and students’ dependence on English is further

extended by the presence of such an organization, as it promises them that the ability to use
English offers a bright future and grants access to easy business, education, and communication.
Most importantly, the RELO can grant Indonesian students and teachers scholarships for pursu-
ing further studies in the United States under the program called Fulbright, the goal of which is
to instill in them a commitment to U.S. values and norms (see also Clachar 1998). Upon return-
ing from their studies in the United States, the students are expected to manifest these norms and
values through their professions. What is more, the organization provides easy access to material
resources in the form of what it calls ‘professional materials’ needed by teachers, students, and
researchers in Indonesia. Apart from these material resources, RELO also offers immaterial
resources in the form of English-native teacher trainers who purportedly have the best technical
know-how of the complexities of English pedagogical practices in the Indonesian contexts
(Sugiharto 2009).

Schools as the Site for the Perpetuation of Linguistic Imperialist Discourse

As the Indonesian education system is fully centralized, any policy issued by the Ministry of
Education and Culture must be realized and implemented. The policy regarding the internation-
alization of local schools is no exception. In fact, while almost all private-run schools are racing
to attract students by labeling themselves with ‘international standard,’ characterized by the use
of English as the medium of instruction and by other imported material and immaterial resources,
the state has legitimated the repressive function of English (see Phillipson 1992) by promoting
the importance of English, primarily through internationalizing state-run schools.

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 Disentangling Linguistic Imperialism

It is through schools that the process of domination and Western ideological reproduction is
most tangible. An instance of this is the imposition of English-only policies, both in class and
outside of class at school vicinities, between teachers and students and between students and
students. Another conspicuous example is the strict imposition of the use of the dominant
Western discourse in the teaching of writing in all levels of language proficiency. For example,
Sugiharto (2007b; 2012a) observes that the teaching of writing and the textbooks used to teach
this skill still cling heavily to and glorify the principles of the Current Traditional Rhetoric,
which stresses the importance of rhetorical moves in texts, such as clarification, exemplification,
process-analysis, cause-effect, and argumentation. Interestingly, despite the plethora of literature
in second language writing that warns against the imperialistic forces of Western academic dis-
course (Spack 1997; Canagarajah 2002; Casanave 2004; Matsuda and Matsuda 2010), this dom-
inant academic discourse still enjoys proliferation in the teaching of writing in classrooms and
shapes the very constellation of the teaching of English composition landscape in Indonesia. All
of these pedagogical practices attest to the monolingual orientation that brings linguistic impe-
rialism into play.

Effects on the Equity in National Education

When the Indonesian New Order regime reigned under then-President Soeharto (the second
president of the Republic of Indonesia), equity in education became the top priority, with the
compulsory learning program (known as program belajar) unveiled in Soeharto’s five-year devel-
opment program. This program, aimed at curbing the illiteracy rates, was proven to be successful,
which was evident in the sharp decline in illiteracy rates. During his administration, Soeharto
emphasized the importance of equity in national education, which provided an opportunity for
all Indonesians to enjoy access to education, particularly those living in remote villages. To realize
his compulsory learning program for the Indonesian citizens, Soeharto established thousands of
schools under the President Instruction as the legal basis. Sugiharto (2008a) recorded that in the
period of 1982–1983 22,600 schools were built; 150,000 more were constructed in 1993–1994.
Nevertheless, many of the policies of the national education system have changed dramatically
since the demise of the New Order. With the Education and Culture Ministry issuing a policy
for the establishment of international pilot project schools in Indonesia, the gap between the
opulent and the needy has widened, giving rise to elitism in national education and class and
social divisiveness. As this Ministry spends billions of rupiahs (hundreds of dollars) every year
subsidizing the development of the RSBI (including its high operational costs), schools with the
RSBI label could collect high tuition fees from students. Thus, it stands to reason that the targets
of such schools are students from upper class socioeconomic backgrounds, because those students
coming from lower classes simply cannot afford to enter these schools. This reality mirrors the
fact that quality education in Indonesia has indeed become an exclusive and costly enterprise and
can be enjoyed only by the rich. With unaffordable education fees, the poor have been margin-
alized and are unable to send their children to schools. Consequently, they force their children
to work to make ends meet. In a stark contrast, schools in particular (both private- and state-
owned) give privileges to students from well-off families, and have become “the regime of the
rich” (Sugiharto 2011, 6).
In fact, the policy of establishing the RSBI has been severely condemned by many Indonesian
education specialists, as it has been deemed against the five principles of the State Ideology (known
as Pancasila) and the Indonesian 1945 Constitution, which grants all Indonesian citizens (regardless
of races, cultures, religions, ethnicities, and social backgrounds) to have equal access to quality
national education. One of the noted, outspoken Indonesian education experts, H. A. R Tilaar,

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once filed a judicial review against the establishment of the RSBI to the Indonesian Constitutional
court, arguing that “the RSBI is certainly against the mandate of our Constitution, and should be
opposed because its establishment has been motivated primarily by Western’s neo-liberalism and
isn’t grounded on our cultural norms and values” (Sugiharto 2012c). Another Indonesian educa-
tion observer and linguist, Bambang Kaswanti Purwo, views the mushrooming of schools with the
international label as symptomatic of the government deliberately inviting “neo-imperialism in
local education” (personal communication, August 15, 2013).
The initiation of setting up the RSBI creates a paradox, however. While the Indonesian gov-
ernment has pledged its allegiance to side with the less fortunate children by creating the “option
for the poor” policy to ensure the Indonesian children to have access to education as mandated
by the Constitution, the ambition of internationalizing state-owned schools nationwide has
paved the way for generating the opposing “option for the rich” policy. The government’s
endeavor to bolster the quality of national education through the internationalization of local
schools indicates diffidence about reclaiming the wealth of local geniuses, long practiced by great
pioneers in Indonesian national education, such as Ki Hadjar Dewantara, Mohammad Hatta,
Mochtar Buchori, YB Mangunwijaya, and K. H. Dahlan, among others.
While all these national education pioneers stressed the importance of upholding local wis-
doms as the bases for the national education system, the system of national education at present
is enmeshed in a neo-liberalist and capitalist ideology. This ideology has been observed emerging
in the national education system, especially when the RSBI began operating in Indonesia, and
when people (especially those from low income families) realized that, despite their constitutional
rights to obtain an equal access to quality education, they could not afford to this quality educa-
tion because of soaring school fees. Thus, education is treated as “an instrument for perpetuating
social divisions and social injustices” (Stern 1983, 424).

Effects on the Preservation of Local Languages

The fervent promotion of English through education has indubitably impinged upon the pres-
ervation of local languages. Known as an archipelagic country with some 746 local languages,
Indonesia, which ranks second in terms of the number of local languages (the first being Papua
New Guinea), is facing and continues to face a serious threat of local language extinction.
Recent documentation by the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) reveals that out of the
figure above, 637 indigenous languages are in a state of endangerment, with their native speakers
at less than 100,000. This number is a significant increase from the previous data, also docu-
mented by the SIL in the 90s, which revealed 111 endangered languages. Peter J. Silzer and Helja
Heikkenen Clouse (1984) in their Index of Irian Jaya Languages: A Special Bulletin of Irian Jaya
recorded that out of these 111 languages, nine languages have become extinct (i.e., Bapu, Dabe,
Wares, Taworta, Waritai, among others), 32 languages are terminally endangered or moribund
(among others Yoki and Pawi), and 70 languages are seriously endangered (among others Biak,
Sentani, and Maibrat).
In addition, local languages spoken in eastern Indonesia documented in the Alor and Pantar
Project (from 2003–2007)—a project funded by the Netherlands Organization of Scientific
Research, Leiden University, and Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Documentation
Program—found that such languages as Klon (West Alor), Abui (Central Alor), and Taiwa (West
Pantar) are on the verge of extinction. Other Indonesian local languages that are no longer spoken
because of the decline in their native speakers (only 500 speakers) include Dayak languages (in
West Kalimantan) such as Bukat, Punan, and Konyeh. Finally, languages spoken in Sulawesi
(Tondano), South west Nusa (Tanimbar), and Sumatra (Alas and Ogan), as has been reported in

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Bahasa Daerah di Indonesia (Local Languages in Indonesia) published by the Indonesian Language
Center, are no longer spoken.
While there are numerous reasons accounting for the declined use of these indigenous lan-
guages among their native speakers (see, for example, Sugiharto 2007a, as well as a personal inter-
view with Uri Tadmor in Sugiharto 2008c), the powerful force behind the potential local language
extinction is native speakers’ attitude toward languages they consider modern, sophisticated, and
prestigious. A long-time veteran researcher of Indonesian local languages from the Max Planck
Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, David Gill, observes that “in the
eyes of many parents and public in general using local languages is less prestigious than using
Indonesian and a much spoken international language such as English (Sugiharto 2012b).
Sugiharto (2008b) observed that it was language indoctrination through the use of the Indo-
nesian language, both as the medium of instruction and in interaction among learners in school,
that contributes to the demise of local languages. If we don’t restrict our understanding of the
notion of linguistic imperialism simply to English, the indoctrination of the Indonesian language
through schooling for the sake of upholding unity can be considered a form of linguistic
imperialism—that is, the imposition of the dominant language (i.e., Indonesian) on the minority
languages (i.e., Indonesian local languages). But now, the Indonesian government’s promotion of
the use of the English language through the internationalization of schools and the exponentially
rising numbers of privately run local schools that strictly impose the English-only policy pose
significant threats not only to local languages, but also to the Indonesian language as the official
and national language. Worse, the promotion of English is enthusiastically done via the strict
English-only policy in scholarly journal publications. This policy requires that scholarly journals
published either by universities or by academic associations be written in English, so that they
can be granted sponsorships from the government to reach a wider international readership. This
policy clearly discourages those who have less competence in writing in standard academic
English, but probably have greater proficiency when writing in their own native languages. By
implication, while locally written journals have begun to draw the attention of international
readers, the policy denigrates the importance of preserving Indonesian and its vernacular lan-
guages, contributing to their endangerment in the long terms.
It is important to highlight that although most local schools claiming to use international stand-
ards (expatriate teaching staff and the use of imported curriculum and assessments) are promoting
bilingual education, in reality, teacher–student interactions and student–student interactions are
conducted in the English language. Many schools masquerade their identity as exclusive schools
with the use of English by offering bilingual education because they need to respect students with
multilingual and multicultural backgrounds. In practice, however, English is more favored than the
student’s own native languages, and most parents demand that their children be exposed to English
as much as and as early as possible (see also Djiwandono 2005). Schools have no choice but succumb
to their customers’ demands, lest they suffer from a plummeting number of students.
This fetish about English should come as no surprise, as people in big cities and villages in
Indonesia have become increasingly aware that “English is . . . a cultural icon of westernization
or success, a goal which entails the promise of a better life” (Schneider 2011, 335). In addition, the
technological breakthroughs and the advancement of communication channels such as the Inter-
net, email, Twitter, and Facebook, to mention just a few, have been associated with westernization,
which uses English as an important international language. The shifting attitudes of Indonesian
speakers and speakers of local languages from their own native languages to English can be
accounted for partly by what Rubin (1977, 260) calls “semi linguistic motivation.” As the goal of
semi linguistic motivation is social, English is seen as “a gateway . . . to a new form of society”
(Ostler 2011) and “. . . correlates with urbanity, advanced education, [and] an international

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outlook that tends to go together with higher social strata . . .” (Schneider 2011). Thus, it is highly
likely that native speakers of Indonesia and of local languages will dramatically shift their attitudes
to the “prestigious” language (i.e., English) and eventually communicate in it as a means of dis-
playing their social status.
Whereas in the 80s and 90s English was taught as a mandatory school subject in only junior
and high school levels, the craze of the English language in Indonesia hitherto has started from an
early stage of learning. Enticed by the charm of English as a superpower language, many, if not
most, Indonesians have high expectations that sending children to schools that expose them to
English as early as possible will make the children’s future brighter. In other words, the Indonesians’
positive perception of English cannot be separated from the image of English as a language of
modernity, superiority, prestige, and sophistication. Thus, the linguistic adequacy and geographic
adequacy of the English language as a global language—advanced consciously and unconsciously
by the government (through its repressive policy); local scholars (through their publications in
scholarly journals); political figures (through their speeches); not to mention journalists, media
commentators, and news presenters—has further motivated Indonesian native speakers and speak-
ers of local languages to view and treat English with awe and seek educational alternatives that can
equip them with this language. As a consequence, the preservation of local languages through
education remains in limbo, with their users gradually but surely abandoning them.

Effects on the National Language Policy

The promotion of English both through pedagogical contexts and other domains, such as com-
merce, entertainment, politics, and technology, backfires, in that it brings about resistance against
Indonesia’s long-established national language policy. This policy stipulates that Bahasa Indonesia
and its local languages must be the first resource to consult with in any attempt to find the equiv-
alents from other foreign languages, including English. Should there be no equivalents found in
these languages, words from foreign terminologies can be taken through the following ways:

a. To adopt new words in accordance with the international use

b. To adopt new words due to their common usage
c. To adopt new words by translating them
(Pusat Pembinaan dan Pengembangan Bahasa Departmen
Pendidikan dan Kebudayaan, Lembar Komunikasi, 2.2.
June–July 1986; see also Sneddon 2003)

The establishment of this policy was basically aimed at promoting the spirit of nationalism
among the Indonesian people through the use of BI—the Indonesian language—and its local
languages in all domains of life. Yet, many view that this policy still marginalizes the use of local
languages, especially in the exhortation of the infamous slogan Bahasa Indonesia yang Baik dan
Benar (correct and appropriate Indonesian), both in daily communication among the Indonesian
societies and in education.
With the hegemony of English seeping into all domains of people’s lives, including into ped-
agogy, there is overt resistance displayed by the Indonesian communities in conforming to the
national language policy. Despite vociferous campaigns for using the national language and local
languages and despite the move initiated by the Indonesian Language Center to legalize the
policy through a language bill banning the use of English in all domains, people remain recalci-
trant and continue to use English without fear of sanctions imposed by the state. Ironically, the
resistance against the language policy is displayed not only by the common people, but also by

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the state officials. This is evident in the speeches of Indonesian politicians and government offi-
cials who often saturate their language with English, through, for example, the use of loan words
and code-switches. In addition, the English-only policy imposed by local schools operating under
the label of ‘international-standard schools’ provides further justification of the complete disre-
gard of, as well as resistance to, the language policy.

New Debates
There are at present two opposing camps related to how national education in Indonesia should
be grounded. The first is the universalists who want to base the national education system on
Western philosophy; the second is the localists who make efforts to revitalize the educational
philosophies passed down from the Indonesian educational pioneers, most notably Suwardi Sury-
aningrat (better known as Ki Hajar Dewantara) and the first Indonesian Minister of Education
and Culture in 1945.
The former argues that in keeping with the spirit of globalization, Indonesian educational
system needs to be overhauled and reformed by internationalizing it so as to attain the status of
world-class education. This is carried out by adopting Western philosophical thinking in the
national education system, such as the notion of Competency Based Education, an educational
movement that first emerged in the U.S. in the 1970s (Richards and Rodgers 2001), and has
recently been realized through the establishment of schools using imported curricula and assess-
ments. Indonesia’s Vice President, Boediono (2012) has recently affirmed his position that
espouses the use of Western philosophical orientation in the Indonesian education system. He
suggests that the national curriculum needs to adopt the ideas of Derek Bok, professor emeritus
and former president of Harvard University, USA, on the real substance of education.
The latter contends that the educational system in the era of globalization ought to be con-
textualized in the rich historical roots of education in Indonesia. This is, in fact, an attempt to
revitalize the spirit and vision of education laid by the Indonesian education pioneers and prac-
ticed during the Dutch colonization period. The well-known educational philosophy and local
wisdom, which many Indonesia scholars believe to be highly germane at the present time, is In
Ngarso Sung Tulodo, In Madya Mangun Karso, Tut Wuri Handayani, which literally means ‘set up a
model, create an intention, and provide constructive support.’
Despite these two competing base camps, it is important to highlight that while at the discourse
level, the conflicting ideas on how the national education needs to be grounded are real, in prac-
tice, they are not operating side by side. In other words, what Pennycook (1994) has suggested in
terms of the co-existence of Anglicism (those who buttress education in English) and Orientalism
(those who buttress education in the vernacular) in ideologies is just a delusion. While Pennycook
(1994, 77) argues that “Anglicism never really replaced Orientalism, but rather operated alongside
it,” the real practice of English education in Indonesia shows just the contrary.
The problem here is that those espousing education in the vernacular belong to the silent minor-
ity, whose voices are often silenced and even suppressed by the political forces that often intrude
into the process of decision making in educational policies. As a consequence, those who stay in
power have the absolute last say in determining the contents of the policy without necessarily
accommodating and taking voices from the opposing silent minority. For instance, although the
judicial review—initiated by Indonesia’s noted education specialist H. A. R. Tilaar—against the
establishment of the RSBI has been granted by the Indonesian Constitutional Court, the Education
and Culture Ministry seems adamant that the RSBI must be maintained. Tilaar has not been upbeat
about the dismissal of the RSBI: “The political pressure is too strong this time, and I am not certain
whether our request for judicial review will be followed up and approved” (Sugiharto 2012c).

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Clearly, the states’ initiation of internationalizing local schools through the use of English-only
and imported material and immaterial resources—not to mention the widespread use of English
in all spheres of Indonesian people’s life—have facilitated the hegemonic forces of English. In
fact, the spirit of internationalizing and modernizing oneself in all life domains through English
has seeped into these domains without any significant resistance. In other words, despite a wealth
of publications on the resistance of linguistic imperialism to date, we cannot lay a claim that signi-
ficant changes in English language education, especially in foreign contexts such as Indonesia,
have been made (see Jenkins 2006).
Nevertheless, the near-absence of resistance to English appropriation cannot uncritically be
explained by the failure of Indonesian societies to develop critical attitudes, as critical scholars
such as Pennycook (1994) and Canagarajah (1999) seem to suggest. Hegemonic practices are
ubiquitous in the policy-making institutions here, and these institutions not only give them
privileges, but also legitimize them as a “natural” condition (Fairclough 1989). To complicate the
issue of the absence of resistant attitudes among the Indonesians, we need to understand the
philosophical outlooks held by the majority of Indonesians.
In almost all aspects of life, including in education, Indonesian societies firmly hold three types
of Javanese philosophies—ways of life derived from the dominant Javanese culture that have
seemingly permeated all cultures in Indonesia. These philosophies are (1) the Manut–lan-miturut
philosophy (literally, ‘follow and obey’), (2) the Ewuh-pekewuh philosophy (literally, ‘feeling uncom-
fortable and uneasy’ [to argue and discuss controversial topics with and challenge those who are
more senior in age and position, and who have a higher social hierarchy]), and (3) the Sabda
Pendita Ratu philosophy (literally,‘the words of priestly king’). Undergirding these philosophies are
“the principles of total obedience, the unquestioning mind, and the concept of elders-know-all,
and the belief that teachers can do no wrong” (Dardjowidjojo 2001, 309).
From these two conflicting orientations, further research needs to be carried out to validate
the claims made by the proponents of each camp. First, from the perspective of sociology, it still
needs to be proven to what extent the internationalization of local schools, which create elitism
in education, will perpetuate further social class divisions, as well as language and cultural barriers
among the Indonesian societies, given that Indonesia is a multicultural and multilingual country.
Second, from the second language acquisition vantage point, to what extent a monolingual ori-
entation to language pedagogy is effective in facilitating language acquisition is subject to empir-
ical scrutiny, as research has shown that bilingual education is more effective than monolingual
education (see, for example, Krashen 1996; 1999). A final area of research worth specifying is
what Stern (1983, 430) calls ‘educational planning.’ Because the policy that motivated the estab-
lishment of the RSBI seems to be politically loaded and without a clear academic rationale, it
remains to be seen whether the interconnectedness of complex factors (teachers, students, parents,
curriculum, and equipment, among others) involved in the establishment of the schools has been
acknowledged and included in the planning process.

Implications for Education

I have shown that even without competing for dominance with the national language and local
languages in almost all domains, including in education, English has penetrated with ease into the
life of the Indonesians. As such, the imposition of hegemonic ideology of English takes place with
no significant opposition from the periphery communities and causes undesirable effects on the
equity of education, the preservation of local languages, and the national language policy. This is,
on the one hand, due to the strong political power that intrudes upon the decision-making pro-
cess in educational policies and silences those opposing voices. On the other hand, voicing

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opposition is considered culturally inappropriate because the Javanese philosophy is ingrained—

in the education system, in particular, and in other domains of life, in general. Thus, to make
student and would-be language teachers aware of the latent hegemonic power of English, it is
important to begin with challenging and interrogating the dominant local Javanese culture. As
the notion of linguistic imperialism also applies to the dominance of one culture over other
cultures within a multicultural country (like Indonesia), resisting the Javanese philosophical out-
looks should be one of the most important teaching agendas, before any efforts are made to resist
the English hegemony. As for the language policy, attempts to preserve both Indonesian and its
vernacular languages need to be placed in a larger sociopolitical context, not just simply in an
educational setting.

Further Reading
Alwasilah, C. 2006. Pokoknya Sunda: Interpretasi untuk Aksi [Nothing but Sunda: Interpretation for Action].
Bandung: Kiblat.
Canagarajah, S. A., and Said, S. B. 2011. Linguistic imperialism. In J. Simpson. Ed. The Routledge Handbook of
Applied Linguistics. New York: Routledge.
Makoni, S., and Pennycook, A. Eds. 2007. Disinventing and Reconstituting Languages. Clevedon: Multilingual
Matters.
Sumardi, M. (Ed.) 1992. Berbagai Pendekatan dalam Pengajaran Bahasa dan Sastra [Some Approaches in Language
and Literature Teaching]. Jakarta: Pustaka Sinar Harapan.

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Canagarajah, S. A. 2002. Critical Academic Writing and Multilingual Students. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press.
Casanave, C. P. 2004. Controversies in Second Language Writing: Dilemmas and Decisions in Research and Instruc-
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Clachar, A. 1998. Differential effects of linguistic imperialism on second language learning: Americanisation
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Dardjowidjojo, S. 2000. English teaching in Indonesia. English Australia Journal 18 (1): 22–30.
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 18
Immigrants and Education
Lesley Bartlett and Jill Koyama

Introduction
The past 50 years have been a period of unprecedented human mobility. An estimated 214 million
people migrated transnationally in 2010 (Ratha et al. 2010). Seventy-three million migrants moved
from developing countries to OECD countries, while another 74 million resettled in other devel-
oping countries (Ratha et al. 2010, 12). In this era, which is often described as ‘globalizing,’ immi-
grants strategically navigate overlapping and, at times, contradictory educational settings, routines,
and socially sanctioned forms of knowledge. These situations bring issues of language and learning
to the fore.
The United States (U.S.) receives one of the largest flows of immigrants, thanks in part to
changes to U.S. immigration law, international migration governing bodies, and more local shifts
in trade treaties. An estimated 1 million migrants relocate to the U.S. per year, and according to
the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2010 American Community Survey, 40 million people, or 13% of the
U.S. population, are immigrants. Nearly a quarter of all school-aged children in the U.S. have at
least one immigrant parent (Terrazas and Batalova 2009); twenty-five percent of children attend-
ing U.S. schools are foreign-born (Gibson and Koyama 2011). As U.S. “immigrant gateways”
have diverged, with immigrants, especially Latinos, moving out of large urban destinations to
smaller cities with opportunities in low-wage manufacturing and industry, increasing numbers
of school districts are enrolling immigrant students (Zhou and Lee 2004; Hernández-León and
Zúñiga 2000). The increased presence of immigrants in U.S. educational settings raises important
questions regarding the significance of language in learning and teaching. The involvement of
immigrant parents and students in formal schooling highlights the ways in which people use,
negotiate, and aim to control language and influence social relations.
In this chapter, we review the contributions of anthropologists, sociologists, and linguists to the
topic of immigrants and education. Historically, the study of immigrant education has been
embedded within research on the broader incorporation of immigrants into U.S. society. Because
American sociology and anthropology have focused on issues of immigration and incorporation,
we have a clearer understanding of the schooling experiences and educational attainment of immi-
grants over three generations, including those born outside the U.S., those born to immigrant
parents in the U.S., and the grandchildren of immigrants. However, as described below, the two

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dominant frameworks used to guide the study of immigrant incorporation—cultural-ecological

theory and segmented assimilation theory—fail to adequately address issues of language and liter-
acy. To bridge the inquiry framed by theories of immigration and education to questions of lan-
guage and languaging in increasingly transnational contexts, we review three schools of thought
or approaches—sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology of education, and language socialization.
We discuss how these approaches have shaped the existing knowledge base, posed new debates,
and paved the way to new and emerging areas of inquiry regarding immigrant education.

Historical Perspectives: Cultural-Ecology and

Segmented-Assimilation Theories
In the anthropology of education, Ogbu’s (1974; 1987; 2003) cultural–ecological theory states that
the participation of minority students in U.S. schools is affected by multiple social and cultural
factors, including the historical and current treatment of the minority group by the larger society,
the schools’ actions towards the groups, and immigrants’ interpretations of and collective responses
to their treatment. In this theory, involuntary minorities, or those who have been incorporated
into a host society as a result of conquest, colonization, or slavery, are shown to differ from vol-
untary immigrants in their perceptions of U.S. society and their responses to the education sys-
tem. These differences, Ogbu argues, have emerged from the groups’ differing modes of
incorporation into the host society and their subsequent discriminatory treatment. However,
despite the theory’s role in reframing and illuminating questions about immigrant education, it
has drawn criticism for restricting analysis to immigrants who have migrated for economic pur-
poses; failing to consider intragroup and generational variations; neglecting the impact of school
factors on academic engagement; and, most salient to our purposes in this chapter, not adequately
considering the role of language immigrant adaptation and education.
In response to the criticisms of Ogbu’s theory, and influenced by the ethnographic work of
anthropologists (Gibson 1988; Suárez-Orozco 1987) whose work was influenced by Ogbu, the
theory of segmented assimilation (Portes and Rumbaut 1996; Portes and Zhou 1993) emerged.
Informed by large-scale sets of survey data and centered on second-generation youth, segmented
assimilation theory suggests that assimilation, and related social mobility, results in one of three
possible outcomes: a linear assimilation associated with upward mobility and middle class inte-
gration; downward assimilation characterized when youth integrate into peer groups of lower
class; and consonant acculturation (Portes and Rumbaut 1996), or what Gibson (1988) calls accom-
modation and acculturation without assimilation, in which youth are grounded within their ethnic
and linguistic group, while selectively taking up aspects of the host country culture. The latter
strategy, Gibson (1988) found, encourages immigrant youth to engage strategically in a schooling
system that too often promotes subtractive acculturation, or the subtractive schooling described by the
ethnographer Valenzuela (1999), wherein school policies and practices often actively subtract
immigrant students’ cultural and linguistic knowledge, to the detriment of their academic engage-
ment and achievement.
Overall, the research centering on the incorporation of immigrants into American society has
contributed to our understanding of broad patterns of academic achievement for immigrant
youth. Because Mexicans comprise nearly one quarter of America’s immigrant newcomers, and
because many arrive with low levels of or interrupted education, numerous studies have focused
on the education of Mexican immigrants in the United States. The analyses are mixed. Some
scholars (Grogger and Trejo 2002) suggest that, because many Mexican immigrants do not enjoy
the same early childhood opportunities and English-language foundation as some native-born
Americans, they are likely to experience lower levels of academic achievement. Others demonstrate

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that Mexican immigrants have made substantial gains in three generations, narrowing education
and income gaps with native-born Whites (Bean, Brown, and Rumbaut 2006). The 1.5 generation
(those brought to the U.S. as children or early teens) and second generation (those born in the
U.S. to immigrant parents) surpass their native-born peers in school achievement, offering the
possibility of future advances in educational and occupational attainment (Farley and Alba 2002;
Portes and Rumbaut 2006). Still, there are concerns. Portes and Rumbaut (2006) find that, despite
the progress made by the second generation, there are signs—namely high school dropout rates,
teen pregnancy, and male unemployment and incarceration—of downward mobility among
many. As well, the third generation, which has been more fully incorporated into the American
“mainstream,” is declining in academic achievement (Perlmann and Waldinger 1997).
Existing studies show that there is much variation across and within ethnic groups. Similar
to the second generation of Mexican-Americans, the second-generation West Indian immi-
grants have been found by Portes and Rumbaut (2001) to exceed academic achievement
among native-born blacks in New York City, and Dominicans, Columbians, Ecuadorans, and
Peruvians do better than Puerto Ricans. Offering preliminary findings from their study of
1.5- and second-generation Mexicans, Chinese, and Vietnamese in Los Angeles, Zhou and Lee
(2007) note that “like other native-born Americans who follow multiple paths to mobility . . .
that 1.5-generation and second-generation Latinos and Asians are successfully pursuing routes
that are just as variegated” (202). Second-generation Chinese students, according to Kasinitz
et. al. (2004) have higher high school graduation rates and college attendance than all other
ethnic groups, including native-born Whites. Much depends on income, human and social
capital, networks, transnational ties, residential patterns, and norms in the ethnic community
(Kasinitz et. al. 2008).
While valuable, these studies of segmented assimilation do not adequately consider issues
related to language learning, use, management, and politics and how these influence immigrant
education. As noted by Baquedano-López and Figueroa (2011), “in emphasizing cross-group
and cross-generation comparisons, scholars working within these frameworks may continue
[erroneously] to assume a one-to-one correspondence between language code and community
membership, and the focus on shared patterns of group behavior can lead to typified understand-
ings of communities and convey implicit beliefs about how the ‘competent’ or ‘successful’ immi-
grant assimilates into the U.S. mainstream” (539).

Research Approaches: Sociolinguistics, Linguistic

Anthropology of Education, and Language Socialization

Sociolinguistics
Sociolinguistic approaches have been productive in the study of ethnic differences and school-
ing. Sociolinguists “work on language choice and language change, while trying to engage in
a dialogue with formal grammarians, with whom they share an interest in how to represent
linguistic competence . . . Sociolinguists also continue to be concerned with the definition of
the speech community as a reference point for investigating the limits of individual variation in
language use. For these intellectual pursuits, . . . phenomena like pidgins and creole languages
or language planning have proved to be rich testing grounds” (Duranti 1997, 14). Foundational
sociolinguistic studies used quantitative methods to empirically demonstrate the difference
between working class and middle class norms in linguistic codes (Bernstein 1974) and contex-
tualized variations in Black English, or what is now referred to as African American English
(Labov 1969).

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Early interactional sociolinguistics employed a conversation analytical approach (Sacks,

Schegloff, and Jefferson 1974) with comprehensive, sequential analyses of naturally occurring
conversations to document how people accomplished interactions. When code-switching
became a central focus for the field, ethnic differences and immigrant students became more
central to these investigations. Gumperz (1982) demonstrated that code-switching was purpose-
ful and meaningful, not the result of language deficiencies. His work incited a series of studies
on code-switching and its meaning. Early research on code-switching identified and quantified
communicative functions, while more recent work has a qualitative, interactional focus on the
socially purposeful uses of such shifts (Martin-Jones 1995). For example, Zentella (1982, 1997)
engaged an “anthropolitical linguistic” lens to consider language socialization in Latino/a fami-
lies and code-switching as conversational strategy. Alternately, Martin-Jones and Saxena (2001)
examined the positioning and discourse strategies of bilingual students in primary classrooms in
England. Code-switching and code-shifting, as well as pedagogical approaches to support bilin-
gual learning and to transition to second academic language learning, remain enduring concerns
(see discussion of translanguaging, below).

Linguistic Anthropology
Linguistic anthropology presents a second major approach applicable to the study of immigrants
and education. Linguistic anthropology entails the “study of language as a cultural resource and
speaking as a cultural practice”—that is, “language as a set of symbolic resources that enter the
constitution of social fabric and the individual representation of actual or possible worlds”
(Duranti 1997, 2–3). It provides strategies and tools for exploring the ways in which language
use reflects, influences, and creates social relations (Wortham and Rymes 2003). Linguistic anthro-
pologists focus on communication in cultural contexts and within social and cultural relation-
ships and networks (Wortham 2006, 2008), with attention to three major areas: (i) performance,
(ii) indexicality, and (iii) participation (Duranti 1997).
Early work in this area derived from ethnographers of communication, who demonstrated
that speech can have multiple functions and, in fact, serves various functions in different educational
contexts. Reacting to Chomsky’s notion of “ideal speakers” with “grammatical competence,”
Hymes (1972) stressed the idea of communicative competence, emphasizing “the socially situated
elements integral to each event of communication,” and promoted ethnographic examinations
of “communicative practice, focusing their analysis on recurring speech events like recurrent
caretaker–child events (Ochs 1988; Ochs and Schieffelin 1984), story-telling (Goodwin 1990), or
literacy events (Duranti and Ochs 1986)” (Rymes 2008, 3). This vein of work led in the 1990s to
calls for a critical ethnographic approach (e.g., Toohey 1995, Canagarajah 1993). Yet students
from non-mainstream language speech communities that used communication from their home
language communities were often misinterpreted as “uneducated” (Cazden, John, and Hymes
1972). Work on communicative competence in classrooms easily became prescriptive (but see
Hornberger 2003 for a broad review).
Linguistic anthropologists of education draw upon key concepts—form, use, ideology,
domain, and trajectory—“to understand how linguistic signs have meaning in practice” (Wortham
2008, 84). They attend to linguistic form in order to understand cultural patterns of social rela-
tionships and interactions. Linguistic anthropologists of education consider how language ideol-
ogies, or “models of linguistic features and the speakers who characteristically use them, which
people use to understand the social relations signaled through language use,” “move from event
to event, across time and across social space, and how such movement contributes to local and
historical change in both language and society” (Wortham 2008). Ideologies represent “the socially

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and culturally embedded metalinguistic forms of language and language use,” including notions
of ownership, value, and norms (Blommaert 2006, 241; see also Woolard 1998). So, for example,
Heller and Martin-Jones (2001) consider how language and educational ideologies are perpetu-
ated, reinforced, or challenged, with consequences for social inequalities; social differences are
imbricated in language varieties, and ideologies pervade language instruction and language pol-
icies in and through schooling. The concept allows researchers to “explore the relations between
the emergent meanings of signs in use, socially circulating ideologies, and broader social struc-
tures” (Wortham 2008, 91).
When linguistic features are associated with particular types of speakers, there emerges what
scholars refer to as a “domain”—“the set of people who recognize the indexical link between a
type of sign and the relevant ideology” (Wortham 2008, 84; see also Agha 2006; Agha and
Wortham 2005). Domains can range from pairs to large networks of globalized language com-
munities. The trajectory of individuals in one domain can be traced across time and contexts to
examine how their identities are enacted linguistically and change over time. For example, Bailey
(2001) investigates how youth from the Dominican Republic living in Providence, Rhode Island,
rethink ethnic identification in the face of U.S. racial categories. Mendoza-Denton (2008)
describes how Latina gang members in Northern California resignify referents and project local
discourses of “turf,” place, and identity onto broader domains of race and modernity (104).
Contemporary research is also recasting traditional concerns with code-switching among immi-
grant youth. Rampton’s work (2005, 2006), for instance, describes a discursive strategy that he
dubs language “crossing,” or the use of linguistic features from Punjabi, Caribbean Creole, and
Asian English by white, South Asian, and Caribbean youth in the United Kingdom. Through
language crossing, youth culturally produce meanings of race/ethnicity and negotiate social rela-
tions. Such research shows how individuals and groups use “forms of language to co-construct
social norms and manage locally contingent criteria for membership” (Baquedano-López and
Figueroa 2011, 541).
Moving beyond the global-local, macro-micro, and structure-agency binaries, recent work in
linguistic anthropology aims to make explicit the complex networked connections between sit-
uated daily linguistic practices and broader ideologies and discourses (Warriner 2007). For exam-
ple, Wortham (2006) illustrates how individuals are differentially socialized in a classroom through
speech chains that engage the curriculum and more broadly circulating models of the self. He
identifies not an overgeneralized pattern of “Western school discourse” but “many evolving ways
of speaking” and how different students are positioned within and among them (Rymes 2008, 7).
Linguistic anthropologists, then, have traced linkages among language ideologies, patterns of
speech, models that link types of language with types of speakers, emergent identities, and broader
social structures at multiple scales for immigrants within and beyond schools. There is great
potential in extending this conceptual framework for immigrant education.
Ethnographers of language and schooling examine the changeability and contradictions in
language use to better understand relations of power and ideology. These studies take up varying
concerns. For example, McGroarty (2002; see also 2008) demonstrates that educational language
policies, especially those that guide bilingual instruction provisions, reflect social judgments and
values—or ideologies—as well as a plethora of other factors that could be seen as unrelated to
language. Park and Bae (2009), on the other hand, explore the linkages between migration, trans-
nationalism, and language ideologies. They show how the temporary migration of pre-university
South Korean students to English-speaking countries, such as the U.S., reflects the ideology that
acquiring English skills is necessary for future success in a globalized world, but that such an
ideology is, in fact, in continuous negotiation with another dominant South Korean ideology, the
value of Mandarin.

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Relatedly, contemporary ethnographies of literacy center on cultural forms and socially situ-
ated literacy practices as inextricably linked to global circulations and discourses. Scholars (e.g.,
Street 2004) have called for ethnographies of literacy that make explicit the connections between
global and local literacies. Heeding that call, several recent studies have carefully examined the
complex social and cultural interactions that influence what kind of ‘outcomes’ will result from
schooling (Bartlett 2009). They consider what Kanno and Norton (2003) describe as “the inter-
action between national ideologies and individual learners’ identities on the one hand, and the
influence of globalization and transnationalism on the language learning and identity construc-
tion on the other” (248). As globalization, immigration, and transnational circulation increases,
further ethnographic focus on transnational literacy and languaging practices of immigrant
learners across multiple contexts is clearly needed.

Language Socialization
Language socialization, a subset of linguistic anthropology, also offers valuable approaches to the
study of immigrants and education. Scholars in this tradition “study and analyze developmental
language data obtained through sustained ethnographic fieldwork. Language socialization
research is thus longitudinal—it involves the observation and analysis of language data over time
and, in many cases, across sites and contexts of interaction” (Baquedano-López and Figueroa
2011, 541).
Though the earliest work was focused outside of formal schooling contexts (particularly
within homes), for decades language socialization scholars have contrasted language use in class-
rooms and schools to students’ home and out-of-school contexts (Baquedano-López and Kattan
2008). Such concerns were central to Heath’s (1983) landmark study of African American work-
ing class, White working class, and White middle class children learning to use language at home
and at school: Her ethnographic study raised fundamental questions about the culture- and
class-specific ways of using language rewarded by schools. Similar concerns informed Phillips’
(1983) research on learning styles and interaction norms for Native American students in Warm
Springs, Oregon, Gonzalez’s (2001) advocacy of an additive model for bilingual Mexican immi-
grant children, work by Pease-Alvarez and colleagues (Pease-Alvarez and Vásquez 1994; Vásquez,
Pease-Alvarez, and Shannon 1994) on linguistic and cultural disjunctures between home and
school for Mexican immigrant children, and Zentella’s investigation (1997) of home, peer, and
school-based language socialization patterns among Puerto Ricans in New York City. Much of
this work contrasted home and community language socialization, showing how difference is
consistently cast as deficit. As Duff (2010) shows, language socialization into academic discourse
communities is a process “characterized by variable amounts of modeling, feedback, and uptake;
different levels of investment and agency on the part of learners; by the negotiation of power and
identities; and, often, important personal transformations for at least some participants. However,
the consequences and outcomes of academic discourse socialization are also quite unpredictable,
both in the shorter term and longer term” (169).
Language socialization approaches have blossomed into a productive framework for research
on immigrant education. Scholars working in this vein have conducted research on language
socialization in immigrant communities, language socialization of immigrants within schools
(including by peers), language and social exclusion, and language and transnational identities. For
example, Willett (1995) examined how four immigrant students in a first-grade ESL classroom
contended with gender roles, class expectations, and teachers’ assumptions about students’ capa-
bilities. Similarly, Rymes and Pash (2001) examined how a second-grade boy from Costa Rica
“passed” as a competent speaker during classroom interactions while being assigned to special

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education classes, with significant consequences for his education. Revisiting Bernstein (1974),
research by Kyratzis, Tang, and Koymen (2009) on peer socialization among Mexican immigrants
in a Head Start program challenged the idea that working class kids relied on restricted codes and
lacked elaborated codes. There is important work on children as cultural and linguistic brokers,
including as translators in parent-teacher conferences (Orellana 2009; Garcia Sanchez and Orellana
2006; García Sánchez, Orellana, and Hopkins 2011).
Increasingly, scholars are considering such issues in migration contexts beyond the United
States. For example, based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork in southwest Spain and
Morocco, García Sánchez (2010a, b) explores how relationships among languages, relations within
multilingual communities, and larger sociopolitical processes shape identity development among
Moroccan immigrant youth and children living and studying in Spain. There is a great need for
more research in this vein that considers how immigrants “reconcile macro-sociological catego-
ries of belonging with micro-interactional negotiations of group membership and identity”
(Baquedano-López and Figueroa 2011, 541).
However, critics charge that language socialization studies produce “overly normative char-
acterizations,” tend to overgeneralize, and “lack a systematic methodology to characterize an
individual’s unique trajectory of socialization across events, longitudinally” (Rymes 2008, 8).
These weaknesses are problematic because

taken together, the logical conclusion of this line of research is a proliferation of studies that
identify multiple forms of communicative competence that support the notion of “LS” as a
dialectical process of give and take between community norms and individual action, but
which have no way of identifying the processes through which norms are taken up or con-
tested. For researchers in education, this is a significant problem. If LS research is to be
illuminating, a methodology will need to be specified to (1) avoid essentializing static cul-
tural types and the uncritical relativism that can attend such generalizations; (2) track the
emergence of new forms of participation; and (3) document how individuals negotiate or
are positioned and repositioned in processes of socialization over time, possibly, in part,
through more sustained and detailed ethnographic study.
(Rymes 2008, 8)

These limitations must be addressed in efforts to extend the approach. The work will require
close ethnographic attention to the multidirectional aspect of language socialization across set-
tings and discourse communities (Garrett 2008).

Core Issues, Key Findings, and Educational Implications

Pragmatic discussions of immigrants and education often narrow to the goal of developing aca-
demic language in the language of wider communication. There is strong support for additive
bilingual education approaches. Empirical evidence around the world shows near consensus
among researchers that greater support for a student’s home language and academic development
in that language is “positively related to higher long-term academic attainment” (Ferguson 2006,
48). Cummins made an early and influential distinction between contextualized language, which
is used for basic interpersonal communication skills (BICS), and the sort of decontextualized lan-
guage for cognitive academic language proficiency (CALP) required to complete most school
tasks—especially assessment tasks. Cummins posited that whereas BICS can be developed in one
to three years, it takes five to seven years to develop the academic abstract languaging needed for
CALP (1981a; 1981b; 2000). In the United States, studies conducted by Thomas and Collier

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(1997) and Lindholm-Leary (2001) support the call for longer-term academic instruction in L1.
Thomas and Collier (1997) state:

The first predictor of long-term school success is cognitively complex on-grade level aca-
demic instruction through students’ first language for as long as possible (at least through
grade 5 or 6) and cognitively complex on-grade level academic instruction through the
second language (English) for part of the day.
(15)

In their synthesis of the research evidence in the education of emergent bilinguals, Genesee,
Lindholm-Leary, Saunders, and Christian (2006) showed that students enrolled in educational pro-
grams that provide extended instruction in their home language through late-exit bilingual educa-
tion programs outperformed students who receive only short-term instruction through their home
language. They also found that bilingual proficiency and biliteracy are positively related to academic
achievement in both languages. Other meta-analyses of the literature have repeatedly shown that
emergent bilinguals who are in bilingual education programs where content is taught in their home
language, even if these programs are transitional in nature and students eventually exit into main-
stream classes, outperform those in English-only programs on tests of academic achievement
(Krashen, Rolstad, and McSwan 2007; Rolstad, Mahoney, and Glass 2005; Slavin and Cheung 2005).
Researchers have consistently found that there is a cross-linguistic relationship between the students’
home language and additional languages (Riches and Genesee 2006). The National Literacy Panel
on Language Minority Children and Youth concluded that bilingual education approaches in
which the child’s home language is used are more effective in teaching children to read than are
English-only approaches (August and Shanahan 2006). August and Shanahan (2006) summarize
these findings for the United States by saying: “Language-minority children who are instructed in
their first language, as well as English, perform better on English reading measures than students
instructed only in English. This is the case at both secondary and elementary levels [emphasis added]”
(639). The educational implications are clear but largely ignored.

Academic Language and Literacy Among Youth

A specific concern in the education of immigrants is that many arrive as youth. Elementary
school children born in the United States and raised in Spanish-speaking homes usually come
into school with some receptive ability in English as a result of watching television and having
lived for five years in an English-speaking society, even if their exposure to that society is minimal.
The literacy demands are not as exacting, and there’s more emphasis on oral development.
The English language and literacy development of adolescents is, by contrast, a more complex
and demanding task. Though adolescents are neither less successful nor less efficient in acquiring
an additional language than children (Singleton 2001), they need a firm foundation of decontex-
tualized language skills in their home languages, and they need time to develop those same skills
in English (Cummins 1991; Hakuta, Gotto Butler, and Wit 2000). However, some immigrants
have experienced low quality and even interrupted formal education; further, when immigrants
arrive in the United States as high school students, state assessment policies do not provide them
with five to seven years to develop their English.
Moreover, as work in New Literacy Studies shows, what counts as literacy, and which literacy
practices are considered appropriate, varies situationally and relationally. Thus, a student who has
gone to school outside the U.S. for many years has experienced a way of communicating “in and
around writing” (Hornberger 1990) that is profoundly different from what is expected once they

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migrate to the U.S. (or elsewhere). It is not simply that English differs from their home language;
rather, the ways of using language and literacy vary in the two societies and the two school sys-
tems. The expressive tradition and expository writing so common in the United States are diffi-
cult for students from places “where the central focus is either the text or the teacher as the
central authority and source of information” (Watkins-Goffman and Cummings 1997, 438), or
places where oral traditions dominate (Vinogradov and Bigelow 2010). Expectations about argu-
mentation and structure vary by cultural contexts; e.g., writing in Spanish is often less direct (or
some might say more subtle) than the argumentation that predominates in American academic
literacies (Watkins-Goffman and Cummings 1997).
These sociocultural differences in literacy and assessment practices have important implications
for educating immigrant students, for despite all the evidence of transfer of skills from one lan-
guage to another (e.g., Cummins 1981b; 1991; 2000; Carson, Carrell, Silberstein, Kroll, and Kuehn
1990; Gabriele, Troseth, Matohardjono, and Otheguy 2009), the lack of convergence in literacy
practices leaves many immigrant students unable to apply what they know about reading, writing,
and testing in their home language to tasks in English. In order for transfer to occur, either students
need the languages to feature similar literacy practices, or students need to be taught new genres
and textual expectations more explicitly (August and Shanahan 2006). Immigrant students must
develop academic literacy practices in their home language that are similar to academic English
literacy practices in U.S. schools, and/or they need to receive explicit instruction in, and opportu-
nities to practice, different writing conventions. Recent research has worked to identify language
education models for these populations (e.g., Bartlett and García 2011).

Educational Models for Migrant and Immigrant Students

Increasingly scholars have turned their attention to identifying, describing, and even helping to
create whole schools or school programs that are successful in educating immigrant-origin chil-
dren. For example, Gibson and Hidalgo (2009) explored the role of the federally funded Migrant
Education Program in supporting the children of migrant farmworkers. Drawing from four years
of ethnographic research in one successful California high school, the study identified teachers’
multiple roles as mentors, counselors, advocates, and role models as a major factor in supporting
migrant students. In a second example, Alvarez and Mehan (2006) identified key features of a
Grade 6–12 charter school they helped to develop that prepares students from low income back-
grounds, including many children from immigrant families, to strong levels of academic achieve-
ment: a culture of learning, academic, and social supports to help students meet the demands of
a rigorous curriculum, and an environment designed to make students feel both confident and
safe. A third example of whole school reform is Gregorio Luperón, a high school for Latino
newcomers in New York City. Even in the face of the city’s divisive educational politics and
polices that emphasize English only, the school successfully promotes a bilingual (Spanish–
English) curriculum, supports additive acculturation or additive schooling, and brings together
parents, community members, teachers, administrators, and students to promote student learning
(Bartlett and García 2011). Comparative cross-national studies of the educational experiences of
the children of immigrants are rare, given their costs and complexity. The Children of Immi-
grants in Schools (CIS), a four-year international study of how receiving-society educational
systems and processes impact on the children of immigrants in Britain, France, the Netherlands,
Spain, Sweden, and the United States, aims to address this gap (Alba and Holdaway 2013). Several
of the comparisons in the study found that, despite systemic differences, the educational systems
maintained similar mechanisms of exclusion related to the maintenance of cultural and linguistic
hierarchies. While such studies provide important insights into the social and academic supports

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provided by successful models, there is much to learn about specific language supports offered at
these schools.

New Debates and Future Directions

This pragmatic concern for the education of immigrants has reignited debates over second lan-
guage acquisition models for immigrant students. While some continue to promote transitional
bilingual education, others are proposing more dynamic approaches. Based on the belief that
bilinguals have two or more dynamically interdependent language systems whose interactions
create new structures that are not found in monolingual systems, García (2014) has proposed a
model of dynamic bilingualism. García argues that bilingualism is not linear, as in the additive and
subtractive models of bilingualism proposed by Lambert (1974) where a second language is
merely added or a first one subtracted. Instead, bilinguals develop language practices that are
complex and interrelated but that differ for distinct purposes and contexts. Dynamic bilingualism
does not emphasize a static conception of learning in order to approach having “native-like
proficiency,” which is itself a political construct (see Canagarajah 1999; Kramsch 1997). Instead,
dynamic bilingualism employs a practice approach to bilingualism that accentuates using lan-
guages to negotiate situations (Larsen-Freeman and Cameron 2008; Van Lier 2000). This view
raises significant debates about the pedagogical uses of code-switching, code-shifting, and
translanguaging.
A second area in need of further research is the application of linguistic anthropological and
language socialization perspectives to immigrants and schooling outside the United States. There
is promising research in this area. For example, García Sánchez’s (2013) fieldwork demonstrated
how Moroccan Muslim immigrants in southwest Spain linguistically negotiate exclusionary dis-
courses concerning “Arabs.” Similarly, Lucko (2011) conducted fieldwork in Madrid, where
essentialist discourses of cultural differences positioned working class Ecuadorian youth as violent
and uneducable. Thus, while examples exist, there is a need to expand linguistic anthropological
inquiries into schooling for immigrants, and especially to consider destinations beyond Europe
to include the increasing phenomenon of South-South migration.
Finally, despite the increase in numbers of especially vulnerable subpopulations of immigrants,
including undocumented immigrants, asylum-seekers, and refugees (King and Punti 2012; Pinson
and Arnot 2007), inadequate research attention has been given to their schooling experiences,
their unique linguistic challenges and resources, and their educational trajectories. For refugee
youth, displacement and resettlement abruptly disturb, and often deconstruct, their educational
trajectories. As stated by Nolan (2006): “The agency and life choices of the world’s refugees are
quite different from those of (im)migrants and the social processes that bind the two contexts
when physical presence is impossible in the home country” (183). For those resettled in the U.S.,
their pre-refugee lives are substantially different from their post-resettlement ones, and their
pre-refugee education is usually not commensurate with the system they enter in the United
States; the certifications, degrees, and licenses previously earned by young adults are likely not
recognized; and their family’s previous social status and educational history do not provide advan-
tages in U.S. schooling. Most, especially during the first year of resettlement, exist on the margins
of society—and, perhaps because of their vulnerability, at the edges of educational linguists’
research lenses. However, two million plus refugees have resettled in the U.S. since 1975, and since
the 1990s most belong to what is best described as acute refugee movements, those in which
populations flee from violence and war, and are characterized by poverty, limited education, and
few vocational skills. Nearly half of these are school-aged youth. Concern and research attention
should thus be paid to their experiences.

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 Immigrants and Education

Further Reading
Baquedano-López, P., and Figueroa, A. M. 2011. Language socialization and immigration. In A. Duranti, E. Ochs,
B. Schieffelin. Eds. The handbook of language socialization, (pp. 536–563). Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Rymes, B. 2008. Language socialization and linguistic anthropology. In P. Duff and N. H. Hornberger,
Eds., Encyclopedia of language and education (2nd Edition, Volume 8: Language Socialization, pp. 1–14).
New York: Springer.
Wortham, S., and Rymes, B. (Eds.) 2003. Linguistic anthropology of education. Westport, CT: Praeger.

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 19
Critical Pedagogy in
Classroom Discourse
Loukia K. Sarroub and Sabrina Quadros

Historical Perspectives
The classroom is a unique discursive space for the enactment of critical pedagogy. In some ways,
all classroom discourse is critical because it is inherently political, and at the heart of critical
pedagogy is an implicit understanding that power is negotiated daily by teachers and students.
Historically, critical pedagogy is rooted in schools of thought that have emphasized the individual
and the self in relation and in contrast to society, sociocultural and ideological forces, and eco-
nomic factors and social progress. In addressing conceptualizations in Orthodox Marxism (with
Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Emile Durkheim) in the mid-19th century and the Frankfurt School
(with Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Friedrich Pollock, Leo Lowenthal,
and Walter Benjamin), contemporary critical theory still embodies the concept of false con-
sciousness, the idea that institutional processes and material mislead people, and the internaliza-
tion of values and norms, which induce people to act and behave according to what it is expected
in society (Agger 1991). The problem of domination (which cannot be reduced to oppression,
nor is it akin to it), a complex understanding of how social structures mediate power relations to
create different forms of alienation (Morrow and Brown 1994), mainly depicts the reproduction
of social struggles, inequities, and power differences, reflecting some of the main aspects of critical
pedagogy classrooms.
In considering such critical theory in classroom settings, Giroux and McLaren (1989) acknowl-
edge the importance of teachers and students understanding classroom pedagogical practices as
a form of ideological production, wherein the classroom reflects discursive formations and
power-knowledge relations, both in schools and in society. Within these conceptualizations,
Livingstone (1987), referring to Freire (1970), refers to critical theory in classrooms as a critical
pedagogy of practice, claiming the concept as a radical perspective in which “intellectuals engage
in social change to make the political more pedagogical and the pedagogical more political” (xii).
In such terms, the “political more pedagogical” calls for a redefinition of historical memory
(which, in critical theory, is the basis for the understanding of cultural struggles), critique, and
radical utopianism, as the elements of a political discourse highlighting pedagogical processes,
such as knowledge being constructed and deconstructed, dialogue being contextualized around
emancipatory interests, and learning being actively pursued in radical practices of ethics and

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political communities. In making the “pedagogical more political,” Freire (1970) refers to a more
profound idea of schooling in order to embrace the broader category of education in the forms
of critically examining the production of subjects and subjectivities that take place outside of
school settings and developing a radical critical teaching in which educators are able to examine
how different public settings interact in shaping the ideological and material conditions that
contribute to sites of domination and struggle.
Theoretically, critical pedagogy in classroom discourse embodies the practice of engaging
students in the social construction of knowledge, which grounds its pillars on power relations. In
utilizing critical pedagogy in the classroom, teachers must question their own practices in the
process to construct knowledge and why the main knowledge is legitimized by the dominant
culture. Moreover, through emancipatory knowledge (Habermas 1981) educators draw practical
and technical knowledge together, creating a space for understanding the relations of power and
privilege that manipulate and distort social relationships. In the end, participants in critical ped-
agogy classrooms are encouraged to engage in collective action, founded on the principles of
social justice, equality, and empowerment (McLaren 2009).
One example of the application of the theory in classroom contexts in which English is taught
as a foreign language directs the concept of critical pedagogy to a narrower, but no less powerful,
dismantling of power structural systems of imposition and false consciousness. Pennycook (1989,
2006) and Canagarajah (1999, 2007) examine the role of English as a foreign language, which
embodies political ideological assumptions in international classrooms. According to Pennycook
(1989), educators need to understand local political configurations in order to know whether a
particular language policy is “reactionary or liberatory” (112). Theorists in foreign language
teaching (Phillipson 1988; Canagarajah 1999; 2007; Pennycook 1989; 2006) argue that the polit-
ical imposition of English as a foreign language interferes with the vitality of local multilingual-
ism due to the hegemonic status of English (in Canagarajah 1999, 208).
Considering the harmful effects of linguistic influence, Phillipson (1988) and Canagarajah
(2007) cite two instances of struggle for local communities where English is the imposed foreign
language. The first instance is the dependence and subjugation of the third world and, second, the
values of the industrial consumerism culture, which reflect aspects of capitalist societies and coun-
tries that maintain the status of global, powerful structures. Pennycook (1989) complements such
claims by arguing that the international spread of English historically has paralleled the spread of
Western cultural norms of international business and technological standardization. Peirce (1989)
also argues that we need to expand our views of language as “neutral,” since “English, like all other
languages, is a site of struggle over meaning, access, and power” (405). Regarding these assumptions
of subjugation of the third world, industrial consumerism, the cultural norms of international
business and technological standardization, and struggle over meaning, access, and power, critical
pedagogy practitioners approach English as a tool to engage participants in larger ideological dis-
courses, promoting agency and knowledge, not only about the learning of the structural aspects
of becoming fluent in the language, but, and more importantly, how such a language influences
their immediate reality and communities.
In literacy studies, the discourse of critical pedagogy embodies the emancipatory force that
challenges the idea of literacy as not being politically neutral, observing that with literacy comes
perspectives and interpretations that are ultimately political (Gee 2008). In using literacy as a skill
to prepare individuals to “read the word” and “read the world” (in Freirean terms), classroom
discourse adds to the idea of learning the ability to decipher symbols and acquire the academic
language to empower participants in their contexts, calling educators to open spaces for margin-
alized students to voice their struggles in political, social, and economic spheres. Freire (1985)
defends the idea that literacy in itself does not empower those who live in oppressive conditions,

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but it must be linked to a critical understanding of the social context and action to change such
conditions. In these terms, Auerbach (1995) refers to critical literacies as the “rhetoric of ‘strengths’”
(644) for focusing on cultural sensitivity, celebration of diversity, and empowerment of parents, and
she also highlights that empowerment is not regarded in individual terms but in social terms (655).
An essential aspect of critical pedagogy in literacy learning includes the ongoing recognition of the
power relationships amongst individuals who are involved in education, such as the power dynamics
within family, classrooms, programs, and institutions. Street (1990) also argues that the failure of
literacy campaigns reflects the non-consideration of significant aspects of literacy practices by those
more powerful outsiders such as teachers, administrators, and politicians.

Core Issues and Key Findings

The practicality of critical pedagogy, while considered highly theoretical, has brought up a series
of questions founded on empirical research wherein educators have attempted to incorporate its
principles in classroom discourse. While such practitioners highlight the positive facets of critical
pedagogy, such as students’ stronger engagement with curriculum, empowerment through dia-
logue and involvement in their communities, critiques of their cultural norms, and participation
in patriarchal countries/communities, the same researchers have also pointed out the shortcom-
ings of the theoretical and ideological model. Some of these deficiencies include students’ aver-
sion to idealized concepts, teachers’ limited understanding of the implementation of “critical” in
their curricula, lack of support in adopting critical perspectives within the school site, as well as
practitioners’ skepticism of the “empowering” outcome in students’ lives.
To use critical pedagogy, practitioners attempt to reconstruct their classrooms as a three-
pronged discourse structure. Structurally, these three aspects include a curriculum that needs to
be founded upon students’ interests, cultural needs, and community empowerment. In terms of
the dynamics of interaction, the teacher/educator in the classroom usually focuses on participa-
tion and skills in dialogue in a rational articulation of one’s context with others who are differ-
ently situated (Young 1997). In this regard, the participatory dynamics and dialogical skills involve
the construction of dialogues amongst peers, questioning concepts and common behavior,
doubting the ritualized form, explaining one’s perception of reality, providing evidence of asser-
tions, advancing arguments from diverse knowledge and/or disciplinary perspectives, drawing
upon experience with the curriculum and topics addressed, and listening to a variety of voices
in different discourses. In essence, this is the capacity for critique, reflecting the critical agency of
participants (Habermas 1981).
Meeting Different Voices: Teaching English for Cultural Awareness. The research about the use and
implementation of critical pedagogy in international language classrooms possibly exemplifies
some of the structural and dynamic rearrangements that teachers and educators have undergone
to teach critically. In this regard, Sadegui (2008) opted to implement critical pedagogy in an
Iranian classroom through adopting locally and situated forbidden topics or taboos, as well as
engaging students through discussion; reading diverse articles; and utilizing students’ own sources
of information and knowledge, such as texts, pictures, and audio-recordings. Although meeting
resistance, Sadegui (2008) suggests that critical consciousness does not necessarily urge critical
action, but it gives participants of the prevalent discourse the chance to resist or change.
Showing similar results in Iranian high schools, Ghahremani-Ghajar and Mirhosseini (2005)
focus on utilizing dialogue journals to express students’ thoughts on any topic of interest.
Ghahremani-Ghajar and Mirhosseini (2005) found that students consistently appropriated the
opportunity to utilize “their” English to express dissatisfactions and opinions. In coding the
journals into descriptive and personal versus critical and creative essays, Ghahremani-Ghajar and

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Mirhosseini (2005) assert that in the last quarter, one percent of the journals were written with
descriptive and/or personal style, 82% being either critical or creative, with 42% being creative
ones. In an English class in South Korea, Shin and Crookes (2005) employed critical pedagogy
by creating projects, such as slide presentations, travel plans, discussion groups, poster presentations,
and written essays. The outcomes reported show that students highly valued class discussions as
sites for listening to their peers’ thoughts to further their views and experiences. Shin and Crookes
(2005) point out that students engaged in dialogue by asking questions, revealing disagreements,
and clarifying others’ comments. Generally, time allotted to discussion with and among students
has been thought of as good teaching practice, and in the United States, it has long been part of
child-centered learning; however, elsewhere, and in countries where historically there has been
little communication in the classroom from students, a more dialogue-oriented set of teaching and
learning tools form a critical pedagogy.
Huang (2011), exploring an English reading and writing classroom in Taiwan, utilized writing
journals by focusing on notions of critique (Luke and Freebody 1999) and different perspectives
of reading material referring to the same topic. Huang (2011) explains that reading became a
conscious process through which students uncovered hidden messages and contemplated multiple
perspectives. In writing, students were encouraged to write because writing became, in some way,
meaningful.
Despite the positive experiences within English language classrooms using critical pedagogy,
challenges have not been absent from these practices. Rice (1998) ponders the welcoming concept
of “criticality” in different cultural practices at the time that Eastman (1998) and Canagarajah
(1993) question the integration of critical pedagogy into a curriculum in which English is learned
as a means for survival and cultural status. Sadeghi (2008) highlighted her “solitude” in the school
site as a result of adopting the perspective and touching on complex topics, adding the struggle in
examining biased voices in every different context. Shin and Crookes’ (2005) concerns focus on
combining the dialogical discourse while maintaining a certain level of authority. The researchers
also point out the limited language proficiency to participate in English talk. Ko and Wang (2009)
emphasize the teacher’s lack of time, insufficient classroom time, large class size, and cultural expec-
tations in education as barriers in Taiwan English classrooms.
Empowering Through Literacy: Practices and Limitations. In literacy studies, the social change per-
spective embodies principles of the multiple-literacies approach, further emphasizing the issues
of institutional power, cultural struggles, and social change. Essentially, literacy becomes a site for
struggle because the conditions created by institutions and structural forces influence the forms
and access to literacy acquisition (Auerbach 1995). In the critical perspective, literacy, in itself,
does not lead to empowerment or resolve economic problems, if the link does not embody a
critical understanding of the social contexts and initiatives to change inequitable conditions. In
critical theory studies, literacy processes comprise complementary modalities, such as connecting
the oral and written “word” to the understanding and critique of controlling structures and
domination, offering students the opportunity to successfully participate in the academic dis-
course. In terms of literacy programs, such as family literacy, critical pedagogy practice encom-
passes the parents’ control over the program’s goals, issues, themes, research agenda, dialogue as a
key to pedagogical process, content centering on critical social issues for participants, and the
critical notion of action for social change. In short, and theoretically, critical studies in literacy
practices challenge power structures through the study and discernment of hierarchies as a first
step to improve the condition of marginalized groups, engaging them in social participation and
discourse patterns.
Empirically, participants have demonstrated indifference to the discourse of critical pedagogy.
Within a family literacy program for Guatemalan Maya families, Schoorman and Zainuddin

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(2008) examine changes in the curriculum to implement critical pedagogy and the empower-
ment practices with which teachers were engaged. The researchers discovered that participants
in the program did not have social and structural change as their primary goal for seeking literacy
education. Conversely, Schoorman and Zainuddin (2008) highlight that parents sought literacy
education to “fit in” to the American system, mainly contributing to the academic success of
their children.
On the positive side, contributors and participants of the Literacy for Social Justice Teacher
Research group, Rogers, Mosley, and Folkes (2009), examined a classroom where the literacy
practices focused on “literacies of labour,” bringing up the (economic) class conflict topic within
students’ immediate job contexts at work as a tool to negotiate awareness and critique in adults’
lives. Through the use of slide-based picture story and dialogue, Rogers et al. (2009), argue that
while the students became more proficient with language and literacy, they also became more
knowledgeable about their rights as workers and “how to be advocates for action” (136).
Although focusing the findings on her practice as a critical educator, Rocha-Schmid (2010)
investigates a family literacy program in London where she attempted to engage immigrant
parents in a critical pedagogy discourse of empowerment. The approach gave opportunities for
parents to discuss the school culture and practices and to position themselves within a different
cultural system. Rocha-Schmid (2010) also acknowledges that parents displayed their own deep
awareness of the topics and issues addressed and debated; however, the discourse patterns in
which she was involved as a teacher did not allow for further and deeper dialogues within the
classroom.
Through the exercise of critical pedagogy in literacy programs, researchers have also presented
the limitations of the perspective. For example, Rogers and colleagues (2009) understand that the
use of critical literacy in education is necessary but insufficient in the struggle for justice and social
action. They argue the need for practitioners to work with cross-societal structures in order to
build more reliable alternatives. Rocha-Schmid (2010) calls for teachers’ discourse patterns to be
revisited and scrutinized through the lenses of power and control. For Schoorman and Zainuddin
(2008), the immediate need and desire of immigrant learners to participate in the school and in
mainstream social discourse challenged their engagement with the critical view. Beyond the above
limitations, considering Ellsworth’s (1989) questions, “What diversity do we silence in the name
of ‘liberatory’ pedagogy?” (299) adding “to be critical of what, from what position, to what end?”
(299) seems to be a constructive and productive approach to take.

Research Approaches
Research in the Field. Research utilizing critical pedagogy commonly inquires into how power and
the often externally imposed knowledge structures together privilege specific forms of knowledge
within students’ learning and language usage. Theoretically, Giroux (1988), Freire (1985), and
McLaren (2009) inform the paradigms of critical pedagogy. In the classrooms, Freire (1970),
Ashton-Warner (1965), Peterson (2009), Waterhouse (2012), and Siegel (2006) have developed
scholarly work that contribute to teachers’ practice in the field of critical pedagogy, as well as
inquiry regarding the use of traditional methods within a critical approach framework (in addi-
tion to others already cited). Freire (1970) and Ashton-Warner (1965), for example, made use of
generative words to engage students in literacy practices. Peterson (2009) acknowledges the
importance of starting with generative themes (topics that emerge from students’ interests and
preferences), which can be discovered and reflected upon while using a diversity of language and
performance arts activities to involve students in the practice of critical pedagogy. Peterson (2009)
also emphasizes that even with standardized curricula, teachers can utilize the life experiences of

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students, as well as poetry, movies, field trips, and music to boost critical thinking and awareness in
the classroom.
In exploring different approaches in critical pedagogy research, Waterhouse (2012) advances
the critical literacy framework and Multiple Literacy Theory to examine the effects of becoming
critical within the students’ context. Siegel (2006) analyzes the language usage ideologies professed
in teacher and student discourse, suggesting that teachers should focus on a critical awareness
approach when teaching language. In terms of differentiating between critical pedagogy and
critical thinking, Burbules and Berk (1999) offer an analysis of both practices, explaining that they
are theoretically different: One espouses an ideological position in response to power structures,
while the other fosters a set learning strategies to deconstruct texts, which may influence classroom
outcomes and student achievement. Lewis, Enciso, and Moje’s (2007) edited book contributes to
that end, wedding studies focused on literacy, critical theory, critical pedagogy, and activity theory
because “closely examining this dialectic process as it relates to learning and schools reveals, among
other things, the role of power and ideology in people’s learning lives” (21). However, research on
the issue of such differences in classroom practice is scarce in the literature.
The teaching and development of educators in critical pedagogy has evolved with studies in
classroom discourse and practice. Hennessy, Mercer and Warwick (2011) developed workshops
that focused on dialogical inquiry of classroom lessons and analysis of recorded teaching prac-
tices. Hennessy et al. (2011), engaged teachers in the process to explore and reformulate ideas of
classroom dialogue in the context of using an interactive whiteboard. In Brazil, Cox, and
Assis-Peterson (1999), through the use of interviews, explored the facets of empowering dis-
course (ED) as understood by English teachers and how they used or did not use it within their
classrooms. The authors reveal that the results yielded a vast unawareness of the concept and
understanding of critical pedagogy. Cox and Assis-Peterson (1999) highlight that, as educators,
the research gave them the opportunity to reflect on their own practice as professionals who had
failed to offer a profound and further understanding of critical pedagogy. With Worthman (2008),
his observation of two distinct adult learning classes acknowledges the differences between teach-
ing for empowerment and teaching for emancipation, which in the research, refers to a different
discourse and overview of learners. In his analysis, while one teacher prepared learners to “act
appropriately,” the other positioned students to critique different discourses (461). Roche (2011)
explored her own classroom, focusing on the students’ discursive production within critical ped-
agogy. Citing meaningful samples from students’ critiques and sociological concerns, Roche
(2011) highlights her growth within the theory and the participation of parents in her classroom.
Her critical practice not only influenced her students’ lives but also the school setting.
For the most part, research on critical pedagogy and classroom discourse links data collection
and analysis through the use of qualitative research methodologies and relevant research tools.
Observations, field notes, interviews, work samples, dialogues, video records, and written journals
compose the main body of tools to collect data. Researchers collect data mainly in classrooms
where the framework is used and analyzed them in terms of engagement of participants, cultural
impact on learners’ lives, limitations of the theory, teachers’ methods of implementation, and
efficiency in implementing the framework. Researchers often used critical ethnographic or crit-
ical discourse perspectives (cf. Carspecken 1996; Rogers 2011).

New Debates
In a broader perspective of critical pedagogy implementation, Eastman (1998) questions whether
it is even appropriate to introduce and implement critical literacy into classrooms where students
have more of an interest in learning the English language itself or a need to learn the language,

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Loukia K. Sarroub and Sabrina Quadros

rather than an interest in being critical of it. Rogers et al. (2009), wonder if critical literacy edu-
cation will make a material difference in the lives of students and their families. From a more
micro perspective, Rocha-Schmid (2010) inquires if it is possible for educators to be able to
distance themselves from their discourses and ideologies to keep them from influencing and
controlling the course of classroom dialogue. In addition, both Rocha-Schmid (2010) and
Ellsworth (1989) ponder which diversities or voices are silenced when using a “liberatory”
pedagogy. More research is needed to address critical pedagogy and critical thinking and how
these are either conceptually or empirically connected. Additionally, there have been in the
past 20 years, a rich array of classroom studies, urban youth, and international English language
settings founded upon critical theory frameworks, but critical pedagogy and discourse have not
been studied systematically on a larger scale, spanning multiple socioeconomic and sociocultural
contexts, including rural, multilingual, urban, as well as ethnically and/or socioeconomically
more homogeneous classroom settings.

Implications for Education

Educational linguistics offers educators the potential for better understanding language use from
the perspective of traditional grammar (what is usually taught in schools) and functional grammar
perspectives (cf. Schleppegrell 2004). Critical theories and pedagogy, in turn, provide a useful
framework for uncovering power relationships between standard forms and many other forms
that are used by individuals, families, schools, and work places, in order to examine the combined
form and function and its impact on interaction and learning. Further research includes the need
for practitioners to study how critical pedagogy influences critical thinking, ethnographic studies
that examine the impact of critical pedagogy in different cultures, and conversational and dis-
course analyses as necessary tools for better understanding the “critical” in critical pedagogy
classrooms. Drawing attention to micro-level analyses of classroom interaction in the context of
larger cultural and social processes continues to be important, especially in regions of the world
experiencing political and environmental changes that are simultaneously and often instantly
visible through digital and multi-media outlets. Ultimately, at stake are individuals and collectives
of individuals’ access to and savvy negotiation of teaching and learning practices that aid them to
succeed in spite of institutional constraints and power structures.

Further Reading
For an overall understanding of the diverse facets of critical pedagogy, The Critical Pedagogy
Reader (Darder et al. 2009) offers not only the theoretical perspectives that inform inquiry, but
also explores how some researchers have applied these perspectives in their studies. Works from
Giroux (1981; 1983), Freire (1970; 1985), and Phillipson (1992) give the most widely used his-
torical and theoretical viewpoints for critical pedagogy. For an overview of classroom discourse,
McLaren (1986; 1989) and Barbules (1992) offer salient reflective and analytic arguments
focused on practice and theory.

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Language Teacher Education
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 20
Teachers’ Beliefs About Language
Learning and Teaching
Sun Yung Song

Over the past 15 years, a particular dimension of teachers’ cognition—teacher beliefs—has

received considerable attention in the fields of language teaching and language teacher education.
It is widely recognized that language teachers bring to the classroom a set of beliefs that are
derived from various sources, including individual personality, prior learning experiences as stu-
dents, and teaching practices (Borg 2003). These beliefs are said to serve as guiding principles for
instructional decisions and classroom practices, which in turn influence students’ language learn-
ing in classrooms (Pajares 1992). Therefore, it is particularly important for educational researchers
and teacher educators to understand the central role that teacher beliefs play in language teaching
and learning. The examination of teachers’ beliefs about language learning and teaching can
provide valuable insights into teachers’ decision-making and classroom practices for language
learners (Johnson 1994). This information can also offer important implications for designing
and implementing sustained and integrated teacher education programs to promote the develop-
ment and transformation of teacher beliefs for teachers’ professional growth.
This chapter delineates current main trends in research into teachers’ beliefs about language
learning and teaching. It begins with a brief discussion on the nature of teacher beliefs. In the
subsequent section, it offers a historical overview of the research on language teacher cognition
in which the study of teacher beliefs is grounded. Then, it provides a review of relevant work
drawn from the 1990s to present. After a brief discussion of the research approaches employed
in the field, the final part of the chapter discusses an agenda for future research intended to
expand the knowledge base of teachers’ beliefs about language learning and teaching, as well as
implications for teacher education.

The Nature of Teacher Beliefs

Beliefs are a notoriously difficult concept to define because they are not directly observable nor
are they easily measurable (Pajares 1992). Despite the increasing research interest in teachers’
beliefs over the past several decades, a single definition of beliefs has not been reached. The lack
of consensus in the definitions of beliefs derives from inconsistency in the terminology used to
describe teachers’ beliefs. Kagan (1992) discussed the lack of agreement in terminology, stating
that “the term ‘teacher belief ’ is not used consistently, with some researchers referring instead to

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Sun Yung Song

teachers’ ‘principles of practice,’ ‘personal epistemologies,’ ‘perspectives,’ ‘practical knowledge’ or

‘orientations’” (66). Perhaps the most problematic conceptual confusion comes from a debate
over the difference between beliefs and knowledge. Although specific understandings of these
concepts remain unclear, researchers have provided features of beliefs that distinguish beliefs from
knowledge. For example, according to Nespor (1987), beliefs are unconsciously held and are
often tacit and resistant to change, whereas knowledge is conscious and is subject to change.
Pajares (1992) explained that “[b]elief is based on evaluation and judgment; knowledge is based
on objective fact” (313). Richardson (1996) stated that beliefs are subjective claims that the indi-
vidual considers as true, while knowledge is objective truths.
In the absence of a clear definition of beliefs, in this chapter teachers’ beliefs refer to those that
are related to language learning and teaching, based on the notion that beliefs are “psychologi-
cally held understanding, premises, or propositions about the world that are felt to be true”
(Richardson 1996, 103). In Kagan’s (1992) view, teacher beliefs are “tacit, often unconsciously
held assumptions about students, classrooms and the academic material to be taught” (65). John-
son (1994) outlines three underlying assumptions about teacher beliefs that provide a basis for
research on teacher beliefs. The three assumptions include: (1) teachers’ beliefs affect perception
and judgment that have an influence on classroom behaviors, (2) teachers’ beliefs shape how
teachers learn to teach and implement classroom practices, and (3) understanding teachers’ beliefs
is important in improving teaching practices and teacher education programs.

Historical Overview of Research on Language Teachers’ Beliefs

Research on teacher beliefs is grounded in the domain of teacher cognition. Borg (2003) defines
teacher cognition as the “unobservable cognitive dimension of teaching—what teachers know,
believe, and think” (81). Since the 1970s, the study of teacher cognition has grown substantially.
(For reviews of the literature, see Borg 2006.) Teacher cognition research emerged out of the
dissatisfaction with the behaviorists’ view in the 1960s that adopted the process-product approach
to teaching. In the process-product paradigm, effective teaching was considered as a set of discrete
behaviors that would lead to positive learner outcomes (Calderhead 1996). From this perspective,
educational researchers were primarily concerned with how teachers’ classroom behaviors (pro-
cesses) facilitated student achievement (products). In the 1970s, however, the focus of research on
teaching began to change with the advancement of cognitive psychology, which focused on the
processes of human thinking. Influenced by this cognitive perspective, educational researchers
shifted their attention from teachers’ behaviors to teachers’ mental lives (Calderhead 1996). This
shift in research on teaching also resulted from a growing recognition that teachers take an active
role in making decisions about classroom events (Calderhead 1996). Jackson’s (1968) pioneering
ethnographic work Life in Classrooms was the first study that attempted to examine “the mental
constructs and processes that underlie teacher behavior” (Clark and Peterson 1986, 255). After
this groundbreaking work, educational researchers began to investigate a variety of concepts in
teachers’ cognition, including teachers’ decision-making, perceptions, judgments, knowledge, and
beliefs. As a result, there was significant growth in research illuminating various aspects of teach-
ers’ cognition in the 1980s and 1990s.
Although mainstream educational research has shown growing interest in teacher cognition
over the past 30 years, language teachers’ cognition has only recently gained prominent attention.
Research on language teachers’ cognition emerged in the 1990s. Prior to the 1990s, research on
second language (L2) teaching was mainly concerned with three issues: “effective teaching behav-
iors, positive learner outcomes, and teacher-students interactions that are believed to enhance
second language learning” (Johnson 1994, 440). However, in the 1990s researchers shifted their

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attention to teachers’ mental lives. Freeman and Richards (1996) were among the first leading schol-
ars to enunciate the need for research on language teachers’ cognition. Major contributions to the
study of language teacher cognition come from work by Woods (1996) and Borg (2003; 2006).
Woods’ (1996) work is the first book-length study examining the effects of teacher beliefs on prac-
tice. In this work, to reduce the distinction between beliefs and knowledge, Woods proposed the
integrated notion of beliefs, assumptions, and knowledge (labeled BAK) that guide teachers’ action.
He argues that these three constructs (BAK) are intricately interrelated and therefore should be
considered as an integrated construct, rather than distinct categories. In his latest comprehensive
review, Borg (2006) traced more than 180 teacher cognition studies conducted in first (L1), L2, and
foreign language (FL) settings that were published from the 1990s to 2006. He reviewed several
areas of study, including the cognition of pre-service and in-service language teachers and language
teachers’ cognition in grammar teaching and literacy instruction. These contributions have stimu-
lated numerous researchers and teacher educators to explore various dimensions of language teach-
ers’ cognition, including teachers’ beliefs (Phipps and Borg 2009), maxims (Richards 1996),
pedagogical knowledge (Mullock 2006), personal practical knowledge (Golombek 1998), and prin-
ciples (Breen, Hird, Milton, Oliver, and Thwaite 2001).
Most published empirical studies of language teachers’ beliefs have examined three broad issues:
(1) beliefs of pre-service teachers, (2) beliefs of in-service teachers, and (3) teacher beliefs in specific
aspects of language teaching, particularly grammar teaching (see Borg 2006 for a full review). A
summary of the research conducted in each of these areas is provided in the next three sections.

Pre-Service Teachers’ Beliefs

One strand of studies has examined pre-service teachers’ beliefs about language learning and
teaching at the point of entry into teacher education programs. Findings of these studies confirm
the results from mainstream educational research that pre-service teachers bring with them a set
of existing beliefs into the teacher education program, and these entering beliefs come from their
previous schooling experiences as students, which Lortie (1975) refers to as apprenticeship of obser-
vation (e.g., approximately 1300 hours of observation of class instruction by teachers before
graduation from high school). Pre-service teachers’ entering beliefs have been recognized as a
powerful factor influencing how they learn to teach, interpret new information, and make
instructional decisions during teacher education (Borg 2003). For example, Johnson (1994)
explored the beliefs and teaching practices of English as a second language (ESL) teacher candi-
dates enrolled in a teacher preparation program in TESL. The study found that teacher candi-
dates’ emerging beliefs and instructional decisions during a practicum were influenced by the
images of teachers and teaching that they formed based on their learning experiences as L2
students. Numrich (1996) also found that teacher candidates’ decision-making about specific
instructional practices was shaped by their positive or negative experiences with these respective
practices as L2 learners.
Examining the characteristics of entering beliefs of pre-service teachers has also been a focus
of research. It has been a contestable issue whether pre-service teachers’ beliefs are stable or
dynamic. Some researchers have argued that as teachers’ beliefs are formed based on unique per-
sonal history and life experience, they become deeply rooted, stable, and resistant to change. In a
longitudinal study in Hong Kong, for instance, Peacock (2001) examined the beliefs about L2
learning of 146 ESL pre-service teachers enrolled a three-year BA TESL program. At the end of
the study, he found no significant change in pre-service teachers’ beliefs, providing evidence for
the stability of teacher beliefs in some key aspects of language learning. In contrast, other research-
ers have supported the view that teacher beliefs are developmental and dynamic. For example,

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Cabaroglu and Roberts (2000) explored the development of the belief system of 20 pre-service
teachers in a year-long teacher education program. The authors observed changes in organization
and development of teacher beliefs during a pre-service training course. To broaden the current
understanding of the nature and role of pre-service teachers’ beliefs, further research is needed to
investigate which teachers’ beliefs may be resistant or open to change and what factors may con-
tribute to change (Fives and Buehl 2012).
A significant number of studies have been concerned with the impact of teacher education
on pre-service teachers’ beliefs. The findings of these studies are mixed. Some studies have pro-
vided evidence that teacher education is a weak intervention. In a qualitative case study of a
pre-service CELTA (Certificate in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) course,
for instance, M. Borg (2005) found the limited impact of teacher education on a trainee teach-
er’s beliefs. The study revealed that the trainee teacher’s pre-course beliefs were largely rooted
in her early schooling experiences. Although some of her pre-course beliefs were influenced by
new information presented by the course, most of her beliefs showed little change. Urmston
(2003) also reported the stability of trainee teachers’ beliefs. The study examined the beliefs and
knowledge of 30 trainee teachers enrolled in a TESL course in Hong Kong. It was found that
trainee teachers’ pre-course beliefs were based on their learning experiences as students within
the teacher-centered educational system in Hong Kong. The study concluded that trainee
teachers showed few changes in their beliefs about key aspects of teaching during the TESL
course. These studies suggest that teacher education programs may have little or no impact on
changing pre-service teachers’ beliefs for two reasons. First, given that teacher beliefs are shaped
by unique personal life histories and “apprenticeship of observation” (Lortie, 1975), pre-service
teachers’ existing beliefs may be too powerful to be changed by teacher education (Pajares
1992). Second, teacher education programs typically provide short-term intervention (e.g., offer-
ing short-range, discrete courses), which may weaken the impact of training on pre-service
teachers’ beliefs (Richardson 2003).
However, the pessimistic view of the impact of teacher training programs on pre-service
teachers’ beliefs has been questioned by a number of studies. For instance, MacDonald, Badger,
and White (2001) and Busch (2010) reported on changes in trainee teachers’ beliefs during an
SLA course. Both studies adopted a pre- and post-course questionnaire to assess the development
of trainee teachers’ beliefs about language learning and teaching. MacDonald et al. (2001) exam-
ined the extent to which trainee teachers’ beliefs changed during a second language acquisition
(SLA) course in the United Kingdom. A questionnaire taken from Lightbown and Spada (1993)
was administered to a total of 28 postgraduates and 27 undergraduates. The study found evidence
of change in trainee teachers’ beliefs. The authors concluded that after the course, the students
showed a shift away from the behaviorist view of language learning and accepted some of the
new ideas consistent with SLA theories and research findings. Adopting a mixed methods
approach, Busch (2010) examined the impact of an introductory SLA course on trainee teachers’
beliefs about language learning and teaching. The analysis of the questionnaire responses indi-
cated significant changes in student teachers’ beliefs in several areas, such as “the length of time
for language acquisition, difficulty of language acquisition, and the role of error correction”
(318). The primary reasons for the belief changes included the content of the SLA course, class
discussions/presentations, and tutoring experience during the course.
In sum, the findings of the studies are inconclusive, considering a great deal of variation in the
nature of the teacher education programs investigated and the research approaches employed in
different studies (Borg 2011). However, given the assumption that pre-service teachers typically
bring their existing beliefs to the teacher education program and changes in teachers’ beliefs are
likely to result in improved classroom practices, teacher education programs should continue to

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help pre-service teachers modify and reconstruct their deep-rooted existing beliefs for profes-
sional growth (Richardson 2003).

In-Service Teachers’ Beliefs

While the beliefs of pre-service teachers have been extensively documented, the body of research
on in-service teachers’ beliefs about language learning and teaching is still in its infancy. This
small, but growing body of research has focused on two issues: (1) the impact of teacher education
on in-service teachers’ beliefs and (2) the relationship between the beliefs of in-service teachers
and those of their students.
Some studies have examined the impact of teacher education on in-service teachers’ beliefs.
These studies suggest that teacher education is generally successful in achieving changes in the
beliefs of in-service language teachers. In two qualitative studies, Phipps (2007) and Borg (2011)
explored belief changes during in-service teacher education. Phipps investigated how four months
of an 18-month teacher education course influenced the beliefs about grammar teaching of an
in-service language teacher in Turkey, while Borg examined whether an eight-week teacher edu-
cation program had any impact on the beliefs of six in-service English language teachers in the
United Kingdom. The findings of these studies revealed that although the teacher education pro-
gram did not lead teachers to make radical and significant changes in their beliefs, it enabled them
to become more aware of and consolidate their pre-existing beliefs. It also helped them develop
ways of adopting teaching practices that were aligned with their beliefs. A few studies have explored
whether and how English as a foreign language (EFL) in-service teachers’ beliefs and classroom
practices changed as a result of their participation in overseas teacher education programs. Lamie
(2001) examined the impact of a U.K. teacher education program on the beliefs and practices of
Japanese secondary EFL teachers. The findings revealed that despite the contextual constraints in
secondary schools in Japan (e.g., the pressure of university entrance examinations and large class
size), teachers’ beliefs and teaching practices shifted from a grammar-focused and teacher-centered
approach to a more student-oriented and meaning-based approach as a result of the teacher edu-
cation program. A similar finding was reported by Kurihara and Samimy (2007), who explored the
effects of a U.S. teacher training program on eight experienced Japanese EFL teachers’ beliefs and
practices. The authors found that while institutional and contextual constraints (e.g., the need to
prepare students for standardized testing) served as an obstacle in changing classroom practices, the
teacher training program generally had an influential impact on the teachers’ beliefs. To sum up,
although only a small body of research on the effects of teacher education on in-service teachers’
beliefs and practices has been conducted, evidence suggests that teacher education may have a pos-
itive influence on achieving changes in the beliefs of in-service language teachers.
It is generally accepted that effective teaching and learning occur when there is a consistency
between teachers’ and students’ beliefs (Kumaravadivelu 1991). Adopting survey questionnaires,
some studies have examined the relationship between teachers’ and students’ beliefs about lan-
guage learning and teaching. The findings of the studies have indicated mismatches in beliefs
between the two groups. These studies have provided useful information on the types of incon-
sistencies between teachers’ and students’ beliefs, which can help teachers understand students’
potential frustration or difficulties in language learning and provide more effective instruction.
Kern (1995) adopted the BALLI (Horwitz 1985) and compared students’ and teachers’ beliefs
about language learning. The results revealed that the overall beliefs of teachers and students were
similar; however, several conflicting beliefs were found at the level of the individual survey items.
The study concluded that teachers’ beliefs about language learning might have an impact on
those of their students on an individual basis. Similarly, Davis (2003) used a questionnaire to

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explore the beliefs of 18 teachers and 97 students enrolled in Chinese-English translation courses
in China. He found incongruence between the beliefs of teachers and students in areas related
to the language learning theory of behaviorism (e.g., “teachers should correct students when
they make grammatical errors”). In short, the findings of the studies suggest that mismatches
between teachers’ and students’ beliefs may create tensions in the classroom and hinder students’
success in learning. Further research is needed to find effective ways to minimize inconsistencies
between teachers’ and students’ beliefs.

Teachers’ and Students’ Beliefs About Grammar Teaching

One specific aspect of language teaching that has been given much consideration in the study of
teacher beliefs is grammar instruction. Two of the most frequently recurring topics are (1) teachers’
and students’ beliefs about grammar teaching and (2) the association between teachers’ beliefs about
grammar teaching and classroom practices.
The issue of whether grammar should be explicitly taught has been a source of controversy in
the field of language teaching. The controversy lies in whether formal grammar instruction is
beneficial or detrimental to students’ language learning. A number of studies investigating teachers’
beliefs about grammar teaching have indicated that teachers generally consider grammar to be a
vital component in language learning and teaching. For instance, using a questionnaire and inter-
views, Eisenstein-Ebsworth and Schweers (1997) explored the views about grammar and grammar
teaching held by 30 ESL teachers in New York and 30 ESL teachers in Puerto Rico. The study
revealed that most of the teachers agreed that explicit grammar teaching was important in L2 classes.
Teachers reported that their views about grammar teaching were mainly affected by their personal
experiences as language learners and teachers. In another study, Burgess and Etherington (2002)
explored the beliefs about grammar and grammar teaching of 48 teachers of English for academic
purposes (EAP) in U.K. universities. The majority of the teachers felt that grammar teaching was
valuable for enhancing EAP students’ language learning. In particular, teachers showed a preference
for discourse-based approaches, rather than a decontextualized method of teaching grammar.
Schulz’s (1996; 2001) two large-scale studies shed light on the views of teachers and students
regarding the role of grammar instruction and error correction in FL teaching. In his first study
(1996), participants were 92 FL teachers and 824 FL students at a U.S. university. The study indicated
significant incongruence between teachers’ and students’ views. Students were more favorable about
formal grammar instruction and error correction than teachers. Discrepancies between teachers’ and
students’ perceptions about formal grammar teaching were also found in his subsequent study (2001)
with 122 FL teachers and 607 students in Colombia. The study suggested that it is imperative for
teachers to explore their students’ perceptions, particularly about the role of formal grammar instruc-
tion and error correction since discrepancies in perceptions between the two groups may diminish
the impact of instruction and negatively affect students’ motivation and learning.

Teachers’ Beliefs About Grammar Teaching and Classroom Practices

Considerable work has been done to explore the relationship between teachers’ beliefs about gram-
mar teaching and classroom practices in both pre-service and in-service contexts. Some major find-
ings from these studies include (1) teachers’ classroom practices are governed by their beliefs about
grammar teaching, (2) teachers’ stated beliefs are not always congruent with their practices, (3) social
contextual factors (e.g., time constraints and institutional expectations) serve as powerful influences
on teachers’ grammar practices, and (4) the relative influence of core and peripheral beliefs on teach-
ers’ practices may lead to discrepancies between teachers’ stated beliefs and classroom practices.

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Burns and Knox (2005) studied two trainee teachers enrolled in a graduate course on systemic
functional linguistics (SFL) in Australia. The authors found that although trainee teachers came to
integrate some SFL principles into their grammar teaching, they primarily adopted a traditional
grammar teaching approach due to their pre-established beliefs on the advantages of explicit and
direct grammar presentation. The study indicated that teachers’ pedagogical decisions were affected
by their beliefs about grammar teaching. Farrell and Lim (2005) and Ng and Farrell (2003) exam-
ined the association between teachers’ beliefs and practices in English grammar teaching in
Singapore. Farrell and Lim (2005) examined the beliefs about grammar teaching and practices of
two practicing teachers in an elementary school. Although teachers stated that they preferred a
communicative language teaching approach, it was observed that their classroom practices were
characterized by a teacher-centered approach with explicit teaching of grammar. In a study of four
secondary school teachers, Ng and Farrell (2003) also found discrepancies between teachers’ beliefs
and their practices about error correction. The study revealed that contextual factors (e.g., time
constraints) led to inconsistency between teachers’ beliefs and their practices. In a recent study of
three in-service EFL teachers in a Turkish preparatory school, Phipps and Borg (2009) focused on
tensions between teachers’ beliefs about grammar instruction and practices. To explain these dis-
crepancies, the authors distinguished teachers’ core beliefs, being “experientially ingrained” (388)
from peripheral beliefs, being “theoretically embraced” (388). For instance, one teacher had a the-
oretical belief (a peripheral belief) that group work increases opportunities for target language use.
However, she chose to adopt teacher-class interaction in her teaching due to her core beliefs about
the benefits of teacher-class interaction that were derived from her previous teaching experiences.
The authors concluded that tensions between beliefs and practices occurred because teachers’ class-
room behaviors were guided by their core beliefs, which were more stable and exerted stronger
impact on classroom practices than peripheral beliefs.

Research Approaches to Examining Teachers’ Beliefs

To gain access to teachers’ beliefs about language learning and teaching, researchers have developed
new and adapted mainstream educational research methods and instruments to fit the objectives
of their studies. Although some studies adopted only one data collection method (particularly
questionnaires), researchers have increasingly used combinations of different data collection meth-
ods, not only to enhance research credibility, but also to capture the complex, multifaceted aspects
of teachers’ beliefs.
Data collection methods employed in studies reported in this chapter can be categorized into
four main groups: (1) questionnaires, (2) verbal commentaries, (3) observations, and (4) reflective
writing (see Borg 2006 for detailed descriptions). One of the most common methods of data
elicitation is to use Likert-scale questionnaires of various kinds. A number of studies have mainly
adopted a quantitative research methodology, using the BALLI (Horwitz 1985) (e.g., Peacock
2001), a teacher version of the BALLI (TBALLI, Horwitz 1985) (e.g., Kern 1995), a questionnaire
taken from Lightbown and Spada (1993) (e.g., MacDonald et al. 2001), the Teachers’ Beliefs
about Literacy Questionnaire (TBALQ) (e.g., Westwood, Knight, and Redden 1997), and the
Foreign Language Education Questionnaire (FLEQ) (e.g., Allen 2002). One drawback of using
questionnaires is that prefabricated statements used in the Likert-scale survey may “mask or
misrepresent a particular teacher’s highly personalized perceptions and definitions” (Kagan 1990,
427). To establish the credibility of research findings, therefore, some studies have used a Likert-scale
questionnaire with open-ended questions to collect extended qualitative data (e.g., Busch 2010).
Various statistical methods (e.g., percentages and frequencies, t-tests) have been used for data
analysis in questionnaire-based studies.

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The study of language teacher beliefs has paid increasing attention to qualitative methodolo-
gies, which are considered to allow a more in-depth inquiry into the complex dynamics of
teachers’ beliefs and better account for relevant contextual variables (Richardson and Placier
2001). The qualitative data collected have been analyzed using multiple types of qualitative data
analysis techniques, such as thematic or discursive analysis. As a form of qualitative verbal com-
mentaries, interviews appear to be the most commonly used method. To stimulate teachers’
articulation of their beliefs, some studies have adopted structured scenario-based interviews in
which teachers are asked to verbally respond through brief descriptions of hypothetical instruc-
tional situations (e.g., Bastürkmen, Loewen, and Ellis 2004). A further method to elicit verbal
commentaries on teachers’ beliefs is a stimulated recall interview which is a retrospective method
used to elicit qualitative data as to teachers’ thought processes related to classroom practices or
instructional events. To facilitate recall of these thought processes, a stimulus, such as transcripts
or video-recording of a lesson, is employed (e.g., Phipps and Borg 2009).
A growing number of studies have also adopted observations of naturally occurring teaching
as a data collection strategy (e.g., M. Borg 2005; Farrell and Lim 2005). Although observation
data allows researchers to capture the complexity of contextual variables in which teachers’ beliefs
are embedded as well as teachers’ actual beliefs and practices, rather than idealized ones, one lim-
itation of using observations is that it “is not sufficient as a means for exploring these [thought]
processes in more depth and ascertaining the validity of the inferences made” (Borg 2006, 231).
To avoid this problem, observation data is often used in combination with other data elicitation
strategies, such as interviews. For example, in two studies by Burns and Knox (2005) and Farrell
and Lim (2005), observation data was used to facilitate stimulated recall interviews.
The fourth data elicitation method is reflective writing, which “require[s] teachers to express
in written form their thoughts, beliefs and attitudes, typically in relation to particular topics or
experiences” (Borg 2006, 249). Reflective writing has been widely used to examine teachers’
beliefs and practices, particularly in pre-service contexts in the domain of teacher education.
Journals and autobiographies have been predominantly employed to document teachers’ own
learning experiences and professional development during teacher education programs
(e.g., Johnson 1994; Numrich 1996).
Overall, a number of approaches have been suggested and used to examine language teachers’
beliefs. Diversity in research approaches has consequently led to a variety of ways in which
teacher beliefs are examined. While a questionnaire-based quantitative approach offers precision
and clarity through the use of statistical analysis, qualitative approach using interviews, observa-
tions, and reflective writing provides thick descriptions and in-depth insights into the complexity
of teachers’ beliefs. Perhaps one inherent methodological drawback associated with studies on
teacher beliefs is that it is not easy to collect and measure teachers’ beliefs, given that teachers may
be unaware of their own beliefs or may not have developed skills to articulate their beliefs clearly
(Kagan 1992). This increases the need for the field to use triangulation of data from multiple
sources to uncover information that teachers may not articulate and to ensure valid interpretation
of research findings, which will lead to a widening and deepening understanding and knowledge
of teacher beliefs.

Future Directions
As shown in the review of the key findings above, the study of teacher beliefs about language
learning and teaching is a growing domain of research, which has provided substantial insights
into teachers’ own professional learning and classroom practices for language learners. However,
much room for further research remains.

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One consideration is to broaden the contexts and subjects researched. While most studies of
teacher beliefs have concentrated on pre-service contexts, research specifically aimed at the beliefs
of in-service teachers has received far less attention. To develop a more complete picture of
teachers’ beliefs, further efforts are clearly needed to obtain information about the beliefs of
practicing teachers in a variety of language-related teaching contexts. For this reason, the exam-
ination of the beliefs of in-service content teachers involved in content-based language teaching
(CBLT) opens an additional area for future consideration. Most of what we know about in-service
teachers’ beliefs is a result of studies investigating practicing language teachers in traditional
language-focused contexts. However, due to the rapid growth in demand for language learning
worldwide and new educational policies implemented in language and content curricula inter-
nationally, there has been an increasing demand for in-service content teachers to serve as “con-
tent and language” teachers and provide CBLT for language learners. Tan (2011) explored the
beliefs of math and science secondary teachers in Malaysia and how these beliefs influenced
teachers’ pedagogical practices in CBLT classrooms. In the context of the United States, Song and
Samimy (in press) examined the belief development of in-service secondary content teachers
who taught English language learners (ELLs) through CBLT as they participated in a teacher
education program in TESOL. These studies indicate that although in-service content teachers
in CBLT settings need to play the role of “content and language” teachers, they receive no or
limited training to meet the needs of language learners and that when there is a lack of training
in language teaching, teachers’ beliefs may play a critical role in guiding instructional practices
for language learners. Thus, the examination of the beliefs of in-service content teachers in
CBLT contexts would be most welcome, as it would broaden our understanding of the beliefs of
different types of practicing teachers (with different language, educational, and professional back-
grounds) involved in language teaching.
There is undoubtedly more research needed in specific domains of language teaching. Despite
a substantial volume of work in the study of teachers’ beliefs about language learning and teach-
ing over the past 15 years, uneven attention has been given to different domains of language
teaching, such as the teaching of grammar, reading, writing, listening, speaking, and vocabulary
(Borg 2003; 2006). So far, the two specific domains that have received the most attention include
the teaching of grammar (e.g., Farrell and Lim 2005; Phipps and Borg 2009) and literacy instruc-
tion (e.g., Diab 2005). The least amount of attention has been paid to the teaching of listening,
speaking, and vocabulary, although some recent studies have explored teachers’ beliefs and prac-
tices in the teaching of discourse prosody (Baker 2011), vocabulary learning and the teaching
beliefs of pre-service and in-service teachers (Gao and Ma 2011), and teachers’ beliefs and prac-
tices about vocabulary pedagogy (Niu 2012). This dearth of research in the teaching domains of
listening, speaking, and vocabulary leaves a significant gap in the literature. Therefore, more
research is needed to fill this gap by investigating multiple domains of language teaching.
Finally, further longitudinal research is warranted to investigate the transformation of teacher
beliefs and capture change in beliefs. Much of the research reported in this chapter shows that
there is a lack of longitudinal studies regarding the development and transformation of teachers’
beliefs. Given that teachers’ beliefs build up over the course of their careers (Richardson 1996),
longitudinal work should be supported and would improve our understanding of how teachers
develop their beliefs. Although a few studies have examined trainee teachers at several points
during their pre-service years (e.g., Mattheoudakis 2007), further research may track trainee
teachers in their transition to the first year of teaching and investigate whether and how teacher
preparation programs contribute to the belief development of these novice teachers. Moreover,
when in-service teachers are the focus of research, longitudinal research on the relationships
between teachers’ stated beliefs and actual classroom practice after a teacher education program

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would yield insights that contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of the long-term
effect of teacher education. Attention should also be directed to a research agenda that explores
the links between belief change, classroom practices, and students’ learning (Kubanyiova 2012).
Understanding these links deserves attention since it can offer valuable information for teacher
educators, program administrators, and educational policy makers to expand the current under-
standing of the teaching process and teachers’ professional learning. More longitudinal research
of the belief development of both pre-service and in-service teachers would contribute to our
understanding of how to support teachers more effectively.

Implications for Teacher Education

There is broad agreement that beliefs represent a vital concept when teachers enter the teaching
profession. An important implication for teacher educators, program administrators, and educa-
tional policy makers is that change in teacher beliefs should be the central focus of long-term
programmatic agendas in teacher education to prepare and support teachers. Providing teachers
with training and facilitating change in beliefs as part of professional development present chal-
lenges to teacher education. One reason for the difficulty of changing teachers’ beliefs is that
teacher education programs are typically not long enough to influence teachers’ beliefs (Richardson
2003). Most research reported in this chapter used short-range, discrete courses (e.g., an SLA
course) as a means for belief change. Therefore, more sustained and integrated programmatic
efforts should be made to enhance the impact of teacher education programs on the development
and transformation of teachers’ beliefs (Tatto and Coupland 2003).
Given the complex nature of teachers’ beliefs, promoting significant and meaningful belief
change requires a great deal of effort to be made by teacher educators and program administra-
tors. It is clear that the role of teacher education is to increase teachers’ awareness of their existing
beliefs about language learning and how these beliefs interact with the objectives and content of
the teacher education program and shape their professional learning. This should involve specific
tasks and activities. For instance, reflection-oriented activities (e.g., reflective writing and portfo-
lios) allow teachers to elicit teachers’ beliefs and encourage them to rationalize and understand
their own belief system (Borg 2011). Such activities enable teacher educators to provide appro-
priate feedback on teachers’ beliefs and eventually facilitate belief change, which in turn can
influence teachers’ classroom behavior. In supporting teachers in developing their beliefs, guide-
lines are needed that are congruent with the purposes of the teacher education program, yet
cognizant of the contextual realities of the teaching environment. Studies have shown that con-
textual and institutional constraints (e.g., time constraints, curriculum mandates, standardized
tests, school policies) may hinder the development of teacher beliefs that are conducive to lan-
guage learning and teaching (e.g., Lamie 2001). Therefore, it is important to provide teachers
with sufficient opportunity to examine their emerging beliefs given the realities of their daily
teaching context. In the case of pre-service teachers, for example, teaching practicums or vicar-
ious experiences (e.g., observations of practicing teachers) can be useful in exploring potential
conflicts between professional development and classroom realities and how those conflicts influ-
ence the development of teacher beliefs. Furthermore, teacher education in collaboration with
local practitioners and framed around contextual and institutional factors, such as peer coaching
(Zwart, Wubbels, Bergen and Bolhuis 2009), teacher inquiry groups (Crockett 2002), and teacher
networks (Hofman and Dijkstra 2010), is needed to support teachers in developing the kind of
beliefs needed to effectively meet the needs of language learners. These efforts for meaningful
and sustainable belief change should be planned as a continuous experience by beginning with
pre-service education and continuing throughout teachers’ careers.

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Further Reading
Barnard, R., and Burns, A. (Eds.) 2012. Researching language teacher cognition and practice: International case studies.
Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
Borg, S. 2003. Teacher cognition in language teaching: A review of research on what language teachers
think, know, believe and do. Language Teaching, 36(2), 81–109.
Borg, S. 2006. Teacher cognition and language education. London: Continuum.
Freeman, D., and Richards, J. C. (Eds.) 1996. Teacher learning in language teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Woods, D. 1996. Teacher cognition in language teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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 21
Chinese L2 Literacy Debates
and Beginner Reading in the
United States
Helen H. Shen

Introduction
Chinese L2 education is a quickly growing field in the United States. Since the beginning of this
century, student enrolment in Chinese language classes in U.S. colleges and universities has increased
tremendously. From 2002 to 2009, enrolment figures jumped from 34,153 to 60,976, with a 79%
increase (Furman, Goldberg, and Lusin 2010). A similar trend is also observed in elementary and
secondary education (American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages 2011). With the
growing student body, the field of Chinese L2 education is also facing great challenges in the new
century. Because of the complexity of the Chinese writing system, coupled with historical factors
of language policy, learning to read and write in Chinese characters has long been considered a very
difficult task by American learners (Ke, Wen, and Kotenbeutel 2001; Walker 1989; Yin 2003). The
U.S. government has labelled the Chinese language a Category IV language because it takes three
times longer for an American learner to reach an equivalent proficiency level of a cognate second
language (Everson and Xiao 2009). However, most institutions of secondary and higher education
require students to complete the Chinese curriculum within the same time frame as that of a Euro-
pean language. Thus, increasing efficiency of literacy acquisition in order to fulfil the curriculum
goals is a major challenge in today’s Chinese L2 literacy education. This article will examine several
controversial issues surrounding beginner literacy, provide possible solutions for the controversies
based on existing research, and outline future directions for beginner level reading education.

The Chinese Writing System and English-Speaking

Students Learning to Read It
The Chinese script originated from pictographs; thus, traditionally it is classified as logographic
writing (DeFrancis 1989). In Chinese writing, characters rather than alphabetic letters comprise
the basic writing units. In modern Chinese, a phonetic alphabet system, pinyin, which adopts the
standard roman letters used in English to spell out the syllables of Chinese characters, has been
implemented in Mainland China since 1958 (Huang and Liao 1981). Today, the pinyin system is
most often used in Chinese learning in the United States (Everson 2011). Because graphically
the pinyin system adopts the English alphabet and some pinyin sounds share acoustic similarities

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with English sounds, it introduces complications in learning. The system of the learners’ first
language (L1) is transferred to the second language (L2) (Major 2001); similar components are
more difficult to learn than dissimilar components because negative transfer is predominant for
similar phenomena (Wode 1996).
Chinese is a tone language, in which tones (indicating pitch differences) are used to distinguish
lexical meaning (Shen 1989). For example, zhāi 摘 (to pick), zhái 宅 (residence), zhai 窄 (nar-
row), and zhài 债 (debt) are four syllables with the same spelling, having different tones indicated
by diacritical marks and representing different morphemes (characters) with distinguished mean-
ings. Mastery of four tones can be very challenging to those learners who have no experience in
learning a tonal language.
Chinese characters can be divided into two types: integral characters with only one orthographic
component (e.g., 日; sun, day) and compound characters with two or more orthographic com-
ponents (e.g., 明; brightness). Strokes are the basic building blocks for characters. The stroke
numbers in each character vary from one to more than 30, and no fixed rules exist on how many
strokes there are for a specific character. Thus, learning to recognize and write thousands of
characters has become the most time-consuming task for learners.
In modern Chinese, compound characters generally can be divided into two kinds: ideographs and
phonetic-semantic compounds. An ideograph is composed of two or more pictographs. For instance,
character 休 consists of two pictographs ( ): the left side (亻) means person and the right side
(木) means tree. ‘A person leans against a tree to take a break’ provides a hint to the meaning of the
character 休 (to rest). A phonetic-semantic compound consists of at least two components, which are
also referred to as radicals: a phonetic radical and a semantic radical. The phonetic radical cues the sound
of the compound character and the semantic radical provides the meaning. Due to the historical
changes in Chinese phonology, the reliability of a phonetic radical to cue the sound of a compound
character in modern Chinese is only about 26% (Fan, Gao, and Ao 1984), and the percentage is even
lower for high frequency compounds. A study of textbooks used by American Chinese L2 beginners
showed that only around 10% of phonetic radicals reliably cued the sound of the compounds (Fan
2010). Semantic radicals only signify a category of meaning, but not the exact meaning of the character.
For example, the semantic radical 日 in the compound character 昨 (yesterday) indicates a meaning
related to time or day, but does not give the exact meaning yesterday. Owing to the fact that phonetic-
semantic compounds consist of 90% of the commonly used character corpus (Zhang, J. 1992),
learning to use radical information appropriately in character learning is part of beginning literacy.
The vast majority characters are free morphemes. They can stand alone as a word, and can
also combine with other characters to form a word. For example, 长 (long), 长度 (length), and
长颈鹿 (giraffe) are three different words that contain the same character 长. For these multi-
character words, each character, as a morpheme, contributes to the meaning of the word. For
instance, 长颈鹿 literally means long (长) neck (颈) deer (鹿). In Chinese writing, characters
are equally spaced and word boundaries are not indicated by space. This also introduces difficulty
for American learners, who are used to reading a text with clear word boundaries.

Controversies in Learning to Read and Write Chinese Characters

From a cognitive information processing perspective, reading consists of two major steps: lexical
access and text comprehension (Perfetti 1985). For reading Chinese, lexical access includes three
major sub-processes: character recognition, word segmentation, and lexical access (Shen 2008;
Shen, Tsai, Xu, and Zhu 2011). Character recognition refers to identifying the graphic structure,
activating pronunciation, and accessing the meaning of an individual character. Word

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segmentation involves grouping relevant characters into a lexical unit and processing them as a
word in the sentential context. Lexical access refers to selecting a meaning for the word that best
fits the larger context of the reading (Shen 2008). The completion of lexical access in Chinese
involves knowledge of phonology, orthography, and morphology that are fundamentally different
from those of English. Therefore, it is understandable that controversial issues in teaching Chi-
nese primarily revolve around character and word learning, and much research effort has been
allocated to investigate how students learn to read and write characters (Everson 2011). In this
section, we will examine the major controversial issues in learning to read and write in Chinese
characters, and seek to resolve the controversies by considering the relevant studies.

Controversial Issue 1: When to Introduce Pinyin and Characters?

Classroom teachers, in general, have reached the consensus that pinyin should be introduced to
facilitate oral language and character learning, but as for the time sequence of introducing pinyin
and characters, considerable disagreement exists. The dominant practice has been to introduce
characters simultaneously while learning pinyin and spoken language; this approach has been
adopted from the mainstream practice used for teaching native Chinese children and has been
embraced by many native Chinese-speaking teachers. A different approach assumes that charac-
ter learning should lag behind the pinyin and spoken language; this strategy is mainly advocated
by non-native Chinese teachers. Scholars who support the latter argue that once students have
become familiar with the basics of pronunciation and have gained a certain level of oral profi-
ciency, character learning will be facilitated (Walker 1984).
Although the two practices coexist in today’s classroom teaching, empirical studies support the
latter. Hayes (1988) reported that during character recognition, non-native readers were not certain
about the pronunciation of characters; thus, they would also need to rely on visual skill to recognise
the characters. Based on this observation, the researcher suggested that providing the student with
a strong phonological foundation in the spoken language prior to working with characters is a
better teaching strategy. With strongly developed phonological skills, students who come to the
Chinese reading task will not have to dwell excessively on the graphic features of the characters. A
year-long longitudinal study on the comparison of the two approaches (character introduced at the
very beginning of the course vs. characters introduced three weeks after the course) for beginner
learners also supports this notion (Packard 1990). A recent study on character learning yields that
presenting pinyin together with new words helps learners to retain the words better, but only if the
learners have reached the level of automatic pinyin reading. This supports the argument that pinyin
should be introduced prior to character learning (Lee and Kalyuga 2011).
Based on evidence from existing studies, it is clear that pedagogical practice of pinyin instruc-
tion prior to formal character learning should be encouraged for two obvious reasons: one is that
it could free up cognitive resources used in character learning to make pinyin learning efficient
and focused, and the other is that with solid pinyin knowledge, students are capable of learning
new characters outside of the class by themselves and can also use pinyin to express words in
which the graphic forms have not been fully memorised in oral communication.

Controversial Issue 2: When and How to Learn

the Two Versions of Characters?
Due to the structural complexity of Chinese characters, learning to write in Chinese characters is
also considered a labour-intensive task, even for Chinese native speakers. Thus, historically, Chinese
individuals have been using simplified versions of various characters for daily communication. After

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the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, the government made this script simplification
official. This script simplification is aimed at two goals: to eliminate the variant forms of a character
and to reduce the number of strokes in a character. In total, so far, 2,235 characters have been sim-
plified and are used in Mainland China, Singapore, and Malaysia (Zhou 2007). The non-simplified
traditional version is mainly used in Taiwan and Hong Kong. In the United States, before the 1980s,
most institutes taught traditional characters. After the 1980s, the teaching of simplified characters
increased with the increase in American students studying and working abroad in Mainland China
(Voice of America 2012). For practical purposes, some institutes require students to learn both
versions of characters (Chan and He 1988). A debatable issue for this practice is which version of
these characters should be introduced first.
The traditional practice is to teach the traditional version first and the simplified version later.
Would this be a pedagogically sound practice? A study showed that in terms of economisation
of strokes of these simplified characters, the simplified characters have 20% fewer strokes than
traditional characters (Zhang 1994). A comparison of the whole corpus of simplified characters
against the traditional versions yields a similar result (Gao and Kao 2002). Cognitively, character
frequency and density (the number of strokes within a character) affect character recognition and
production. It was reported that Chinese L2 beginner learners performed significantly better on
reading and writing with low-density characters (Sergent and Everson 1992; Xiao 2002). In
addition, accurate and fast recognition of Chinese characters requires strong visual skills (Chen
and Kao 2002), such as visual discrimination of individual strokes within a character, visual clo-
sure of individual components within a character, and visual spatial relationships between the
components within a compound character (Gardner 1996). Comparison of visual skill develop-
ment in learning two versions of characters among native groups of Chinese children revealed
that the simplified character group was clearly stronger in all of the three visual skills than the
traditional character group. And their visual skills showed more improvement across time than
in the traditional character group (Mcbridge-Chang, Chow, Zhong, Burgess, and Hayward 2005).
This observation holds true for adult native Chinese speakers (Peng, Minett, and Wang 2010).
Although further studies among Chinese L2 learners are needed to verify the results, the existing
studies lead us to conclude that learning the simplified characters first and then the traditional
characters is a more effective way of learning characters at the beginner stage.

Controversial Issue 3: A Character-Based Approach

or a Word-Based Approach?
The development of the modern Chinese grammar system is heavily influenced by Western classical
grammar (Norman 2000). As modern Chinese is quite different from classical Chinese, at the time
of constructing modern Chinese grammar, Chinese scholars borrowed concepts from the Western
writing system. A Chinese word (词) is roughly equivalent to, but not exactly the same as, the English
word. Word in modern Chinese is defined as “the smallest syntactical unit” (Wang 1953). Since the
1980s, some Chinese linguists have challenged the definition and claim that the “character” rather
than the “word” is the very basic unit of Chinese grammar, which has brought a series of debates
known as “zi benwei” 字本位 theory [character as a basic unit] versus “ci benwei” 词本位 theory
[word as a basic unit] in the linguistics circle (Li 2005; Lu 2011; Xu 1994; Zhang, P. 1992; 2005).
Scholars who hold “zi benwen” have argued that many characters themselves are words, and
characters in a multi-character word are not just simply playing the role of morphemes, but also
the role of lexemes. Noted linguists have also emphasised the complex characteristics of Chinese
characters (Leong 2002). For example, Chao (1968) referred to “zi” (character) as a “sociological
word” which intermediates in size between a phoneme and a sentence. Therefore, the grammatical

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function of a “character”, to some extent, is similar to “word” in English (Peng and Pan 2010).
This linguistic debate, initiated in Mainland China, has a direct impact on overseas Chinese L2
literacy education.
The prevailing character-instruction approach in Western countries, including the United
States, has followed the “ci benwei” concept, and used the word-based approach in classroom
instruction. Basically, in the glossary of a lesson, a list of equivalent English words for the new
Chinese words is provided. Students learn the entire words from the list, but pay little attention
to the meaning of the constituent characters within the word, as well as the morphological struc-
ture of the word. For example, the word 矛盾 consists of two characters, but students will learn
the meaning of the whole word, contradiction, without being told the meaning and pictographic
origin of each constituent character (e.g., 矛spear; 盾shield), and how each character contributes
to the meaning of the word 矛盾 respectively, as well as the intra-word relationship (e.g., in this
case 矛盾 is coordinative structure). Instructors who are in favour of the word-based approach
hold that teaching whole words helps Western learners to memorise word meaning better, as they
can easily relate the Chinese words to the English equivalents.
With the rise of “zi benwei” theory, a new, character-based teaching approach, initiated in
France in the 1990s, has gradually spread over Western countries, including the United States
(Bellassen 1996; Wang 2004). The advocates of this approach emphasise that learning orthographic
and morphological information imbedded in the individual characters will facilitate character
and word learning.
Existing comparative studies between these two approaches have firmly supported the effi-
ciency of the character-based teaching approach. It is reported that when compared with a word-
based teaching approach, the character-based approach has improved both character and
vocabulary acquisition in both quantity and quality for all levels of learners in the long run (Wang
2005; Luo 2009). Zhang (2007) from a pragmatist perspective, proposed that in beginning stage
of literacy, a character-based method should be emphasised to help build a solid knowledge of
root characters because monosyllabic words consist of 45% of the 1,033 highest frequency char-
acter corpus (Liu and Song 1992).
Although more empirical studies are still required to verify how and when to use character-
based and word-based approaches to the best effect in beginner literacy, pedagogical practice is
moving in the right direction to introduce a character-based approach at beginner levels, endeav-
ouring to expand learners’ orthographic and morphological knowledge in order for them to
become autonomous learners.

Controversial Issue 4: Why Practice Writing Characters by Hand?

As we mentioned earlier, the logographic nature, plus the structural complexity of Chinese char-
acters, make learning to handwrite characters a very time-consuming and challenging task.
According to Xu’s “guesstimation”, learning to write in Chinese is about fifty times as hard as
learning to write in French (Xu 1999). Thus, beginners have to devote hours and hours to prac-
tice writing characters by hand at the expense of developing their overall language skills. When
a Chinese word processor is used in the classroom, students can write Chinese characters by using
a computer, which greatly reduces the time consumed by handwriting characters. However,
typing a Chinese character is quite different from typing an English one. To type a character/
word, the first step is to type the pinyin for the intended character/word on the keyboard; then,
a group of homophonic characters (about 7–9) appears in the icon bar. The user then selects an
intended character by hitting a number on the keyboard. A much easier way of typing characters
has also been developed, which allows for continuously inputting the pinyin for the whole

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sentence; the computer automatically translates it into Chinese characters. Therefore, typing
Chinese characters does not require knowledge of strokes and radicals.
The debate on whether students should use a word processor to replace handwriting during the
initial stages of character learning has been going on since the birth of the Chinese word processor.
Some scholars have proposed introducing electronic writing into Chinese at the very early stage of
learning. The advantages are multi-fold: it saves the time used for practicing handwriting; it greatly
reduces writing errors; it allows learners to express themselves by writing and communicating with
peers in written form at the very beginning stage of learning, which helps to reinforce pinyin
knowledge; and it also facilitates character recognition, since the software requires the user to choose
a target character from a list of homophonic characters (Xu 1999; Shen, Tsai, Xu, and Zhu 2011).
Allen (2008) further argued that learning to handwrite Chinese characters is a waste of time. His study
showed that beginner learners spent about 32% to 42% of their entire Chinese learning time practic-
ing handwriting characters and completing character writing assignments or quizzes. On the other
hand, educated native speakers reported that about 50% to nearly 100% of their writing was done
electronically. This supported Walter’s early argument that hundreds of hours spent writing characters
has a smaller payoff in terms of functioning as a participant in a Chinese society (Walker 1989).
Using a computer to write Chinese characters has been very popular and it is expected that
paperless writing in Chinese will be a dominant form of written communication in the near
future, but can literacy education totally eliminate writing by hand? Some scholars hold the
opinion that to learn handwritten characters at the beginner stage is a pedagogical necessity
(Flores d’ Arcais 1994; Ke 1996; Guan, Liu, Chan, Ye, and Perfetti 2011). By practicing handwrit-
ing characters, students will have a better idea about stroke order, radical components, and the
physical structure of a compound character. All of this will facilitate character memorisation.
Studies showed that executing stroke order, especially the initial strokes of a character, facilitates
character memorisation (Flores d’ Arcais 1994); native children’s character reading skills were
highly correlated with their ability in handwriting (Tan, Spinks, Eden, Perfetti, and Siok 2005),
and this observation was also true for American learners of Chinese (Ke 1996; Guan et al. 2011).
Although handwriting characters can facilitate character reading, it demands time away from
developing other important language skills and cultural competency. Is there a better way to help
students to learn to read and write at a faster pace? The answer to this question has been explored
not only in the Chinese L2 world but also in Mainland China. A radical idea of adopting
digraphia (汉语双文) or the two-writing system (双轨制) was also proposed (Feng 2005; Feng
and Yin 2000; Rohsenow 2001). That is the idea to use both pinyin and characters as a writing
system because the two systems of inscription can support each other in developmental literacy
acquisition (Feng 2000). This would allow a holistic approach to Chinese literacy development
and also help sustain learners’ motivation and interest in learning the language by greatly allevi-
ating the difficulty of learning Chinese characters in the initial stage of learning (Liu 2005).
However, we should be very cautious about totally eliminating handwriting practice at begin-
ning stages. Because practicing handwriting is an important means of strengthening orthographic
knowledge, it is also promising to experiment with digraphia approaches in non-target language
speaking setting, for the sake of improving the effectiveness of beginning literacy. It is hoped that
the successful application of these approaches will lead Chinese L2 literacy into a new era: an era
of character learning that is situated in the communicative-based, whole language learning envi-
ronment and that it is no longer a discrete memorisation chore.
To conclude the above discussion, the controversial issues are primarily centred on how learn-
ers can read and write characters with parsimony, so that they will be able to devote more time
to the overall development of the language competency within a limited learning period. The
next section will further examine the problems of current literacy practices and point out future

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directions, considering the aspects of character learning goals, curriculum design, technology
usage, and critical learning in Chinese L2 classroom in the next section.

Major Problems in Current Practice and Future Directions

for Beginning Literacy

Setting Realistic Goals for Character/Word Acquisition

How many characters and words does a non-native speaker need to use the Chinese language?
The Vocabulary Guideline for the Chinese Proficiency Test (Liu and Song 1992) for non-native speak-
ers developed by the scholars in Mainland China requires knowledge of 2,905 high-frequency
characters and 8,822 words. So far, most Chinese programs use this as the benchmark for
character/word teaching. What is the reality for non-native learners acquiring Chinese characters/
words? Zhao (2003) reported that American and European learners acquire an average of 360
passive characters from a one-semester intensive study in a target language-speaking setting
(roughly equivalent to a one-year study in a non-target language-speaking setting). Western
learners who have studied three years of Chinese in a full immersion target-language setting have
acquired 1,847 characters and 3,985 words (equivalent to a six-year study in a non-target lan-
guage environment) (Jiang, Zhao, Huang, Liu, and Wang 2006). For American learners who have
completed 26 credit hours of study (equivalent to completion of the third-year Chinese course
at most American colleges and universities), on average, they acquire 2,229 words (Shen 2009).
This data suggests that a goal of about 3,000 characters and 8,000 words is not a realistic for a
four-year college curriculum in the United States.
What is a realistic goal for character/word acquisition? A careful study of the 3,000 high
frequency characters showed that if one acquires 1,000 of them, one is able to recognize 90% of
characters in non-technical daily-life reading materials; if one acquires 2,400 characters, one can
recognize 99% of characters in daily reading materials (Zhang, J. 1992). As for words, among the
8,000 commonly used words, 3,000 are the most frequently used, which comprises 86% of words
appearing in daily reading materials. If one expands this to the most frequent 5,000 words, this
covers the words appearing in 91% of reading materials (Liu and Song 1992). This means that
knowledge of 1,500 to 2,000 characters or 3,000 to 5,000 words would be sufficient for a
non-native speaker to read and write with occasional dictionary help.
So far, there is no recognised vocabulary level guideline for a classroom teacher nor a character/
vocabulary level test to gauge the students’ progress in character/vocabulary learning in the
United States. It is important that we set up reachable goals and have a clear guideline for
the amount of character/vocabulary acquisition at each instructional level. Thus, a collaborative
effort should be made in light of developing a vocabulary level scheme to provide a base reference
for classroom teaching.

Needing a Balanced Curriculum

In a traditional literacy curriculum, character/word learning is regarded as the top priority in
literacy education. Therefore, other language skills, especially oral and written communication
skills, are often compromised at the initial stage of learning, since teachers believe that character
knowledge is the key and the foundation for developing other language skills. As a result, the
initial character learning activities are not well integrated into language learning as a whole, but
rather they are isolated from a meaningful communicative setting, which not only increases
learning difficulty, but also dampens learners’ enthusiasm toward learning. Therefore, we need a

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curriculum in which language skill training is balanced and learning is communicative based. In
such a curriculum, students will be allowed not only to use textbooks written with digraphia or
pinyin annotated lessons, but also to write by using a mixture of pinyin and characters. By doing
so, insufficient character knowledge will no longer be a barrier toward reading and writing. More
importantly, it will also allow instructors to adopt the method of non-synchronised character
recognition and production (读写分流) (Jiang 2006a). The key concept of this method is that
students are required to recognise the characters introduced in the lesson, but write fewer. By
adopting this method, character learning will no longer be closely tied to a particular lesson, but
rather it can follow orthographic-based instructional principles to gauge the learning progress
from strokes to radicals, from high frequency characters to low frequency characters, from inte-
gral characters to compound characters, and from low density characters to high density charac-
ters (Yun 2002). In fact, studies have demonstrated that this type of character learning by sequence
greatly reduces the cognitive load in learning (Jiang 2006b; 2006c; 2007).

Promoting Digital Learning to Optimise Literacy Acquisition

Despite the fact that the existing studies on CALL (computer assisted language learning) in
Chinese L2 have conveyed a strong positive message for adopting multimedia-based literacy
instruction—it promotes pinyin learning and tonal acquisition (Liu, Wang, Perfetti, Brubaker,
Wu, and MacWhinney 2011), character memorisation (Chung 2002; 2008; Jin 2003; 2006; Zhu
and Hong 2005; Zhu 2012), and sentence learning (McGraw,Yoshimoto, and Seneff 2009; Wong,
Boticki, Ivica, Sun, and Looi 2011; Wu 2012)—the instructional reality is that using CALL in
assisting literacy acquisition at a lower instructional level is not well embraced by many Chinese
teachers. There are a number of reasons for this account. One is the ideological problem. To date,
many teachers still do not believe that a new way of teaching will make a difference in learning,
as they are used to the “chalk-and-textbook” pedagogy. They still hold the traditional ideology
that learning Chinese ought to be labour-intensive. The other is that computer mediated teach-
ing requires substantial preparation on the teachers’ side. Even though a variety of commercial
software and online learning resources are ready for use, some of them are not pedagogically
sound and cannot be well integrated into daily teaching without modification. Lacking funding
to support instructors’ professional development for technology-based instruction is another
hindrance to implementing CALL-supported literacy in the class.
Nonetheless, the rapid development of modern technology has surrounded us by new types of
texts in our everyday life. These new texts, such as e-books, hypertexts, multimedia blogs, wikis,
podcasts, and instant messaging, have caused a radical shift in reading from print to screen (Gounari
2009). Along with the emerging of these hypertexts, the concept of literacy is also expanding.
Hyper-literacy (learning to read by using hypertext technology) as a new form of literacy becomes
part of literacy education. Besieged by such a global hyper-literacy environment, the cherished tra-
dition of using a Chinese brush or pen to learn characters will inevitably be replaced by paperless
digital learning. Chinese educators must be ready to welcome the era of digital learning and to meet
the challenge ahead. Meanwhile, institutional efforts should be made for teacher training to increase
teachers’ capabilities in literacy education for maximum learning effectiveness through technology.

Building Critical Components Into Literacy Instruction

The critical pedagogy of second languages emerged in the early 1980s (Okazaki 2005). However,
it has never been a mainstream practice in Chinese L2 literacy instruction, especially in beginner
literacy. In current practice, pedagogical efforts are largely placed on skill-based instruction, in

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which language skill training is detached from larger historical and sociocultural conditions to a
great extent. And, the instruction design, to some extent, is divorced from cognitive and second
language learning theories. Little attention is paid to how knowledge is acquired through
self-analysing language, critical reflecting on usage of learning strategies, and actively practicing
the knowledge in a sociocultural setting that is meaningful to learners.
From the critical language learning perspective, the learning process is also the process of
learners recognising themselves, their social surroundings, and their potentialities for the future.
Introducing critical components to the literacy instruction does not replace well-developed
teaching methods, but it adds a critical quality to everyday instruction to help students question
and challenge domination, and to achieve critical consciousness in language learning by their
own understanding of what they learn (Riasati and Mollaei 2012). This empowers learners to
become active learners in knowledge acquisition.
In Chinese L2 literacy instruction, critical learning can be realized in several aspects. First,
L2 learning is affected by the learners’ prior literacy experience (Koda 2008). Learners will
bring their prior literacy experiences, such as visual organisation of the written script (Yeh, Li,
Takeuchi, Sun, and Liu 2003); the knowledge of first language phonology, orthography, and
morphology (Koda 2000; Cheung et al. 2001); and processing strategies specific to their L1 to
reading in L2, even when the L1 and L2 orthographies and phonologies vary widely
(Wade-Woolley 1999). Thus, having learners self-analyse how their first language has made
acquisition of Chinese characters/words in some ways easier and in some ways harder, as well
as how the L1 and L2 writing systems differ in phonology, orthography, and morphology, can
facilitate the development of L2 metalinguistic awareness, which is fundamental in learning to
read. The other aspect is to foster learners’ critical consciousness in using learning strategies.
Although quite a number of studies have identified strategies that Chinese L2 learners use to
learn radicals, characters, and words (Jiang and Zhao 2001; Ke 1998; McGinnis 1995; Shen 2005;
2010; Yin 2003; Zhao and Jiang 2002), we still have little knowledge about why certain strate-
gies work for one learner, but not for another. Learning is individualised, as are cognitive styles.
If learners are encouraged to introspect their own learning strategies through a critical lens to
find out which strategies are working best for them, it would make strategy training much more
effective. The third aspect of critical learning is to put learners in a situated sociocultural envi-
ronment to make character learning activities immediately relevant to learners by using task-
based or problem-posing learning approaches, and engage them in solving problematic issues in
their lives during learning.
Although task-based learning has been adopted in the area of second language learning
for more than two decades, it is not a widely accepted pedagogical practice in Chinese L2
literacy. Chinese educators who resist this approach hold that we do not even have enough
class time to introduce characters and carry out form-focused drills; thus, how can we afford
time for the meaning-focused practice? They expect that students practise using language
after class. However, we must understand that in a non-target language learning environ-
ment, it is very difficult for students to find opportunities to practice with the language in
their daily life situations. On the other hand, if classroom learning is not supported by plenty
of situated meaningful practice, it is difficult for students to transfer the knowledge into
skills. The existing studies on adopting task-based learning in Chinese L2 literacy education,
although limited in quantity, have demonstrated that task-based learning was welcomed by
students and produced good learning outcomes (Lai, Zhao, and Wang 2012), it improved
speed and quantity in writing (Yuan 2010), and it can be used to enhance performance-based
assessment (Ke 2006).

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Conclusion
Due to the uniqueness of the Chinese writing system, learning to read and write Chinese is a
long-term effort for U.S. learners, which makes it extremely important to seek best practices to
improve learning efficiency within limited classroom learning periods. In addition, our future
endeavours should include adjusting curriculum goals and learning content, integrating CALL
instruction, shifting the teaching pedagogy from knowledge transmission to knowledge construc-
tion, and giving students the autonomy to actively explore knowledge through critical learning.

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 22
Language Teacher Identity
Jason Martel and Andie Wang

Introduction
Language teacher identity research has grown exponentially over the past fifteen years. Having
reviewed this literature, we view identity as a crucial construct to consider when it comes to
conceptualizing teacher learning (Freeman 2009; Izadinia 2012; Miller 2009; Tsui 2011; Wenger
1998) and advocate for a continued discussion about its place in language teacher education. The
purpose of the present review is, therefore, to contribute to the field of educational linguistics,
not only by providing an overview of the language teacher identity research, but also by suggest-
ing directions for future research and outlining implications for language teacher education.

Historical Perspectives
Researchers and theorists from a variety of fields in the social sciences began paying attention to
the construct of identity in the middle of the 20th century (e.g., Holland and Lachicotte 2007;
Vyran, Adler, and Adler 2003). Holland and Lachicotte (2007) provide an excellent overview of
two main lines of theorizing identity: one governed by the ideas of the psychologist Erik Erikson
and the other by those of the sociologist George Mead. According to Holland and Lachicotte,
Erikson’s conception of identity focuses on the stability and coherence of identity, while Mead’s
centers on the ways in which identities are constructed in interaction with others as they occupy
various roles. Furthermore, Holland and Lachicotte (2007) state:

An Eriksonian ‘identity’ is overarching. It weaves together an individual’s answers to ques-

tions about who he or she is as a member of the cultural and social group(s) that make up
his or her society. A Meadian identity, on the other hand, is a sense of oneself as a participant
in the social roles and positions defined by a specific, historically constituted set of social
activities.
(104)

Thus, where emphasis is placed on coherence in the Eriksonian view of identities, Meadian
conceptualizations highlight their multiplicity, corresponding to the many roles one occupies in

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life (Holland and Lachicotte 2007). Despite the influence of both lines of thought, the Meadian
approach has pervaded the research base on language teacher identity since its inception.
In the field of language education, scholars took up the study of identity first in relation to
language learners. A prime example is Norton’s (2000) seminal study of immigrant women
learning English in Canada. At the end of the 1990s, researchers began to turn their sights to
language teachers’ identity construction, as evidenced by pioneering works by Duff and Uchida
(1997) and Antonek, McCormick, and Donato (1997). From the turn of the century to the time of
this writing, this research base has resulted in upwards of 50 empirical studies. As Menard-Warwick
(2008) states, the majority of these studies have focused on the native speaker/non-native speaker
(NS/NNS) dichotomy and legitimacy when it comes to teaching (e.g., Amin 1997; Golombek
and Jordan 2005; Inbar-Lourie 2005; Park 2012; Pavlenko 2003; Vélez-Rendón 2010). However,
other lines of inquiry have since emerged, such as Menard-Warwick’s (2008; 2011) and Fichtner
and Chapman’s (2011) studies on language teachers’ cultural identities.
It is only recently that reviews of the language teacher identity literature have begun to appear
(Miller 2009; Morgan and Clarke 2011; Tsui 2011). These reviews have outlined major themes
in the language teacher identity literature and have begun to touch upon the relationship between
the literature and teacher education programs. For example, Miller (2009) suggests teaching stu-
dent teachers about the nature of identity and engaging them in critical reflection that “takes
account of identity and related issues, of individuals in specific contexts, and of the role of dis-
course in shaping experience” (178). The present review expands upon this base and contributes
to the field of educational linguistics in several ways. First, it brings together research from a much
larger collection of second language teacher roles, such as traditional foreign language (FL)
teacher, immersion teacher, and bilingual teacher, where the three reviews above limit themselves
to research done in Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) and English as
a Foreign Language (EFL) settings. Bringing in research on other second language teacher roles
allows for enlightening cross-contextual comparisons regarding role-specific identity positions,
such as advocate in English as a Second Language (ESL) (Golombek and Jordan 2005) and
standards-based practitioner in traditional foreign language (Luebbers 2010). Granted, we are able to
represent more contexts here because much of the teacher identity research outside of TESOL/
EFL is relatively recent (e.g., Fichtner and Chapman 2011; Cammarata and Tedick 2012). Sec-
ond, following Miller (2009), we aim to further expand the connection between language teacher
identity research and language teacher education, contributing to the “widening gyre” (i.e., the
expanding scope) of language teacher education described by Freeman (2009).

Core Issues and Key Findings

In the following sections, we present four prominent themes in the language teacher identity
research. The studies cited within these themes generally subscribe to a Meadian approach to
identity, in that they view it as a constantly evolving sociocultural construct.

1. Language Teachers’ Identities Are Shaped in Interaction

With Significant Others, Personal Biographies, and Contexts
The literature is rife with accounts of ways in which significant others influence teachers’ identity
trajectories. The significant others with whom teachers associate shift throughout their careers;
during teacher education, common significant others include mentor teachers, classmates, and
teacher educators, while in the workforce, significant others include colleagues, administrators,
and students. The influence a significant other can have on a teacher’s identity construction is

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vividly revealed in many of the critical incidents that pepper the language teacher identity liter-
ature (Liu and Xu 2011a; 2011b; Park 2012; Yi 2009). For example, the focal participant in Park’s
(2012) study, a native Chinese-speaking teacher of English in a TESOL program in the United
States, received a blow to her confidence when a classmate questioned her ability to teach English
on the first day of her student teaching by laughing at her and exclaiming “You were only here
for one and a half years and you are going to teach English [to kids who don’t speak English]?”
(138). This incident stirred the participant’s insecurities about her non-native speaker status, in
essence challenging her suitability and identity as a burgeoning English teacher.
Personal biographies and prior experiences have also been shown to shape teachers’ identities
(Duff and Uchida 1997; Izadinia 2012). For example, Danny, a participant in Duff and Uchida’s
(1997) study, disliked the decontextualized grammar study that characterized his high school
French class and, as a result, avoided using the textbook too much in his teaching. Miki, another
participant in this study, “saw herself as a bilingual role model” (468) for her students, which tied
back to her own history as an English learner. Yi’s (2009) study also powerfully demonstrates the
influence of prior experiences, again via critical incidents. Ms. Ying, one of her participants,
considered herself a “product of the times” (258), reflected by her decision to major in English
despite disliking it, by working in Tibet as an interpreter, and by beginning teaching in her late
40s as a “late entrant” (259). In Ennser-Kananen and Wang’s (2013) study on Chinese language
teachers’ cultural identities, one Chinese-born participant reported an ongoing interaction
between being a parent to her American-born daughter and teaching culture in her class. This
participant expressed regret over the weakening of her daughter’s Chinese cultural identity, which
led her to recognize the importance of respecting her students’ home cultures in teaching.
It goes without saying that context matters in shaping identities, too (cf. Duff and Uchida
1997; Morgan and Clarke 2011). This is well exemplified by teacher education programs, for
student teachers operate in two distinct and often competing contexts: their teacher education
programs and the schools in which they student teach. Feiman-Nemser and Buchmann (1985)
refer to this disparity as the “two-worlds pitfall.” Luebbers (2010) explains how the participants
in her study, faced with “‘the realities’ of the FL classroom” (146) in their student teaching place-
ments, grew disenchanted as their “glorified view of FL teaching” (149) was replaced with the
belief that it was not feasible to implement innovations learned in their preparation programs,
such as communicative and standards-based teaching. In other words, the messages they received
from their preparation program, with which many of them identified at the beginning of student
teaching, were “washed out” by the student teaching context (Zeichner and Tabachnik 1981).
This phenomenon occurs not only during teacher preparation programs, but also during teach-
ers’ first years in the field (Zeichner and Tabachnik 1981).

2. Language Teachers’ Identities Are Negotiated

in and Influence Practice
Using a situated learning framework (Lave and Wenger 1991), Kanno and Stuart’s (2011) impor-
tant study demonstrates not only how language teachers’ practice shapes their identity, but also
how their identities shape their practice. Concerning practice shaping identity, the study’s par-
ticipants became more confident as teachers throughout the year as they became more competent
pedagogically and in terms of their subject matter. Concerning identity shaping practice, the
participants presented as more confident at the start of the new quarter “because they had learned
from their experiences in the previous quarter” (247). The researchers note that this authoritative
stance came along with becoming more detached from students and that “some of the valuable
qualities of beginning teachers may be lost as they accumulate more experience” (248).

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Although not explicitly highlighted, the mutual shaping of practice and identity can be seen
elsewhere in the literature. In her study of FL student teachers, Luebbers (2010) compares partici-
pants’ pre-student teaching desired level of target language use (which generally amounted to “as
much as possible”) with their actual use during their placements (which ranged from 28–47%). It
could be argued that engaging in the actual practice of teaching and contending with the expecta-
tions of students surrounding language use gave them a sense of what was possible in that context
and likely changed how they saw themselves as FL teachers. In other words, the ways in which these
students desired to see themselves as providers of target language input changed across their student
teaching experience. A second example comes from the immersion context, in which teachers tend
to see themselves principally as content teachers, rather than both language and content teachers
(Cammarata and Tedick 2012; Tan 2011). This is important, for neglecting to incorporate a lan-
guage focus into teaching plateaus students out in their language development (Genesee 1987;
Lyster 2007). Cammarata and Tedick (2012) describe how a professional development course that
emphasized content-based instruction stimulated an identity shift in three immersion teachers, who
came to see themselves as responsible for both content and language. Although not included in this
study’s findings, one could hypothesize that this change in identity position encouraged the partic-
ipants to incorporate more form-focused activities into their instruction.

3. Language Teachers’ Identities Are Complicated by Their Own or

Others’ Perceptions of Their Native/Non-Native Speaker Status
For a while now, scholars in our field have problematized the notion of native speaker (see Enric
Llurda’s chapter in this volume). It is therefore not surprising that the native speaker/non-native
speaker (NS/NNS) distinction has also emerged in the language teacher identity research. Indeed,
this distinction has been identified as one of the principal features that distinguish the language
teaching profession from the others (Borg 2006; Menard-Warwick 2008). Many studies reveal
that NNS teachers experience uncertainty and self-doubt because they lack the perceived status
or power associated with native speakerness (Miller 2009), which is often connected with pro-
nunciation, intelligibility, and race (e.g., Mawhinney and Xu 1997; Motha 2006; Pavlenko 2003).
Motha (2006) demonstrates how English is associated with white privilege and the concept of
standard English is inherently racialized. For NNS teachers, constructing a professional identity
within discourses of native-speakerness is characterized by constant struggles to gain legitimacy
(Brown and Miller 2006; Golombek and Jordan 2005; Miller 2009; Reis 2011) and even failure
to take on a teacher identity (Amin 1997).
Most studies tend to go beyond the dichotomy of NS/NNS in the language teaching field and
further into complex issues such as demystifying the myth of NS (e.g., Inbar-Lourie 2005; Reis 2011).
Vélez-Rendón (2010), for instance, is the only scholar we encountered to examine how discourses of
native speakerness shape the professional identity development of a FL teacher. The excessive
reliance on being a native speaker of Spanish in teaching, reinforced by the prevailing discourses
of native speakerness in the schooling context, prevented the student teacher from developing
important dimensions of his professional identity and resulted in problematic teaching practices,
e.g., giving inaccurate grammatical explanations. Other studies contesting the NS/NNS dichot-
omy investigate ways to empower NNS teachers (Park 2012; Pavlenko 2003) and facilitate NNS
identity development through educational interventions such as shared stories (Johnson 2003)
and critical literacy narratives (Rodriguez and Cho 2011). Along these lines, Pavlenko (2003)
proposes the notion of the multicompetent speaker, which positions NNSs positively as those
who know more rather than negatively as those who know less. It is argued that reimagining
oneself as bilingual or multilingual enables NNS teachers to reframe their competencies and

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actively engage themselves in reshaping the teaching context, thus critically challenging the NS/
NNS dichotomy and marginalization in the profession in general.

4. Language Teachers’ Views of Themselves as Cultural

Beings Bear Upon Their Cultural Teaching Practices
Despite its integrality to language teaching (Duff and Uchida 1997; Lange and Paige 2003), the
cultural dimension of teacher identity, or cultural identity, is the focus of investigation in only a
few empirical studies. Intercultural experiences and cultural affiliations influence not only the
ways in which language teachers see themselves as cultural beings, but also their approaches to teach-
ing culture (Ennser-Kananen and Wang 2013; Fichtner and Chapman 2011; Menard-Warwick
2008; 2011). Tensions and struggles are common themes in the construction of language teach-
ers’ bi- or multi-cultural identities. Fichtner and Chapman (2011), for example, demonstrate the
disequilibrium between primary and secondary identities that language teachers come to develop
in association with the languages they learned and currently teach. The participants in this study,
university-level Spanish and German teachers, claimed that their primary cultural identities were
rooted in their national identities, while identities associated with the target culture remained
secondary. Ennser-Kananen and Wang (2013) find a strong connection between Chinese lan-
guage teachers’ intercultural experiences and their beliefs in teaching culture. These teachers
drew largely on cross-cultural parenting and marriage in talking about their teaching beliefs. For
example, Hu, one of the study’s participants, traced her bicultural identity back to marrying an
American and associated the experience with being a translator between the two cultures both
in and outside the class.
Language teachers’ cultural identities impact their classroom practices. The studies referenced
above show that language teachers largely draw on their own cross-cultural experiences and
intercultural identities as resources for addressing students’ linguistic, ideological, and cultural
concerns (cf. Duff and Uchida 1997). For instance, Ruby, an ESL teacher in Menard-Warwick’s
study (2008), stressed the importance of assumptions underlying cultural behaviors in her class
because it helped communication in her intercultural marriage. Paloma, another teacher in the
same study, encouraged her students to explore cultural changes because her transnational expe-
riences made her see values of both the traditional and the rapidly shifting sides of the culture.
The role of cultural identities in language teaching is perhaps best reflected in the notion of
“identity as pedagogy” (Morgan 2004, 172), where the teacher’s identities are performed in class-
room conversations around culture and, in turn, transformed in the culture teaching practice.

Research Approaches
Building upon Izadinia’s (2012) recent review of the student teacher identity literature, we notice
that language teacher identity scholars generally:

• frame their studies with social theoretical frameworks in qualitative paradigms, reflecting
Izadinia’s (2012) claim that “researchers consider the process of identity construction a social
phenomenon that is largely shaped and understood in light of social factors” (14)
• use a wide range of data collection methods, including “reflective practices” (Izadinia, 2012, 13)
and innovative techniques such as concept maps (Lim 2011)
• conduct studies over relatively short periods of time (Kanno and Stuart 2011), usually less
than six months
• analyze their data with a variety of analytical tools, notably narrative ones

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A handful of the studies we reviewed do not employ theoretical frameworks (e.g., Fichtner
and Chapman 2011; Liu and Fisher 2006). Most of them do, however, and favor social frame-
works such as sociocultural theory (Antonek et al. 1997; Reis 2011; Vélez-Rendón 2010), activity
theory (Anh 2013; Luebbers 2010), communities of practice/situated learning (Kanno and Stuart
2011; Liu and Xu 2011a; 2011b; Morton and Gray 2010; Varghese, 2001), post-structuralism/
discourse (Ajayi 2011; Golombek and Jordan 2005; Mantero 2004; Menard-Warwick 2008;
2011; Morgan 2004; Pavlenko 2003), critical feminism (Motha 2006), language socialization
(Duff and Uchida 1997), symbolic interactionism (Martel 2013), and phenomenology (Cam-
marata and Tedick 2012). Following Izadinia (2012), this copious list not only seems to confirm
that “the formation, negotiation, and growth of teacher identity is a fundamentally social pro-
cess” (Varghese, Morgan, Johnston, and Johnson 2005, 39), but it also honors Varghese et al.’s
claim that “multiple theoretical approaches are absolutely essential if we are not to lose sight of
the real-world complexity of our subject” (40). This being said, some theoretical frameworks are
represented more than others—namely, communities of practice and post-structuralism. Tsui
(2011), an avid proponent of the former, claims that “Wenger’s theory of identity formation is
perhaps the most powerful, in that it cogently argues for identity formation being relational and
experiential, as well as social and personal” (33). The popularity of the latter might be attributed
to Norton’s (2000) use of it in her pioneering work.
Concerning study design, there exists a healthy variety in the data collection methods
employed by researchers. Some studies rely on one form of data, such as interviews (e.g., Fichtner and
Chapman 2011), while others use larger kits of data consisting of interviews, teaching journals,
classroom observations, videotapings of classes, stimulated recall, and documents (e.g., Kanno and
Stuart 2011). Many of these studies use “reflective practices” (Izadinia 2012, 13), including stu-
dent teaching portfolios (e.g., Antonek et al. 1997), self-written perspectives (e.g., Ajayi 2011),
reaction papers (Golombek and Jordan 2005), linguistic autobiographies (e.g., Pavlenko 2003),
dialogic journals (e.g., Reis 2011), and reflective diaries (e.g., Tsui 2007). Additionally, many of
the studies include observation, departing from Izadinia’s (2012) critique of the student teacher
identity literature. Within this array of methods, innovations abound. Many researchers are
beginning to employ technology as a means of collecting reflective data, like Park (2012), who
used e-journals; Luebbers (2010), who used a weekly group blog; and Clarke (2008), who used
online Web CT discussion forums. Martel (2013) gave his participants digital voice recorders to
capture reflections based on prompts; according to the participants, they were more likely to
complete their reflections using this format than if they had to write them down, and did so most
often in the car on their way home from their student teaching placements. Technology aside,
Motha (2006) incorporated a series of “afternoon teas” into her data collection methods, which
were not included in the initial study design, but rather came to occur at the behest of the par-
ticipants. Lastly, Lim (2011) utilized concept mapping, a formalized statistical group process that
has the power to “examine the underlying clusters and dimensions” (971) of identity. Note that
this last data collection method is mixed in nature (i.e., it includes both quantitative and qualita-
tive data), while the other methods described are qualitative.
Kanno and Stuart (2011) claim that the language teacher identity literature wants for longi-
tudinal studies, identifying Tsui’s (2007) and Liu and Fisher’s (2006) as the only two that unfold
over a substantial period of time. Curiously omitted from this list is Clarke’s (2008) study, which
takes place over the course of two years. In her review of the general student teacher identity
literature, however, Izadinia (2012) claimed that “no obvious distinction was found between the
general findings as a result of the length of data collection” (12). She also stated that “similar
positive outcomes were observed across the studies in the same category and with the same
approach regardless of their duration” (12–13). In our review of the language teacher identity

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literature, we did find a general lack of longitudinal (i.e., lasting longer than six months) studies,
yet we did not find a general tendency towards what Izadinia (2012) defines as “positive out-
comes.” Counter examples include Liu and Xu’s (2011a; 2011b) accounts of EFL teachers who
left their communities of practice; Luebbers’ (2010) descriptions of FL student teachers who grew
disenchanted by the reality of their student teaching placements; and Martel’s (2013) depiction
of a FL student teacher who experienced a weakening of her FL teacher identity during her
preparation program, ultimately taking a position as an ESL teacher.
Finally, in terms of analysis, narrative analytical techniques figure prominently in the literature
(Johnson 2003; Liu and Xu 2011a; 2011b; Reis 2011; Rodriguez and Cho 2011; Simon-Maeda
2004; Yi 2009). This is not surprising given the compelling links made between stories and one’s
identity construction (Sfard and Prusak 2005). Despite narrative inquiry’s ubiquity, language
teacher identity researchers have still employed a gamut of analytical tools, including thematic/
constant comparative method (Antonek et al. 1997; Golombek and Jordan 2005), discourse
analysis (Clarke 2008; Morton and Gray 2010), and a discursive positioning framework (Pavlenko
2003). We appreciate the theoretical and methodological variety in this literature and encourage
researchers to continue to utilize innovative ways for exploring language teachers’ identities.

New Debates
In light of the literature reviewed above, we have pinpointed three areas that want for further
consideration in the language teacher identity research. These areas are outlined in the following
sections.

1. We Need to Augment Our Understanding of

Teachers’ Identities in a Larger Variety of Roles/Contexts
Language teacher education encompasses multiple roles/contexts (e.g., immersion teacher, ESL
teacher, etc.). Our review of the literature revealed that we know far more about ESL/EFL teach-
ers’ identities than those of teachers in other roles/contexts. Out of the studies we reviewed, only
four explore the identities of traditional FL teachers (Antonek et al. 1997; Fichtner and Chapman
2011; Luebbers 2010; Vélez-Rendón 2010) and one the identities of bilingual education teachers
(Varghese 2001). Furthermore, the studies we reviewed from the immersion context do not sub-
scribe to theories of identity (e.g., Cammarata and Tedick 2012). These findings indicate that we
need to know far more about the identity composition and construction of language teachers
outside of ESL/EFL. A fuller picture would provide teacher educators with important insights
for designing curricula that prepare student teachers to meet the needs and face the changes of
the roles they will fill. Two lines of inquiry stand out. First, it would be fruitful to explore the
NS/NNS issue more from the NS side, as did Vélez-Rendón (2010). Do native English speakers
feel qualified to teach ESL by virtue of their native speakerness? Why or why not? Second, we
hope that scholars further investigate the cultural identities of language teachers, particularly in
the immersion context, whose goals include preparing bi/multicultural students.

2. We Need to Factor Emotions Into Theories of Language

Teachers’ Identity Construction
In an overview of teacher emotion research, Zembylas and Schutz (2009) conclude that the sig-
nificance of emotions is illustrated and reinforced in the general experiences of teachers strug-
gling to deal with emotional intensity. Emotion is a key dimension in teachers’ lives, and teacher

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identity formation is informed, reshaped, and disciplined by discourses and practices of teachers’
emotions (Zembylas 2005). In a word, the process of teaching cannot be fully understood with-
out addressing the emotional aspect that underlies the teaching behavior. In second language
education research, the role of emotion is understudied and undertheorized (Cowie 2011), lack-
ing “a clear research agenda or consistent approach” (236). Furthermore, the few studies that
explicitly connect emotion with teacher identity (e.g., Cowie 2011; Mousavi 2007; Verity 2000)
are largely descriptive in nature. Most studies carry a negative tone, capturing the negative side
of teachers’ emotions such as hopelessness (Verity 2000) and stress (Mousavi 2007). Future
research is needed in theorizing teacher emotions in the directions of teacher self, sociopolitical
aspects of emotions in teachers’ lives, and transactions between teacher selves and sociopolitical
influences (Zembylas and Schutz 2009).

3. We Need to Elucidate the Connection Between Language

Teachers’ Identities and Their Students’ Language Learning
Outcomes/Processes
As language teacher educators and teacher educators, we must never lose sight of students, for
improving the quality of their language learning experiences remains the ultimate goal of any
line of inquiry in our field. Borg (2003, 2006) argues that the link between teacher cognitions
(e.g., beliefs, knowledge) and student language learning has yet to be convincingly made, and
we would argue the same for teacher identity and language learning. As much as identity is an
engaging construct to study in its own right, where do language teachers’ identities and stu-
dents’ language learning processes meet? For example: What aspects of language teacher iden-
tity contribute to students’ improved and sustained language use? How is teacher identity
connected with students’ development of bilingual or multilingual identities? Although many
studies in the language teacher identity literature chronicle and theorize connections between
teachers’ identities and their classroom practices (e.g., Ajayi 2011; Fichtner and Chapman 2011;
Kanno and Stuart 2011), they do not go as far as making the important link between teacher
identity and student language learning. This is most likely due to methodological challenges.

Implications for Language Teacher Education

. . . we contend that identity work is vital in whatever way it manifests and that it is up to
reflective teacher educators to enact this focus in appropriate ways that are contextually
bound.
(Gaudelli and Ousley 2009, 934)

Despite the growing number of research articles calling for a reconceptualization of LTE,
the field continues to operate from a traditional perspective favoring mechanistic and trans-
missive models that overlook the social nature of learning and the powerful role of language
in society.
(Vélez-Rendón 2010, 645)

As Vélez-Rendón’s (2010) quotation demonstrates, we have not yet found a meaningful way
to integrate the construct of identity into language teacher education. Many teacher education
programs involve learning experiences in which teachers do identity work (e.g., reflection, seminar),
yet what is unclear is the level of intentionality associated with this identity work. In other words, do
teacher educators subscribe to an “identity approach” that guides the design of their programs

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and the assignments they set? Indeed, we follow Izadinia (2012), who asks, “How can teacher
education programs facilitate the process of identity formation in [student teachers]?” (17).
Many scholars have offered recommendations on how to conduct identity work for teacher
preparation programs, ranging from general advice to specific activities. Miller (2009) proposes
four directions: understanding the nature of identity; knowing the context in which student
teachers work; engaging student teachers in critical reflection; and beginning with learners’
needs. Antonek et al. (1997) hold that student teaching portfolios are spaces in which student
teachers can “reflect on the development of the quality of their instruction and on their iden-
tities during the student teaching experience” (16). These researchers, however, point out that
teacher educators may want to push student teachers to reflect on important field-specific topics
(e.g., first and second language use) that might be left out if the choice of topics in the portfolio
is left completely to students. At the University of Minnesota, USA, the Teacher Education
Research Initiative (TERI) project is breaking new ground by incorporating a teacher identity
self-study into its curriculum. In the study, student teachers from a variety of disciplines (includ-
ing ESL/FL student teachers) are asked to reflect on the ways in which their cultural and racial
identities shape their perceptions of schooling and students. The reflection process is guided and
supported by teacher educators and built into a course-based professional learning community.
The goal of such a study is to cultivate student teachers who are able to reflect on the role of
personal identity in becoming a teacher and to address the issues of culture, race, and identity in
education.
Related to Antonek et al.’s (1997) advice above, a compelling way to conceptualize student
teacher identity construction in language teacher education consists of “actual” and “designated”
identities (Sfard and Prusak 2005). Actual identities consists of “stories about the actual state of
affairs,” while designated identities consist of “narratives presenting a state of affairs which, for
one reason or another, is expected to be the case, if not now then in the future” (18). In other
words, actual identities are the identity positions with which a student teacher comes to teacher
education, while designated identities represent the identity positions (e.g., standards-based
teacher [Luebbers 2010]) that preparation programs want student teachers to acquire. In accord-
ance with Sfard and Prusak (2005), learning occurs when the gap is closed between student
teachers’ actual and designated identities.
There is a tension inherent in this conceptualization. On one hand, should student teachers
mechanically accept the identity positions foisted upon them by teacher preparation programs
(cf. Britzman 1994)? On the other, do we not value the research support and best practices that
define these identity positions as a way of pushing our field further? We maintain that, in the
future, researchers should document and also theorize ways in which the objectives of teacher
education might be accomplished while at the same time preserving student teachers’ agency. As
stated by Sexton (2008), “we should consider student teachers’ identities as a starting point for
teacher education; the challenge, then, is to learn how to bridge their identity to larger hopes for
teachers and students” (86).

Further Reading

Historical
Britzman, D. (1994). Is there a problem with knowing thyself? Toward a poststructuralist view of teacher
identity. In T. Shanahan (Ed.), Teachers thinking, teachers knowing: Reflections on literacy and language education
(pp. 53–75). Urbana, IL: National Conference on Research in English and National Council of Teachers
of English.

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Jason Martel and Andie Wang

Duff, P. A., and Uchida, Y. (1997). The negotiation of teachers’ sociocultural identities and practices in
postsecondary EFL classrooms. TESOL Quarterly, 31(3), 451–486.
Holland, D., and Lachicotte, Jr., W. (2007). Vygotsky, Mead, and the new sociocultural studies of identity. In
H. Daniels, M. Cole, and J. V. Wertsch (Eds.), The Cambridge companion to Vygotsky (pp. 101–135).
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Recent
Clarke, M. (2008). Language teacher identities: Co-constructing discourse and community. Bristol, UK: Multilingual
Matters Ltd.
Gaudelli, W., and Ousley, D. (2009). From clothing to skin: Identity work of student teachers in culminating
field experiences. Teaching and Teacher Education, 25(6), 931–939.
Liu, Y., and Xu, Y. (2011). Inclusion or exclusion?: A narrative inquiry of a language teacher’s identity expe-
rience in the new work order of competing pedagogies. Teaching and Teacher Education, 27(3), 589–597.

References
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Anh, D. T. K. (2013). Identity in activity: Examining teacher professional identity formation in the
paired-placement of student teachers. Teaching and Teacher Education, 30(0), 47–59.
Antonek, J. L., McCormick, D. E., and Donato, R. (1997). The student teacher portfolio as autobiography:
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Britzman, D. (1994). Is there a problem with knowing thyself? Toward a poststructuralist view of teacher
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 23
Corpus-Based Study of Language
and Teacher Education
Alex Boulton and Henry Tyne

Historical Perspectives
Corpora are generally considered to be large collections of authentic electronic text designed to
be representative of a particular language, genre, et cetera. This broad definition is open to debate
(cf. Gilquin and Gries 2009), but corresponds to a prototypical view of what most people would
consider a corpus today. The development of corpora and corpus linguistics over the last 50 years
or so has improved the description and understanding of language and has had important impli-
cations for language teaching and learning. Early corpus work was painstaking in the extreme,
being based on the manual collection and analysis of data. More recently, computers have made
the various processes vastly simpler and faster: for example, the Corpus of Contemporary American
English (currently 450 million words) is essentially the work of a single person. Different types
of corpora have been developed: parallel corpora in translation, sound-aligned or multimedia
corpora with video, and ‘learner corpora’ containing non-native speaker output mainly used by
researchers in the field of second language acquisition.
For present purposes, two points are worthy of note in early work. First, corpora were often
compiled with a practical application in mind and not just for linguistic study as an end in itself.
Second, in many cases these applications were pedagogical in nature—see, for example, Thorndike
and Lorge’s Teacher’s Word Book of 30,000 Words (1944), Gougenheim and colleagues’ Dictionnaire
Fondamental de la Langue Française (1958), or the Cobuild dictionaries of the 1980s and 1990s.
Underlying these dictionaries is the basic idea of Zipf ’s law, which implies that the commonest
items deserve direct attention in teaching, while less frequent items provide diminishing returns
and may be dealt with better through strategies for observation, noticing, pattern-detection, infer-
ring meaning, and so on (e.g., O’Keeffe et al. 2007, ch. 2). Of course, frequency is not the only
criterion in deciding what to teach, though it is probably fairly safe to say that improved knowl-
edge about language and language use can lead to better-informed pedagogical decisions—in
particular, helping to target common forms, patterns, uses, and meanings in different contexts.
There is no question of corpus-derived data replacing linguistic intuitions, but they complement
intuitions (cf. Sinclair 1997, 32).
Other corpus-based projects and products include usage manuals and grammar books
(e.g., Biber et al. 1999), syllabuses for teaching and testing (e.g., English Profile), and coursebooks

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(e.g., McCarthy et al. 2006), which no longer rely solely on the creator’s intuitions. However, the
corpus input to such resources often goes unnoticed; as McCarthy (2004, 15) puts it, referring to
his Touchstone coursebooks, “teachers and learners should expect that, in most ways, corpus
informed materials will look like traditionally prepared materials”; what counts is that they reflect
actual language usage better.
Applying corpora and corpus linguistics can go further and influence teaching and learning
practices directly. For example, Burdine and Barlow (2007) include screenshots of phrasal verbs
in context, with instructions to identify different meanings, uses, and patterns from the context
(see Boulton 2010 for a review). Teachers can also use corpora themselves on various levels, from
prioritising content in LSP to creating tests to devising activities. Existing software makes it fairly
easy for teachers to create their own corpora to correspond to specific linguistic or pedagogical
needs, or get their learners to create their own. In class, a corpus can be used as a permanently
available “informant” (Johns 1991a, 1) and also as a tool that lends itself to various activities in
which the learners explore the language themselves (assuming computers are available). This
corpus-based approach is frequently termed “data-driven learning” or DDL (Johns 1991a;
1991b) and involves using the tools and techniques of corpus linguistics for pedagogical purposes
(Boulton 2011b).

Core Issues and Key Findings

What do corpora bring to language teaching? A simple but effective answer to this question is
that they challenge certain established ways of doing things. As Sinclair (2004, 271) puts it, “from
a classroom perspective the emergence of corpora may not seem to be good news—a large
amount of new information to absorb, and an unsettling failure to confirm the consensus view
of language that has been considered adequate for most classrooms for many years.” Sinclair
points out that much of the challenge for using corpora in language education comes from the
fact that it sits uncomfortably with many existing (and essentially unchallenged) views and prac-
tices, and can even contradict well-known ‘rules.’ The following paragraphs highlight the role
played by corpora in key aspects of language education.
A learner must have some kind of contact with the target language (L2) in order for acquisi-
tion to occur. Corpus use can provide massive exposure to language in a systematic way, high-
lighting target patterns. For example, in the concordance in Figure 23.1, one might observe usage
of the word however (e.g., in relation to that, punctuation).
More generally, corpus analysis has highlighted the shortcomings of many textbook presenta-
tions of language in a highly decontextualised and artificial manner (Chambers 2009). However,
the use of authentic materials in language teaching has given rise to debate in relation to the

to create political parties. They were firm in agreeing, however , that Bulgaria met " all the conditions required for
and credibility of the Korean framework. I would stress, however , that a more interventionist approach would have met
, he vowed to follow the agreement. His made clear, however , that his primary focus would be on combating the power of
with the latter even slightly ahead. [1] All confirm, however , that many Dutch citizens feel poorly informed about the EU
within a deeper and enlarged Union. It is striking, however , that most of them seem rather reluctant to take up this
integration in motion". It was not before May 1992, however , that the candidature of Bulgaria had sufficiently advanced
temps a crisis. (Laugher and applause.) I do believe, however , that the concerns of Europeans and of Americans about our
87 % of Hispanics who speak Spanish at home. It’s true, however , that the disparity of access is also closely correlated
is the most important among them. This by no means implies, however , that the need for further committed involvement of
delivery of services to the community. It is equally clear, however , that the search for best practice in people management in
are even subject to sanctions. It has always been assumed, however , that the threats arise from large datasets that are
(a) - (c) in all sorts of ways. It is not at all clear, however , that these differences are systematic. Rather than clutter
p.a., the corresponding figure is only 25 %. Statistically, however , the disparity is only about 50 % explained by income, i.e.

Figure 23.1 Concordance extract for however (Leeds Internet Corpus)

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question of input (Duda and Tyne 2010): Can all learners cope with authentic materials? Should
they be simplified, or only used with higher-level learners, et cetera? One answer has been to allow
learners access to ‘real’ language, providing some degree of preparation or negotiation. More gen-
erally, with the development of the notion of autonomy in language learning, much of what was
once seen as a problem for accessing the L2 can be ruled out by providing methodologies that allow
language learners to benefit appropriately even from complex materials. For example, in the case of
DDL, learners typically access corpus data in response to given questions, in order to discover pat-
terns and rules of use, essentially functioning as a researcher (cf. Johns 1991a; 1991b).
Although corpora can be considered as pools of authentic language (Duda and Tyne 2010),
this does not necessarily come across in the same manner as in ‘traditional’ authentic materials:
corpora are not intended to be accessed or read as complete texts. Instead, corpora bring to the
fore a distilled set of authentic uses that the individual would be hard pressed to tease out of the
data manually or based on occasional incidental encounters. Corpora not only highlight com-
mon patterns, they also provide maximum exposure to the target language, which may otherwise
be lacking in the classroom (cf. Gaskell and Cobb 2004). This concords with recent theories of
lexical priming (Hoey 2005) and the mental corpus (Taylor 2012). In other words, when learners
themselves engage with data, not only is the language authentic in the more traditional sense, but
so are the tasks devolving from the discovery process. Authenticity is thereby concerned more
with the effectiveness of doing than with the inherent nature of sample forms or input.
The idea of autonomy has become something of a buzzword in language education today.
The pioneering scholars at the Crapel research unit in France promoted the use of autonomisa-
tion in language learning throughout the 1970s and 1980s, insisting that since it is the learner
that has to do the learning, then ownership of learning decisions can, or should, rest on his/her
shoulders. (See the journal Mélanges Crapel for this period.) Moreover, the very reasons for which
people go about learning languages differ from one individual to the next, thereby lending
weight to the argument that it is the learner who should actively seek to guide his/her own
learning. Being autonomous is not simply a matter of being ‘independent’ or in some way able
to get by without the teacher. Rather, it is about being able to make informed decisions as to
one’s learning so as to be able to appreciate the benefits of given tasks or to be able to take stock
of what has been learned during a given activity.
The use of corpora in DDL is essentially the development of autonomous learning tech-
niques. Engaging learners with data through DDL presupposes a host of attitudes and learning
activities that focus on the principles of ‘learning by doing’ and ‘learning by discovery.’ This
requires specific training, both for teachers and for learners; acceptance of new ways of learning;
and, in most cases, development of specific ICT skills. Though this type of approach is not
without its critics (e.g., Kirschner et al. 2006), there are likely to be considerable benefits to such
work on a regular basis well beyond the specific focus of any given task: it may be argued that
increased autonomy develops better language learners. Some evidence for this can be found
independently in Allan (2006) and Johns et al. (2008), where learners using an experimental
corpus approach not only outperformed control groups on target items, but also on items that
weren’t explicitly covered.

Research Approaches
A frequent refrain is that, despite the numerous arguments for using corpora in language learn-
ing, very little empirical research has so far been conducted to test the validity of such arguments.
This claim does not entirely stand up to scrutiny, as we have so far identified well over 100 studies
that do attempt to evaluate some aspect of corpus use by language learners. (An evolving list can

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be found in the bibliographies at CorpusCALL.) These studies can be divided into four main
categories, depending on their main research focus:

• Attitudes and representations. How do learners react to using corpora? How receptive are
they?
• Learner behaviour. What do learners do with corpus data? Can they make sense of it?
• Learning outcomes from corpus use. Does a DDL approach lead to observable, measurable
learning compared to ‘traditional’ approaches? If so, where?
• Using corpora as a reference resource. How efficiently can learners use corpora in this way
(usually in writing and revision)? How does this compare to use of other tools, such as
dictionaries?

The overwhelming conclusion from these papers is that corpus use can provide benefits in all
areas so far researched, with strong effects on language learning found in a meta-analysis by Cobb
and Boulton (forthcoming). Most students in most studies appreciate what corpora can bring to
their own learning and are generally capable of using them appropriately, given the right training.
These findings apply almost across the board, whatever the corpus and however it is used, encom-
passing paper-based and computer-based approaches; controlled deductive exercises or open-ended
inductive activities; and irrespective of learners’ level of proficiency, age, cultural context, mother
tongue and target language, disciplinary background, needs, preferences, and so on.
Though very few studies are entirely negative, it is worth noting that the majority, while offer-
ing encouraging results, tend to be mitigated in places—for example, with positive learning out-
comes but mixed learner feedback, or significant results on some research questions only. Such
findings are by no means limited to corpus use in language learning but are commonplace in many
human and social sciences, and reflect the complex nature of such research (e.g., Larsen-Freeman
and Cameron 2008). It is thus certainly possible to cherry-pick individual pieces of evidence to
counter the use of corpora in language teaching, but a more accurate picture is provided by the
weight of studies as a whole, which are clearly highly encouraging. Corpus consultation is thus
by no means a panacea, but introduced appropriately it does add an extra set of tools and proce-
dures to the teacher’s (and learner’s) panoply.
There is inevitably a great deal of variation in study design. The corpora used vary from small,
locally compiled corpora for specific needs to very large published corpora (hundreds of millions
of words). They are overwhelmingly monolingual written corpora (including transcribed speech)
of native language, with comparatively few using parallel corpora, multimodal corpora, or learner
corpora. In the majority of cases, the learners are given access to data on computers; less than a
quarter of studies make use of paper-based materials (often in the form of concordance print-
outs), and even here often as a lead-in to hands-on corpus consultation. Unsurprisingly, the target
language is English in nearly all cases, though corpora of Chinese and Japanese, for example,
show that a corpus-based approach can adapt to quite different scripts and target language fam-
ilies. Over half the studies to date have been carried out in Europe, and more than half the rest
in Asia. The implication of positive results in both contexts is that corpus consultation can be
effective in quite different cultures, assuming that it is appropriately adapted to local contexts
(Thompson 2001).
Three quarters of the studies indicate a disciplinary specialisation. In nearly half of these cases
the learners are language specialists (including future teachers, linguists, and translators); the others
are specialising in a variety of fields, from human and social sciences to the hard sciences, taking in
business, tourism, architecture, et cetera. Very few studies are conducted outside higher education
institutions (e.g., in language schools or in a company), and barely a handful concern school-age

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populations, even though the results with young learners appear to be as encouraging as elsewhere
(e.g., Sealey and Thompson 2004). The conclusion is that age and linguistic sophistication are not
necessary conditions for corpus use in language learning. However, logistical limitations and the
research focus in higher education may explain the predominance of studies concentrating on
advanced or intermediate language learners, although this in itself should not be taken to indicate
that corpus consultation is only useful at higher levels of proficiency. Promising results are also found
in the small number of studies that work with lower levels—even alleged beginners, in four cases.
Those studies using corpora as a reference resource tend to focus on writing, revision, and
error-correction, as well as translation. Comparatively few concentrate on spoken production or
receptive skills. In terms of language learning per se, it is often claimed that corpus consultation
lends itself most clearly to lexicogrammar (e.g., Johns 1991b, 28). This seems to be where most
empirical research has been carried out so far, but various studies cover a wide range of other
language areas, suggesting that corpora can be successfully used for pronunciation, meaning,
vocabulary, collocations, phraseology, grammar, syntax, and so on. Recent years have seen a sub-
stantial increase in the use of corpora for discourse purposes, as well as awareness of and sensibility
to genre, text type, sociolinguistic variation, and critical analysis. But corpus use has still wider
implications, extending to the study of literature (e.g., Kettemann 2011), cultural studies (Boulton
2011a), and indeed any other discipline that works with text.
We currently know little about learners’ continued use of corpora over time, and what evi-
dence there is seems to be mixed. Bowker’s (1999) Master’s translation students mostly prefer
‘traditional’ reference resources (notably dictionaries), while Hafner and Candlin’s (2007) law
students tend to revert to prior consultation practices towards the end of the course. However,
other studies have found learners who continue using corpora: general language learners (Allan
2006), students from other disciplines (Yoon and Hirvela 2004), and students majoring in lan-
guage (Granath 2009). Littlemore (2002) found that corpus work was among the most popular
modules in her ICT course for language teachers, and was viewed even more favourably eight
months after the end of the course. The most detailed data in this respect comes from Charles
(2012a), who found that, by the end of her programme, more than half the participants used
corpora at least once a week on their own initiative and for their own ends. A year later, 50% still
used corpora at least once a week (10% daily), with an immediate writing need being the main
determining factor (Charles 2012b).

New Debates
One area of debate in applied corpus linguistics is the apparent slowness of uptake of methods and
materials in mainstream language teaching (Römer 2006; 2009). A survey by Borg (2009) of 500
language teachers around the world showed that research engagement (including reading academic
publications) is comparatively rare among practicing teachers for understandable reasons: They
may not have easy access to research or training, or they may not have the time or opportunity to
implement new methods and techniques. Or they may discover new things, desire to use or to test
them, even, but then find their implementation impractical or impossible in their particular work-
ing environment. And yet it is teachers who need to become “central stakeholders in the corpus
revolution” (McCarthy 2008, 565). Indeed, if researchers are to lament the fact that corpora have
not become widespread in language education, then they might start by shifting their own research
to the types of learning environments that most need it and taking stock of existing and new
practices among language teachers.
On another level, while many teachers and learners will spontaneously deploy search tech-
niques closely resembling those of corpus linguistics in everyday Internet use (cf. Boulton and

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Tyne 2014), the very nature of corpora and corpus searches may prove to be too daunting. For
users who are not used to ‘reading’ a concordance, the presentation can be a problem since there
are often no obvious ‘sentences’ to be seen. Many large corpora are designed for researchers rather
than language teachers or learners, which impacts the design and user-friendliness as well as the
syntax of corpus enquiry, which can be highly complex at times. For these reasons, other, more
‘peripheral’ areas of corpus use, in particular those involving corpus creation, may benefit from
being explored more in language education, insofar as they appear to relate more easily to existing
activities in the language classroom (Tyne 2012): corpus building, transcription, whiteboard or
hand concordancing (Willis 1998). The ‘web as corpus’ debate may go some way towards address-
ing these issues, though with a number of caveats (see below).
As we have seen, the type of input provided by corpora does appear to offer a number of
advantages. However, more longitudinal research is needed on a variety of issues. In particular,
what are the effects of the various types of corpus use—not just on the specific language items
covered, but also on long-term learning of the language as a whole? What use is made of corpora
outside class or after the end of the course? Do learners apply corpus techniques to other areas of
study in addition to language learning, such as in information retrieval, literary or cultural studies,
translation, et cetera? The debate here is whether the use of corpora in language teaching and
learning constitutes a mere passing trend or represents a lasting development. Change for the sake
of change may be inherent in language education (Decoo 2001), but corpus findings and corpus
techniques do reflect some fundamental issues at the heart of language teaching and learning. First,
the common-sense view is that better description of the target language can positively influence
language teaching. Corpus use is standard practice in almost all fields of linguistics today, such that
it seems almost unconceivable to embark on the study of language without some form of empir-
ical investigation, which includes the Internet and general electronic data access. And now that the
general climate for the empirical study has been developed, together with its numerous applica-
tions, it is, as Sinclair (2004, 272) puts it, “unlikely that corpus evidence can just be ignored.”
An obvious area of discussion today is the role played by the Internet as a kind of surrogate
corpus. The status of the ‘web-as-corpus’ is not uncontroversial (Kilgarriff and Grefenstette
2003), but there is reason to think that many learners and teachers are already using the web in
this way (e.g., Conroy 2010). The traditional view that quite simply the “web is not a corpus”
(Sinclair 2005, 21) has now largely given way to the view that, for all intents and purposes, “the
corpus of the new millennium is the web” (Kilgarriff 2001, 473). However, the Internet is not a
‘principled’ collection of texts; it contains a lot of ‘noise,’ and general search engines are designed
primarily to search for content information (i.e., things one actually desires to know about), while
in the case of corpus searches the priority is language (i.e., how that information is presented).
Moreover, the types of search that can be carried out online using a commercial search engine are
generally less specific than the possibilities offered by corpora. Though regular web use cannot
permit the types of detail found in lemmatised, register-specific, era-specific corpora, technology
can resolve certain issues: It is possible to introduce a number of filters (e.g., in Google advanced) to
reduce noisy data and optimise queries via regular search engines (Boulton and Tyne 2014), and
tools such as WebCorp or KwicFinder allow refined searches and more language-friendly presenta-
tion of output. However, there is still, quite understandably, a general absence of reliable spoken
language transcripts in web searches: Despite some recent advances, the all-purpose label ‘spoken’
can still be found as a genre or register type; the same is not true of written language, where the
identification of press sources, popular fiction, classical literature, et cetera, is standard procedure.
An additional argument for reappropriating the Internet for language teaching and learning
purposes is that it builds on the ordinary use of the Internet by most language learners (e.g., Shei
2008)—that is, learners can recycle a methodology they already use on a day-to-day basis. Indeed,

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it would seem somehow counterproductive not to tap into a set of procedures already mastered
by learners and teachers.

Implications for Education

As we have seen, a frequent observation is that corpora have still to make substantial inroads in
mainstream teaching. Römer (e.g., 2009) talks of a “corpus mission” to convince publishers and
other decision-makers; key in this process will be the involvement of teachers. Given that they
are “central stakeholders” in education, McCarthy (2008) suggests that we should cease to think of
them as passive “consumers” of corpora and more as “active participants,” even “corpus lobbyists.”
He points out that most of the flow at the moment is one-way, with researchers expecting teachers
to take up their work; it is clearly crucial, however, for researchers to be sensitive to the real needs
of teachers too (also Römer 2006). So, rather than asking what corpora can do, we should therefore
first ask what teachers need and then what corpora may bring them (Frankenberg-Garcia 2012;
Tyne 2012). Corpus use is not an end in itself, but is justified only insofar as it is actually useful and
relevant (Johansson 2009, 42). Teachers’ needs, as identified by Römer (2009), include better teach-
ing materials and support in creating new ones, as well as native-speaker advice and reliable refer-
ence resources. As we have seen, corpora should be able to contribute on all these counts, and
indeed, a study by Mukherjee (2004; also Götz and Mukherjee 2006) shows that these are the uses
teachers most readily identify with: The teachers in his study quickly saw how corpora could be
useful for themselves in the classroom as a permanent informant or at home in preparing or cor-
recting work.
We have seen that different learners may react to corpora differently; the same would seem to
be true of teachers, both culturally and as individuals. Some may take to DDL immediately; some
may need a relatively substantial introduction before adopting it; some may decide it is not appro-
priate for them or their students even after such an introduction. But in all cases, training is an
advantage, and simply rejecting corpus work on the grounds of its newness, for example, would
be an unfortunate choice. As Conrad (1999, 3) has it, we owe it to our students to introduce
them to corpora, and even those who are initially reluctant may come to find the new practice of
corpus consultation to be surprisingly “liberating” (Bernardini 2001, 23). Clearly, though, it is not
an option to force new practices on teachers, since this may be a problem in fostering positive
attitudes among learners (Yoon and Hirvela 2004, 278; Mauranen 2004); Liu and Jiang (2009), for
example, find a strong positive correlation between teachers’ and learners’ motivations.
A number of researchers have looked at factors critical to teachers’ uptake of corpus consul-
tation with remarkably similar results: The first obstacles are purely practical or logistical, from
availability of computers to using the software, passing through potential issues of discipline and
time-wasting, but mostly these are not specific to corpus use and apply to any hands-on use of
ICT in the classroom (see Boulton 2009 for discussion). While such concerns are no doubt gen-
uine, the suspicion is that the obstacles relate more to a latent ‘technophobia’ among students and
teachers (Seidlhofer 2000, 208).
We have also mentioned the gap, real or perceived, between research and teaching practice.
However, linguistic corpora and tools can often be ‘subverted’ for pedagogical purposes: The
creators of the British National Corpus, for example, never imagined it would be used by indi-
vidual teachers or learners (Burnard 2002, 67). ‘Pedagogical corpora’ (Braun 2007) are also being
produced (e.g., the Elisa corpus, the Business Letters Corpus) and increasing numbers of tools are
becoming available on the Internet free for download or online use (see Frankenberg-Garcia 2012),
especially user-friendly ones designed in collaboration with teachers and with pedagogical appli-
cations very much the main priority (e.g., the Compleat Lexical Tutor, IFAConc, or TextStat). It

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is becoming ever easier to build pedagogically relevant corpora for specific purposes, using Boot-
Cat to ‘seed’ the web for virtually instantaneous corpora or tools such as AntConc to search more
carefully compiled corpora of selected texts. One area, however, that is considerably underdevel-
oped is the provision of materials and activities which can be adapted for immediate use (Gavioli
2005, 1). Boulton (2010) notes exceptions, such as Tribble and Jones (1997) and Thurstun and
Candlin (1997), both of which consist of printed exercises, but it is surprising that there are not
more materials to exploit the interactive potential of hands-on corpus use. This is perhaps one of
the biggest potential obstacles, as corpus work is considered to be extremely time-consuming, not
just in class (e.g., Farr 2008) but especially perhaps in terms of preparation: Johns (1991a) claims
to have spent four hours on a single exercise. Inevitably, more efficient tools today reduce such
time considerably, but teachers may be unwilling, or simply unable, to invest the time in master-
ing them. Also, the fact that most existing corpora do not match the communicative needs of
many courses may be a problem in getting teachers interested in using them.
There has been much debate about training for learners, but it is clearly no less important for
teachers. As Johns (1986, 159) noted long ago, “it is important that teachers themselves should
have experience in using concordance output if they expect their students to make use of it.” It
is frequently noted that effective corpus use requires extensive training for both learners and
teachers. However, for the first, a number of short-term experiments show immediate benefits,
and it is also possible to devise activities that allow learners to discover corpus techniques and
technology at the same time as they learn the language. For both, the problems of training for
the technology itself should not be overstated (Sinclair 2004), and there are numerous books (see
‘Further Reading’ section of this chapter), articles (e.g., Gabrielatos 2005; Frankenberg-Garcia
2012), and even on-line tutorials (e.g., ICT4LT; CALPER). But of course, it is not enough for
the information simply to be there—it has to reach the intended audience, hence the need for
specific training and awareness-raising.
In-service training has received the bulk of attention so far. Mukherjee (2004) found that
teachers can quickly see the advantages for their own purposes, but often hesitate to use them
with their learners. Traditionally, teachers have been in the position of ultimate ‘expert’ on all
matters linguistic and pedagogical and, not unsurprisingly perhaps, some teachers (and some
learners) inevitably resist changes to these perceived roles. Though such factors should not be
underestimated when advocating change, one advantage of corpora is that they allow the teacher
to admit to not knowing everything (which can be quite a relief) and to respond to questions by
saying, “I’m not sure: let’s find out together” (Johns 1991b, 31).
For these reasons, it may be more advantageous to incorporate corpus work in pre-service
training (e.g., Gan et al. 1996, 32; Conrad 2000, 556; O’Keeffe et al. 2007; Davis and Russell-Pinson
2004), and reports in this direction seem to be rather more encouraging. Breyer (2009), for exam-
ple, reports no major problems; simply choosing an appropriate corpus was the largest barrier
cited. However, it is clear that the student teachers’ mindset was substantially different from what
would be expected in a researcher: selecting items from the textbook syllabus and looking for
examples to support them, with a preference for ‘closed’ tasks that limit the possible answers and
allow the teacher to retain full control of the activity. This brings us back to the points made
earlier: the need to adjust corpus use to teachers’ needs, rather than expecting users to become
overnight corpus linguists. In the case of DDL, the ‘learner as researcher’ approach may be par-
ticularly off-putting for some; as Mukherjee (2006, 14) points out, “it is doubtful . . . whether
this extremely autonomous corpus-based activity can be fruitfully put into practice in the reality
of ELT classrooms.” Thus, both teachers and learners may benefit from a gentle introduction for
corpus use rather than being dropped in at the deep end. There may then be an argument for
presenting corpus work as ‘ordinary’ practice (cf. Boulton 2011a), highlighting the bridges with

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existing practices and seeing how corpora can integrate to current, ordinary uses. For example,
Scheffler (2007) finds that 30% of teachers already use the Internet for linguistic searches; as they
have come to this heuristically, their procedures could no doubt be improved upon with training,
and constitute a springboard to more regular corpus use.
Corpora and the associated software and techniques constitute one extra set of tools in the
teacher’s battery, albeit a potentially powerful one. Suitably chosen and consulted, they can pro-
vide answers to many of the teacher’s questions about language in the form of extensive samples
that can also be used as the basis for activities, exercises, and tests. Such uses range from the ‘soft,’
which correspond very closely to the traditional, closed-answer, right-or-wrong design favoured
by many learners and student teachers (cf. Breyer 2009), to the out-and-out discovery-based
DDL activities, which are much more open-ended and allow for greater learner input and crea-
tivity (Gabrielatos 2005), and are more learner-centred as opposed to teacher-led. While it may
be deemed appropriate to ‘progress’ from highly controlled, teacher-led activities to freer, more
learner-led activities involving “a gradual transfer of responsibility and control of the mental
activity from the teacher to the learner” (O’Sullivan 2007, 273), there is no single ‘right’ way to
use corpora. It is important for each teacher to choose what is appropriate for him/herself given
the learners’ needs and available resources.
Corpora by no means contain the solutions to all pedagogical problems, and massive use with
any group of learners is not necessarily the best way forward. However, the evidence suggests
that, sensitively used, they can provide an additional set of tools and techniques for a variety of
purposes, can increase language awareness and metacognitive skills, can build on and promote
existing ICT skills, and are potentially highly motivating as they allow exploration of individual
questions, fostering autonomy with potential for life-long learning. Inevitably, any decision con-
cerning their use has to be a local one, depending on individual and cultural learning and teach-
ing styles, as well as needs and opportunities. Nonetheless, “the corpus revolution is here to stay,
and teacher education cannot afford to sideline it” (McCarthy 2008, 573).

Further Reading

Important Historical Books

Johns, T. and P. King (eds). 1991. Classroom concordancing. English Language Research Journal, 4.
Sinclair, J. (ed). 1987. Looking Up: An Account of the COBUILD Project in Lexical Computing. London: Collins,
104–115.

Important Recent Books

Boulton, A. and H. Tyne. 2014. Des Documents Authentiques aux Corpus: Démarches pour l’Apprentissage des
Langues. Paris: Didier.
Flowerdew, L. 2012. Corpora and Language Education. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
O’Keeffe, A. and M. McCarthy. 2010. The Routledge Handbook of Corpus Linguistics. London: Routledge.
Reppen, R. 2010. Using Corpora in the Classroom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Thomas, J. and A. Boulton (eds). 2012. Input, Process and Product: Developments in Teaching and Language Corpora.
Brno: Masaryk University Press.

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Corpora and Resources Cited

AntConc. http://www.antlab.sci.waseda.ac.jp/software.html
BootCat. http://bootcat.sslmit.unibo.it
British National Corpus. http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/, http://corpus.byu.edu/bnc/
Business Letters Corpus. http://www.someya-net.com/concordancer
CALPER. http://calper.la.psu.edu/corpus.php
Compleat Lexical Tutor. http://www.lextutor.ca/vp/eng
Corpus of Contemporary American English. http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/
Elisa corpus. http://www.uni-tuebingen.de/elisa/html/elisa_index.html
English Profile. http://www.englishprofile.org
ICT4LT module 2.4. http://www.ict4lt.org/en/en_mod2–4.htm
KwicFinder. http://www.kwicfinder.com
Leeds Internet corpus. http://corpus.leeds.ac.uk/internet.html
WebCorp. http://www.webcorp.org.uk

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 24
Second Language Acquisition
and Language Teacher Education
Sachiko Yokoi Horii

Introduction
Second language acquisition (SLA) researchers, experts in how second languages are learned, have
sought ways to contribute to language classroom practices. For instance, sections on practical impli-
cations in academic journals are usually devoted to making pedagogical suggestions to language
teachers and educators to improve their daily classroom practices. There are many textbooks on
SLA that are tailored specifically for language teachers in that they try to provide answers to the
practical questions that emerge from classrooms. In addition, as language teacher educators, many
SLA researchers offer SLA courses in their language teacher education programs. It is assumed that
teachers’ knowledge about L2 acquisition acquired in such courses would be positively reflected in
their classroom practices. However, researchers both from SLA and related fields have questioned
such “moral ends” or “the social value and educational relevance” (Ortega 2012, 206) of research
in SLA (e.g., Ellis 1997; Freeman 2002; Freeman and Johnson 1998; Ortega 2005; 2012).
This chapter explores the fundamental issues of research—practice connections (and possibly
disconnections) between the field of second language acquisition (SLA) and language classrooms.
In reviewing the past and current research in SLA and related fields, we ask what SLA as a research
field can offer to teaching practice and how it can impact language teachers and their classroom
practices.

Historical Perspectives
There has been considerable discussion among SLA researchers about the applicability of SLA
theories and research to language classroom practices ever since SLA began to be recognized as
an established field in the late 1960s or the early 1970s. In these early years, SLA researchers
argued that there needed to be a careful consideration before interpreting and applying research
findings to classroom practices. For instance, Tarone, Swain, and Fathman (1976) suggested that
researchers not make hasty pedagogical applications, explaining how the field at that time was
“still in its infancy” (29). Hatch (1979) echoes Tarone et al. (1976), pointing out “leaps in logic”
(123) in such pedagogical applications. She argued that SLA researchers should not be able to
answer the kind of pedagogical questions language teachers would normally pose without

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making “jumps (or leaps) . . . in explaining how our data applies to the classroom” (137). In the
1980s, Lightbown (1985) provided a brief historical overview of the field and concluded, “our
understanding of acquisition is still far from complete, and our ability to make recommendations
is still very restricted” (184).
Thus, having once been language teachers and/or being language teacher educators themselves
(e.g., Hatch 1979; Lightbown 1985; Tarone et al. 1976), many researchers in early studies tried to
remain closely connected to language teaching practices by seeking ways to apply research to prac-
tice. However, they also argued that the field of SLA was still too young to draw conclusive findings
to make practical, pedagogical suggestions at the time. In addition, issues with “leaps in logic” reflect
not only the infancy of the field but also the complex, messy nature of language learning and teach-
ing processes. As Hatch (1979) argued, instead of making conclusive pedagogical applications based
on narrowly drawn but arbitrarily expanded findings, questions related to applicability also needed
to be asked and explored in research for more sound application. Overall, in these early years,
empirical investigation of such issues was almost non-existent. As I review below, it was only in the
1990s when such issues/questions began to be theoretically reconsidered and empirically explored.

Core Issues and Key Findings

Many researchers agree that educational/pedagogical relevance was still missing in SLA research
in the 1990s and even today (e.g., Clarke 1994; Crookes 1997; Ellis 1997; 2010; Freeman and
Johnson 1998; Markee 1997; Ortega 2005; 2012). Ellis (1997; 2010) points to the divide between
researcher and teacher communities that complicates the interpretation and application processes
of relating research findings to practice. For instance, researchers most commonly make efforts to
connect their research findings to practice by addressing pedagogical implications in their studies.
However, in the symposium section titled “Research and Its Pedagogical Implications” in TESOL
Quarterly, Han (2007) raises questions about the ways in which researchers “ostentatiously link
the research to practice” (387) in their pedagogical/practical implications sections. She points out
that many implications are drawn with insufficient empirical basis and further illustrates how
“leaps in logic” are made in research. While the “apply with caution” maxim from the 1970s
seems to still apply today, Ortega (2012) updates this notion by realistically suggesting that we
apply research findings to practice with caution but not to the extreme. She articulates that stud-
ies, particularly the ones conducted in laboratory settings, should clearly state “how this fact
limits the range of interpretations, and even more so the applications, that can be legitimately
based on such data” (Ortega 2005, 432). Han (2007) also suggests that journals (TESOL Quarterly,
in particular, in her case) embrace a wider range of ways to articulate the practical relevance.
In recent years, the connections (and disconnections) between research and practice in SLA
have been explored more directly. Some researchers examine whether or not SLA-related theories
impact language teachers. For instance, MacDonald, Badger, and White (2001) examined the
impact of an SLA course on students’ beliefs, assumptions, and knowledge about language learning
and teaching in a TESOL program in the United Kingdom. They administered a questionnaire
with 12 statements (see Lightbown and Spada 2006) to 55 students, both undergraduate (n = 27)
and post-graduate (n = 28), in an SLA course at the beginning and the end of the semester. The
questionnaire was also administered twice to a control group of 25 students who were not taking
the SLA course. With respect to the students’ beliefs on behaviourist language learning and
teaching and grammar-oriented instruction, the results showed that there were significant changes
from the start of the course to the end of the course. In particular, after taking the SLA course,
the students more strongly disagreed that language learning should take place through imitation,
that learners should be exposed only to the language structures they have already learned, and

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that learners learn what they are taught (see Lightbown and Spada 2006, xv). On the contrary,
no significant difference was found in the control group. The authors concluded that overall, by
taking the SLA course, the students had moved away from the behaviourist view of language
learning and teaching, which they had held more strongly before they took the course.
A similar study with a larger population was done by Busch (2010) using mixed methods. She
examined the effects of an SLA course on the beliefs of pre-service teachers she taught at a uni-
versity in California, USA, over the course of three years. A widely used survey with 23 statements
(Horwitz 1988) was administered to 381 participants before and after the course. The participants
were also asked to compare their survey results and write about the changes in their beliefs. The
survey results demonstrated significant changes in the teachers’ beliefs on 16 statements. In par-
ticular, the teachers moved more toward disagreement with statements such as, “If beginning
students are permitted to make errors in English, it will be difficult for them to speak later on,”
“It is important to repeat and practice a lot,” “You shouldn’t say anything in English until you
can say it correctly” (322–323). These results also indicate a decrease in the participants’ inclination
toward behaviourism as a result of the SLA course. The qualitative data of written explanations
of the pre-service teachers’ beliefs further revealed that their prior language learning experience,
the SLA course, and tutoring an ESL student as part of the course requirement impacted their
beliefs concerning language learning and teaching.
Nassaji (2012) also examined language teachers’ beliefs and understandings of the relationship
between SLA and language teaching. He distributed a questionnaire to 410 ESL teachers in
Canada and EFL teachers in Turkey and received 201 responses. In addition to 12 statements
about their beliefs on SLA, the questionnaire asked participants about their research experience
in SLA. The results show that while the teachers believed that knowing about SLA improves
language teaching, many also indicated that practical knowledge gained from their teaching
experience was more relevant.
While these studies offered quantitative evidence of the positive effect of SLA theories on
pre-service and practicing language teachers’ knowledge, assumptions, and beliefs about language
learning and teaching, some of the critical factors underlying the impact of theory on practice are
left unexplored. For instance, while the above studies seem to suggest that SLA courses may possibly
have impact on teachers’ beliefs concerning the behaviourist view of language learning and teach-
ing, they do not report on the process—why and how such changes occurred. The changes should
be at least partly due to the ways in which the SLA courses were taught, but none of the above
studies discussed this fundamental factor or provided enough description of their SLA courses.
Overall, these quantitative studies overlook why and how the participant teachers came to change
certain assumptions and beliefs, but not others, regarding language learning and teaching.
Issues with making connections between SLA research and classroom teaching have also been
discussed in the language teacher education field. In the 1998 special issue of TESOL Quarterly on
language teacher education, Freeman and Johnson (1998) discussed what constitutes teacher
knowledge in language teacher education, based on teacher education theories. They point out
that language educators have traditionally remained within a knowledge-transmission model. In
this model, teacher knowledge was viewed as an extended body of theories and research findings
relevant to language teaching and was selected and transmitted to teachers by researchers as if
filling in the “empty vessels” (Freeman and Johnson 1998, 401). The underlying assumption here
is that once language teachers learn generalized theories and methods, they should be able to apply
the knowledge in their own teaching contexts. This assumption indeed contradicts the reality as
repeatedly pointed out by many researchers. In an effort to reflect this reality in our understandings
of teacher knowledge, Freeman and Johnson propose to reconceptualise the knowledge base of
language teacher education. Drawing from the work in general teacher education, Johnson (1996)

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argues that teacher knowledge “is inherently their own, constructed by teachers themselves” (767).
Freeman and Johnson (1998) also echo Johnson’s statement as follows:

[W]hat teachers know about teaching is largely socially constructed out of the experiences
and classrooms from which teachers have come. Furthermore, how teachers actually use
their knowledge in classrooms is highly interpretive, socially negotiated, and continually
restructured within the classrooms and schools where teachers work.
(400)

Thus, the focus in language teacher education should shift from the accumulation of theories
and research to the local, situated knowledge that is socially and experientially constructed and
reconstructed by teachers themselves over time. This change in focus in itself can be a theorizing
process. Feiman-Nemser (2001) in general teacher education illustrates this process as follows:

The kind of conversation that promotes teacher learning differs from usual modes of teacher
talk which feature personal anecdotes and opinions and are governed by norms of politeness
and consensus. Professional discourse involves rich descriptions of practice, attention to
evidence, examination of alternative interpretations, and possibilities. As teachers learn to
talk about teaching in specific and disciplined ways and to ask hard questions of themselves
and others, they create new understandings and build a new professional culture.
(1043)

This framework implies that teacher knowledge does not devalue or ignore theory, but instead
suggests that teachers engage in theorizing themselves through professional discussions to gener-
ate their own knowledge. Theories and research, then, may provide teachers with tools and
language to articulate and make sense of their practices in specific and disciplined ways (see
Freeman 2002; Johnson 1996). Freeman (2002) suggests that such opportunities may be provided
by “connecting and integrating the social contexts of professional education with those of the
classroom and the school” (7).
The question then is, how can social contexts of SLA courses in language teacher education pro-
grams connect and integrate those of classrooms? Or more generally, how can SLA inform classroom
practices? Angelova (2005) examined a particular instructional tool used in her SLA course in an MA
TESOL program at a U.S. university. She begins the study with a description of her own experience
as a first-year instructor. She faced challenges in teaching the course in a traditional way when assign-
ing students to read a number of research articles and do a presentation on an SLA-related topic. She
reports that many of her practicing ESL teachers generally complained about disconnections between
the theories they learned and their own beliefs regarding teaching practices. After her “very difficult
first year” (27), Angelova realized that she needed to integrate “actual classroom experiences” into
her SLA course so that the students could reflect on their own experiences in order to internalize
and further apply what they learn about SLA into their own classrooms. She also found that 70% of
her practicing ESL teacher-students were monolingual. She decided to offer her students foreign
language learning experiences through 15-minute Bulgarian lessons within the SLA course. Occa-
sionally, Angelova gave language activities that were planned based on specific SLA theories and asked
her students to change them based on what they knew about SLA. She also required the students to
keep reflective journals on their Bulgarian learning experiences from any SLA perspectives of their
choice. In her qualitative analysis of the data collected from 30 participant-teachers, which included
surveys, reflective journals, and audio-recordings of several classroom discussions, Angelova illustrated
how their reflections and discussions of their language learning experiences were translated into their

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own classrooms. She showed how the Bulgarian mini-lessons provided the students with opportu-
nities to internalize SLA concepts in more practical ways. For instance, at one time, students were
learning how to introduce themselves in Bulgarian. Angelova presented two different types of activ-
ities using a mini dialogue. The first one involved asking each student to stand up and repeat the
dialogue she read to the students, correcting their pronunciation and asking them to repeat after her
until they got it right. In the second activity, the students sat in a circle and practiced how to ask and
answer questions while tossing a toy. This time, she did not correct their errors at all. Angelova reports
that the students reflected on how some of them were intimidated by the way the instructor cor-
rected them in the first activity, while others were frustrated by not being corrected in the second.
They further discussed how the reactions of their students might differ from their own reactions to
each activity. Angelova also found that some of the SLA theories were simply not applicable to her
students; even after student presentations, they could not find ways to apply certain theories to their
own classrooms. Overall, Angelova concluded that the use of mini-lessons led to a better understand-
ing of SLA concepts than the traditional lecture style.
In their qualitative case study of nine graduate students in a graduate level SLA course at a U.S.
university, Vásquez and Harvey (2010) examined how their students’ knowledge and beliefs about a
particular SLA topic, corrective feedback, might change as they engaged in their course assignments.
Vásquez and Harvey created an assignment in which the students were to conduct a partial replication
of Lyster and Ranta’s (1997) classroom research on corrective feedback. The research replication pro-
ject included a transcription of their own videotaped classroom teaching, data analysis using Lyster and
Ranta’s codes, and write-up of a research report. The students were also asked to keep reflective jour-
nals. In addition, after the semester ended, a small group of students participated in a focus-group
interview. Thus, the data that the researchers collected mainly came from the students’ assignments,
which included reflective essays, open-ended questionnaire responses, researcher notes, reflective jour-
nals, and transcription of the focus group interview. The findings showed that while the students
initially demonstrated minimal knowledge about corrective feedback, with more concerns about its
affective dimension (fearing that corrective feedback might negatively impact learners’ self-esteem),
later in the semester, particularly after conducting the research replication project, they demonstrated
“a more nuanced and sophisticated understanding of its [ = corrective feedback] role and function,
and its interaction with student uptake” (Vásquez and Harvey 2010, 430). For instance, they paid less
attention to the affective dimension of corrective feedback, but instead began to explore relationships
between corrective feedback, student uptake, and error types. The authors also described how the
students were able to make “personal and meaningful connections” (437) between what they learned
in the SLA course and their own classroom practices, as well as connections between their research
findings and the original study. In addition, the students also reported that the research provided them
with the language and concepts to better understand and articulate their own practices. For example,
one of the participants reflected on her practice and her attempt to change as follows:

At the time of teaching, I did not realize just how much one student was dominating
the talk time, and how little negotiation of meaning was taking place. This has impacted
my teaching; I started using more group work and student-student interaction in the
classroom . . . This helped encourage more students to speak and negotiate for meaning,
and it made the class a little more interesting for the students.
(434)

Overall, Vásquez and Harvey concluded that their research replication project served as a
hands-on, practical tool to provide teachers with chance to make personal connections between
research and their own practices.

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Several studies report how action/teacher research may be able to bridge the gap between SLA
theory/research and practice. An SLA researcher who specializes in “theoretically motivated,
hypothesis-testing quantitative research” (36), McDonough (2006), observed her students being
more interested in L2 pedagogy than in SLA research and decided to explore how action research
in a graduate seminar at a U.S. university might have an impact on the professional development
of graduate teaching assistants. In her seminar designed specifically to explore action research,
seven graduate teaching assistants participated in this study. The participants investigated topics
of their choice concerning, for instance, grammar instruction, classroom participation, or activity
transitions. As for data collection, they were asked to submit professional journals, reflective
essays, action research projects that involved oral presentations and written reports, and course
feedback through an oral focus group and a written course evaluation. The researcher also kept
field notes. The findings indicated that through their action research projects, the participants
were able to expand their views of research, respond to peer collaboration more positively, and
further implement new L2 techniques based on their reflections. However, McDonough reports
that although the participants recognized its usefulness for their professional development, “they
had some lingering reservations about action research and their concerns reflected the values and
standards associated with the more dominant positivistic paradigm in educational research” (40).
The author attributes the students’ narrow understanding of research to the insufficient exposure
to this kind of research in their graduate programs, as well as to “the relative lack of action
research studies in the top-tier journals” (40). Overall, this study did not directly concern the
connection between SLA research and practice. However, it documents the difficulty of and
further calls for promoting a paradigm shift in understanding what counts as research.
In their “modified” (because of the researcher’s active involvement in this study) action
research, Rankin and Becker (2006) investigated the connection between research and practice,
documenting how and to what extent reading the SLA research impacted a novice graduate
instructor’s (= Becker’s) classroom practice in his German class at Princeton University, USA. For
this study, the authors focused on the research on corrective feedback. In his action research
project, Becker underwent three phases: Classroom observations (Phase 1), reading and planning
(Phase 2), and implementation (Phase 3). In Phase 1, the authors first documented how corrective
feedback was provided by Becker in his German class before he read any research articles. In
Phase 2, he read three research articles on corrective feedback, assigned by Rankin, and created
his own action plan to improve his instructional skills on corrective feedback. In Phase 3, Becker
implemented the action plan and reflected on how it went. Rankin also observed Becker’s classes
in Phase 1 and 3. The authors report that as Becker went through the three phases, he became
more consistent in supplying corrective feedback to his students. In addition, they found that by
reading the research articles, Becker was provided with new vocabularies and concepts to analyse,
articulate, and understand his instruction, relating, in particular, to corrective feedback. For
instance, when he reflected on or discussed his teaching, terms such as “salience,” “recast,” and
“self-correction” were found in Becker’s language only after reading the articles (365). Overall,
through the action research project, the SLA research led to instructional improvement as well as
to a more in-depth understanding of the instructor’s own classroom practices. Thus, these studies
suggest that action research may serve as a promising alternative tool to bridge the gap between
research and practice.
However, Allwright (2005) argues that even teacher research such as action research may not
be a viable alternative (355) for full-time, practicing teachers. When Allwright worked with
language teachers in Brazil to lead their research projects, he realized that their classroom-based
SLA research projects were pushing teachers too close to “burnout” (354). Allwright argues that
this is because academic research, be it classroom-based SLA research or action research, requires

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too much of teachers’ time to learn and acquire the research skills necessary to carry out research
projects that are “doubtfully usable” (354) in their classroom teaching. He further continues:

[I]t [ = Action research] appeared to be something that could be fitted into an in-service
teacher development course, where good support was available, and be used as the frame-
work for a final project. This project would be done with great enthusiasm and at a level of
energy expenditure that it would not be possible to repeat after the course was over and the
teacher was back in the classroom full-time.
(355)

Indeed, findings in both McDonough (2006) and Rankin and Becker (2006) support All-
wright’s argument. The action research projects in these studies were the final projects for the
courses in which the participants were enrolled. In addition, all the participants were graduate
students who received ample support from university instructors/researchers and had easy access
to academic literature. These graduate students would “read and respond to the texts . . . with
an eye to critical analysis and conceptual synthesis” (Rankin and Becker 2006, 363) and thus, had
no issues with reading and processing research articles.
McDonough (2006) examined whether the graduate seminar on action research had “linger-
ing effects” (42) on the graduate instructors. Thirteen months after the seminar ended, she sent
a follow-up message to the seven participants via email, asking whether they did anything else
with the project after the course, whether they have done any other research projects, and whether
they think the action research had a persistent impact on their professional development (42).
According to their responses, all the participants agreed that the action research projects had a
lasting impact on their professional development. Five out of seven participants continued their
action research projects after the course was over in order to present them at a language teacher
education conference. However, only one participant expanded her action research for her mas-
ter’s thesis; the rest of the participants did not conduct any other action research projects. It is
clear that the fundamental issues with the research—practice connections that Allwright (2005)
pointed out—were less explicit in McDonough’s study.
Allwright’s (2003; 2005) work, known as exploratory practice, grew out of his own experience
working with practicing teachers on classroom research projects in Brazil, Hong Kong, and the
United Kingdom. He observed how traditional academic research might exploit already over-
worked language teachers’ lives by requiring extra time and energy of them in order to learn
research skills and conduct research. In response to such realities, he proposed an ethically and
epistemologically motivated approach to practitioner research designed for teachers. Exploratory
practice focuses on the relationship between knowledge and life and aims to “work to under-
stand, rather than to problem-solve; and to understand life in the language classroom, rather than
other aspects of language teaching and learning” (360). Allwright (2005) firmly claims:

. . . [R]esearch in the human field of language teaching and learning is necessarily and essen-
tially, first and foremost an ethical and an epistemological matter. If that leaves us apparently
vulnerable on the technical side, we are comfortable with that. If teachers and researchers
interested in EP [ = exploratory practice] want practical help in putting it into practice, then
we are ready to help and have plenty of ideas to propose.
(362)

With an ethical and different epistemological perspective, exploratory practice is now an

established approach, developed over the course of a few decades. For example, in 2003, in a

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special issue of Language Teaching Research devoted to exploratory practice, a variety of exploratory
practice studies were presented, including two dissertation studies. More recently, Tarone and
Swierzbin (2009) developed a set of SLA analytical tools in order to provide language teachers (and
researchers) with “basic skills and tools for the analysis of learner language” (xvi). Providing a DVD
of six English language learners (and two native speakers) completing six communicative tasks, the
two SLA researchers lay out five different analytical frameworks to analyse learner language in terms
of error analysis and interlanguage, developmental sequence, interaction (e.g., corrective feedback),
referential communication, and language complexity. The point seems to lie in what and how
research and theory may be introduced to language teachers in exploratory practice research so they
can internalize and use it as a tool to understand what they do in their own classrooms.
Overall, quantitative studies offer evidence of the positive impact of SLA research on classroom
practices, while qualitative studies explore a range of ways to integrate two different domains,
documenting how teachers were provided with time, space, and tools (language, concepts, research
techniques and opportunities) in their university courses to reflect on and make sense of what
they do in their classrooms and/or how learners learn second languages. Angelova (2005) and
Vásquez and Harvey (2010) proposed practical ways to integrate the SLA findings and research
techniques into university courses. McDonough (2006) and Rankin and Becker (2006) report on
their action research courses to examine how research may be integrated into classroom practices.
All these studies were based in university, often graduate level, courses, seeking ways to integrate
language classroom contexts into their university contexts. Allwright (2003; 2005) points to the
realities of the language teaching profession and fully questions the feasibility of the existing
practitioner research approaches proposed by researchers instead of teachers. In his framework of
exploratory practice, he primarily considers teacher knowledge in relation to life in the language
classroom, not necessarily the research–practice connections. In this framework, research takes
place in classrooms in a way not to exploit the teacher but, instead, to serve her by providing her
with a better understanding of what she does in her classroom. As I discuss in the next section,
a wider range of practitioner research approaches should be creatively explored and embraced for
“research about practice could perhaps most sensibly [emphasis added] conducted by practitioners
themselves working to understand their own practices” (Allwright 2005, 357).

Research Approaches
As I have reviewed in the previous section, a range of approaches, methods, and techniques have
been employed to examine the connections between SLA research and classroom practice. The
key question researchers generally raise is whether and how SLA has impact on language teachers
and their classroom practices. On one end of the methodological spectrum is the quantitative
approach. Studies such as MacDonald et al. (2001) and Nassaji (2012) used surveys and question-
naires to reveal whether SLA courses have an impact on teacher knowledge, assumptions, and
beliefs about language learning and teaching. Busch (2010) chose mixed methods in order to
quantitatively examine the effect of the SLA course on teachers’ knowledge and beliefs while
qualitatively including their explanations about their beliefs in the analysis. As Angelova (2005)
cautioned, questions for teachers in surveys need to be carefully crafted because the wording of
each question does impact the results. As part of her larger study (although she did not include
any quantitative data in the study under discussion), Angelova (2005) conducted a survey at the
beginning and end of her SLA course. She used two different sets of questions for each survey.
The first survey used almost no technical terms, but the second survey directly asked about SLA
concepts. Angelova reports that while the participants shared their opinions on every question in
the first survey, in the second survey, they “did not recognize or were not able to explain 70 percent

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of the concepts” (31). Of course, this does not necessarily mean that the teachers had not inter-
nalized the concepts they could not answer; it could be due to the way in which they learned
those concepts. In fact, Angelova’s qualitative analysis documents moments of teacher learning in
her SLA course. Since the participants learned several SLA concepts through learning Bulgarian
in mini-lessons, they might have internalized those concepts without using many technical terms.
Thus, when employing survey as a method of the study, the way in which each question is pre-
sented to the participants needs to coincide with how they learned SLA research and theories.
On the other end of the spectrum is the qualitative approach. Angelova (2005) and Vásquez
and Harvey (2010) detailed how their instructional approaches played an important role in
bridging the gap between SLA research and classroom practices. Both studies are a semester long
investigation of their teacher-participants’ learning processes. The researchers included the
students’ course assignments, such as reflective journals and essays, as well as recordings of class-
room and group discussions, as part of the data set. They also included open-ended questionnaire
responses in their analyses. These studies mainly investigated the connections between SLA
research and language teacher knowledge, beliefs, and assumptions. Although it may be assumed
that teacher learning should be almost directly translated into classroom teaching, teacher educa-
tion research suggests a far more complex reality. For instance, Zeichner and Tabachnik (1981)
pointed out that what teachers learn in university-level teacher education is mostly “washed
out,” or has little impact on their teaching. However, Grossman (1990) demonstrated that those
who finished a university-level teacher education program were better prepared to teach than
those who did not. In other words, the ways in which teacher knowledge is formed may largely
impact how the acquired knowledge is translated into classroom practices. Then, it is critical to
examine how teachers not only understand what they learn, but also interpret and translate it into
what they do in their classrooms. Ultimately, classroom practices must be included in the analyses
in order to examine the connections between teacher learning and teaching practices.
Freeman and Johnson’s (1998) call for reconceptualization of the knowledge-base of language
teacher education added another layer of fundamental, epistemological perspective to our inves-
tigation of the research–practice connections in SLA. If we are to understand that teacher knowl-
edge is socially and experientially constructed by language teachers themselves, research projects
must be designed accordingly. Instead of asking whether and how SLA has an impact on language
teachers’ knowledge, the questions should ask how language teachers construct their own knowl-
edge regarding SLA. In this perspective, language teachers play a central role in shaping their own
knowledge. The methods that align well with this framework would be teacher/practitioner
research in which teachers conduct their own research in their own classrooms, exploring topics
of their interests. Practitioner research can take many forms. In McDonough (2006) and Rankin
and Becker (2006), teacher participants successfully conducted their own action research projects
as part of their graduate course assignments. Both studies collected qualitative data, including
journal entries, reflective essays, and field notes from the SLA classroom discussions, as well as
from the actual classroom observations. Another interesting form of practitioner research is self-
study methodology. Martel (2012) employed this methodology in order to explore how his work
as a university student-teacher supervisor was shaped by the way in which his language teacher
education program was designed, which combined different second language contexts (English
as second language, foreign language, and bilingual/immersion). His data collection and analysis
included transcribing and/or coding of post-observation conferences, his reflective journal, and
syllabi from courses he had taken or taught. This methodology allows teachers and teacher edu-
cators to explore “self and the arena of practice, between self in relation to practice and the others
who share the practice setting” (Bullough and Pinnegar 2001, 15) and typically takes the form of
a narrative.

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Allwright’s (2003; 2005) framework of exploratory practice challenges and further expands the
traditional, narrow understanding of what counts as research by centering on the knowledge and life
of the teacher. The primary purpose of exploratory practice is to allow language teachers to under-
stand their own practices. As such, the guiding principles are designed accordingly, proposing that
teachers prioritize their quality of life, collectively work in groups, “minimize the extra effort of all
sorts for all concerned” (Allwright 2003, 360), and the like. Thus, the exploratory practice studies that
appear in academic journals explicitly maintain this perspective. When their research agenda involves
academic research theories and methods/techniques, their use is clearly addressed (e.g., Miller 2003).
Despite the growing body of teacher-centered research, more is needed to inform teacher educators
how their pedagogy may be connected to teacher learning and ultimately the classroom teaching.

New Debates
Over the course of the last few decades, the research–practice connections in SLA have been widely
explored. The issues have been extensively discussed from the very beginning. A wide range of
approaches, methods, and techniques has been used to examine the connections/disconnections of
the two domains. More recent research proposes new frameworks that foreground practitioners/
teachers in the process of teacher learning, while promoting their local, socially, and experientially
constructed knowledge. While current research has advanced our understanding of language teacher
knowledge with regards to SLA, more research needs to be done in order to create a robust empirical
base for better understanding and conceptualization of the SLA research and classroom practice
connections, researcher–practitioner relationships, and, in general, the knowledge-base of language
teacher education. First, the research needs to include actual classroom practices in its data collection
and analysis to more directly examine how what teachers learn impacts how they actually teach. In
addition, more longitudinal studies are necessary to explore and document the persistence of such
professional development opportunities for more sound, nuanced understandings of individual
teachers’ own situations. Second, the researcher–language teacher relationships must also be exam-
ined in more depth. As Ellis (2010) proposed, we should look at the research–practice connections
in SLA “in terms of the actors involved rather than, abstractly, in terms of the kinds of actions they
perform” (190). In his framework, classroom researchers and teacher educators function as mediators
between SLA researchers and language teachers. These actors usually hold multiple roles. For instance,
SLA researchers typically teach SLA courses in language teacher education programs. In such cases,
they perform both researcher and teacher educator roles. Alternatively, many university-based SLA
researchers teach not only SLA courses but also second languages in language departments. In this
case, the SLA researcher, language teacher educator, and language teacher roles all coincide. Thus,
more research is needed to examine how the multiple roles that these actors perform variably inter-
sect and, overall, illuminate the complexities of the SLA research–language teaching connections.
Finally, in light of the reconceptualised knowledge base of language teacher education, we ask how
language teachers construct their own knowledge about language teaching. Does teachers’ local
knowledge interact with SLA research and theories? If so, how? Ellis (2010) admits that the contri-
bution of teacher/practitioner research to the SLA research “is well-taken but probably not realistic”
(189). McDonough (2006) points to the lack of action research studies in the top-tier journals
(40): “I easily located articles about the principles, theory, or value of action research, but I had
more difficulty finding published action research studies” (33). Ellis (1997) also reports:

Teacher research is unlikely to meet the rigorous requirements of SLA gatekeepers such as
the editors of journals like Studies in Second Language Acquisition. Foster’s (1993) pseudoex-
perimental study of task-based meaning, for example, did not survive the in-house editing

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of this journal. Yet this article, the product of teacher research, raises an important issue for
SLA—namely, whether, the kind of meaning negotiation that tasks provide in laboratory
settings also occurs in an real classroom setting.
(87)

Certainly, more teacher research should be published in academic journals. At the same time,
SLA researchers’ advocacy and engagement in this line of research would not only expand the
research community itself but also give them chance for “epistemological ‘world’-traveling” (Ortega
2012, 214) to possibly make their own research more ethically sensitive and theoretically and/or
empirically more valid within the research community (Ortega 2012; see also Foster 1998).

Implications for Education

Since the 1990s, the field of SLA has undertaken epistemological expansions (e.g., Ortega 2005;
2012) and at the intersection of SLA and language teacher education, new frameworks have been
presented to better understand SLA and language teaching. However, despite the epistemological
diversity achieved in the SLA field, researchers are generally reluctant to change, and thus, “the
bulk of current research continues with business as usual” (Ortega 2012, 216). Ortega (2012)
argues that the epistemological diversity should guide researchers to seriously consider the moral
ends of research. The consideration of the moral ends of SLA research would involve taking
implication sections far more seriously in our research. Those who offer SLA courses in teacher
education programs may explore ways in which teacher learning can socially and experientially
take place. SLA researchers who take on teacher education responsibilities may engage in action/
teacher research themselves (e.g., McDonough 2006). Overall, more theoretical, empirical, and
ethical investigation of teacher knowledge and practice will advance our understandings of
teacher learning and teaching.

Further Reading
Allwright, D. (2005). Developing principles for practitioner research: The case of exploratory practice.
Modern Language Journal, 89(3), 353–366.
Ellis, R. (2010). Second language acquisition, teacher education and language pedagogy. Language Teaching,
43(2), 182–201.
Ellis, R. (2012). Language Teaching Research and Language Pedagogy. Malden, MA: Wiley/ Blackwell.
Freeman, D., and Johnson, K. E. (1998). Reconceptualizing the knowledge-base of language teacher education.
TESOL Quarterly, 32(3), 397–417.
Hatch, E. (1979). Apply with caution. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 2(1), 123–143.
Ortega, L. (2012). Epistemological diversity and moral ends of research in instructed SLA. Language Teaching
Research, 16(2), 206–226.

References
Allwright, R. L. (2003). Exploratory practice: Rethinking practitioner research in language teaching. Language
Teaching Research, 7, 113–141.
Allwright, D. (2005). Developing principles for practitioner research: The case of exploratory practice.
Modern Language Journal, 89(3), 353–366.
Angelova, M. (2005). Using Bulgarian mini-lessons in an SLA course to improve the KAL of American
ESL teachers. In N. Bartels (Ed.), Applied Linguistics and Language Teacher Education (Vol. 4, pp. 27–41).
New York: Springer.
Bullough, R. V., and Pinnegar, S. (2001). Guidelines for quality in autobiographical forms of self-study
research. Educational Researcher, 30(3), 13–21.

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Busch, D. (2010). Pre-service teacher beliefs about language learning: The second language acquisition
course as an agent for change. Language Teaching Research, 14(3), 318–337
Clarke, M. A. (1994). The dysfunctions of the theory/practice discourse. TESOL Quarterly, 28(1), 9–26.
Crookes, G. (1997). SLA and language pedagogy: A socioeducational perspective. Studies in Second Language
Acquisition, 19(1), 93–116.
Ellis, R. (1997). SLA and language pedagogy: An educational perspective. Studies in Second Language Acquisition,
19(1), 69–92.
Ellis, R. (2010). Second language acquisition, teacher education and language pedagogy. Language Teaching,
43(2), 182–201.
Feiman-Nemser, S. (2001). From preparation to practice: Designing a continuum to strengthen and sustain
teaching. Teachers College Record, 103(6), 1013–1055.
Foster, P. (1998). A classroom perspective on the negotiation of meaning. Applied Linguistics, 19, 1–23.
Freeman, D. (2002). The hidden side of the work: Teacher knowledge and learning to teach. Language
Teaching, 35(1), 1–13.
Freeman, D., and Johnson, K. E. (1998). Reconceptualizing the knowledge-base of language teacher educa-
tion. TESOL Quarterly, 32(3), 397–417.
Grossman, L. (1990). The making of a teacher: Teacher knowledge and teacher education. New York: Teachers
College Press.
Han, Z. (2007). Pedagogical implications: Genuine or pretentious? TESOL Quarterly, 41(2), 387–393.
Hatch, E. (1979). Apply with caution. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 2(1), 123–143.
Horwitz, E. K. (1988). The beliefs about language learning of beginning university foreign language stu-
dents. The Modern Language Journal, 72(3), 283–294.
Johnson, K. E. (1996). The role of theory in L2 teacher education. TESOL Quarterly, 30(4), 765–771.
Lightbown, M. (1985). Great expectations: Second-language acquisition research and classroom teaching.
Applied Linguistics, 6(2), 173–189.
Lightbown, M., and Spada, N. (2006). How languages are learned (3rd ed.). Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Lyster, R., and Ranta, L. (1997). Corrective feedback and learner uptake: Negotiation of form in commu-
nicative classrooms. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 19(1), 37–66.
MacDonald, M., Badger, R., and White, G. (2001). Changing values: what use are theories of language
learning and teaching? Teaching and Teacher Education, 17(8), 949–963.
Markee, N. (1997). Second language acquisition research: A resource for changing teachers’ professional
cultures? The Modern Language Journal, 81(1), 80–93.
Martel, J. (2012). Looking across contexts in foreign language student teacher supervision: A self-study. The
New Educator, 8(3), 243–257.
McDonough, K. (2006). Action research and the professional development of graduate teaching Assistants.
The Modern Language Journal, 90(1), 33–47.
Miller, I. K. (2003). Researching teacher-consultancy via exploratory practice. Language Teaching Research,
7(2), 201–219.
Nassaji, H. (2012). The relationship between SLA research and language pedagogy: Teachers’ perspectives.
Language Teaching Research, 16(3), 337–365.
Ortega, L. (2005). For what and for whom is our research? The ethical as transformative lens in instructed
SLA. The Modern Language Journal, 89(3), 427–443.
Ortega, L. (2012). Epistemological diversity and moral ends of research in instructed SLA. Language Teaching
Research, 16(2), 206–226.
Rankin, J., and Becker, F. (2006). Does reading the research make a difference? A case study of teacher
growth in FL German. Modern Language Journal, 90(3), 353–372.
Tarone, E., Swain, M., and Fathman, A. (1976). Some limitations to the classroom applications of current
second language acquisition research. TESOL Quarterly, 10, 19–31.
Tarone, E., and Swierzbin, B. (2009). Exploring learner language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Vásquez, C., and Harvey, J. (2010). Raising teachers’ awareness about corrective feedback through research
replication. Language Teaching Research, 14(4), 421–443.
Zeichner, K., and Tabachnick, B. R. (1981). Are the effects of university teacher education washed out by
school experiences? Journal of Teacher Education, 32(3), 7–11.

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 Part 6
Language Instruction
and Assessment
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 25
Primary Language Use in Foreign
Language Classrooms
Jennifer Dailey-O’Cain and Grit Liebscher

In this chapter, we provide an overview of the research on the use of the primary language in
foreign language classrooms. These classrooms include both traditional foreign language classrooms
in primary, secondary, and post-secondary schools and content instruction that is taught in a for-
eign language. The primary language is considered to be the main or common language in the
community, which is often (though certainly not in all cases) the native language of most learners.
Taking into account the contributions of educational researchers, foreign language pedagogy
scholars, and applied sociolinguists, we detail the contributions on a controversy in which one side
has historically regarded the primary language as something that was simply inappropriate for the
foreign language classroom, while the other side tends to regard it as something that could in fact
be beneficial to learning and communication.
Ultimately, however, we feel compelled to argue in favour of the value of allowing the use of
the primary language in foreign language classrooms, on the basis of three sets of findings that
emerge from the existing body of literature on the subject. First, the most reliable research evi-
dence suggests that principled use of the primary language can be a cognitive tool in the learning
of the target language; second, allowing emerging bilinguals to alternate between the language
they are learning and the language they use every day allows them to behave as fluent bilinguals
do naturally around the world; and third, using two languages in the same conversation both
accords more naturally with bilingual identities in general and affords learners a tool that they
can use to construct identities in conversation. After an overview of the findings from these three
areas, we move on to a discussion of the most recent contentious issues among researchers and of
the most common research methodologies in the field, and we conclude with the implications
for education.

Historical Perspectives
The notion that the learner’s primary language is to be avoided in the foreign language classroom
has been persistent throughout the language pedagogy revolutions of the 20th century and
beyond. In the scholarly literature, this notion is more often simply assumed rather than stated
outright—limited to remarks such as Polio and Duff ’s (1994) “using the TL as much as possible
is important” (324) but that has not made its effects on the language pedagogy of the late 20th

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Jennifer Dailey-O’Cain and Grit Liebscher

and early 21st centuries any less profound. This is largely due to the strong influence of this notion
on educational policy, reflected in documents such as the official statement from Canada’s Educa-
tion Foundation of Atlantic Provinces, cited in McMillan and Turnbull (2009), in which it is stated
that “it is essential that [the target language] be the only language of communication in the class-
room” (15). The most extreme version of this notion—the idea that there is no pedagogical or
communicative value at all in the use of the primary language and that the target language needs
to be used for all purposes—has been dubbed the “virtual position” (Macaro 1997).
We can trace the theoretical roots of the virtual position back to two areas of research in sec-
ond language acquisition: first, the work on contrastive analysis in the mid-20th century, which
argued that the bulk of the problems in learning a target language resulted from interference from
the primary language (e.g., Lado 1957), and second, the body of literature on input and interaction
from the 1980s and 1990s (e.g., Krashen 1985; Ellis and He 1999), which showed that the amount
of target language input ultimately has an effect on learners’ target-language development. Toward
the end of the 20th century, this combination of theories paved the way for communicative ped-
agogies that prescribed as little use of the primary language as possible, in the hopes that the end
learning result would be a compartmentalization of the two languages in the learners’ minds in a
kind of coordinate bilingualism, with little to no influence from one language on the other (Cook
2001, 406–408).
It was in the late 20th and the beginning of the 21st century that challenges to the virtual
position began to be issued. Most obviously, the primary language was stated to be simply more
efficient for the explanation of complex notions (Cook 2001; Celik 2003; Ferguson 2003), espe-
cially when the learners’ level of proficiency in the target language was low (Giauque and Ely
1990; Nunan and Lamb 1996; Macaro 1997). If those were the only benefits to using the primary
language in the foreign language classroom, of course, it would have been easy to disregard it as
something done only by lazy teachers and/or learners who are unwilling to put up with a few
inefficiencies in order to communicate exclusively in the target language. However, as will be
discussed in the following section, there is a growing body of evidence that there are many other
benefits to the principled use of the primary language in the foreign language classroom beyond
efficiency when discussing complex notions.

Core Issues and Key Findings

It can be said that the current state of inquiry into primary language use in foreign language
classrooms came about at the intersection of two distinctly different research communities, both
concerned with the confluence of the bilingual and the social: on the one hand, language peda-
gogy scholars interested in sociocultural theory and ecological perspectives, and on the other
hand, sociolinguists interested in conversational code-switching. While there were, of course, a
number of key early works that had already called the virtual position into question by the
mid-to-late 1990s (e.g., Kramsch 1995; Macaro 1997; Antón and DiCamilla 1998), interest bal-
looned around the turn of the 21st century and beyond when a large number of pedagogy
scholars turned to the sociolinguistics literature (and sociolinguists to the literature on pedagogy,
especially sociocultural theory) in order to help explain what they were observing in their class-
rooms. The effect of this meeting of minds was ultimately to link classroom code-switching more
strongly with the kind of code-switching that takes place in bilingual communities. Of course,
researchers still differ on how deep this connection between bilingual and classroom code-switching
is and on what it should imply for classroom pedagogy. However, the notion that language learn-
ers should be seen as aspiring bilinguals (rather than as simply poor imitators of target-language
monolinguals), and should therefore be permitted to behave as bilinguals do, is nearly always

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emphasized in this more recent work (e.g., Moore 2002; Liebscher and Dailey-O’Cain 2004;
Üstünel and Seedhouse 2005; Edstrom 2006; Liang 2006; Littlewood and Yu 2011 de la Campa
and Nassaji 2009; Turnbull and Dailey-O’Cain 2009a; van der Meij and Zhao 2010; Levine 2011;
Majer 2011; DiCamilla and Antón 2012; Oguro 2012; Grasso 2012; Tian and Macaro 2012).
This is a notable point of agreement in such a new and diverse area of inquiry, but it is not the
only one. In fact, as alluded to in the previous section, current researchers in the field of primary
language use in foreign language classrooms are more or less unanimous about at least one point
of pedagogy as well: a rejection of the virtual position that prescribes a complete ban on the pri-
mary language. This stance has come about as a result of a combination of findings from different
corners of the field. First, the use of the primary language has been found to assist cognitively both
in thinking about learning and in learning itself: It better enables learners to think about language
learning in their familiar language of thought (Macaro 2005); it serves as a cognitive tool that helps
negotiate meaning in the target language—for example, through scaffolding (Antón and DiCamilla
1998; Lantolf 2000; Swain and Lapkin 2000); and it facilitates the cognitive process of target lan-
guage intake (Dickson 1992; van Lier 1995; Long 1996; Py 1996; Turnbull 2001).
Second, the use of the primary language in the classroom also allows learners to code-switch
in ways that are natural for bilingual speakers: not only by providing them with a multilingual
model of communication (Blyth 1995; Chavez 2003; Cook 2005; Levine 2005; Levine 2011),
but also by equipping them with a tool that allows them to use multiple languages for a range of
conversational functions that fluent bilinguals use them for (Liebscher and Dailey-O’Cain 2004;
Üstünel and Seedhouse 2005; Dailey-O’Cain and Liebscher 2006; Dailey-O’Cain and Liebscher
2009). Finally, there are also identity-related benefits: Multilingual classrooms allow learners to
adopt identities that take into account both their monolingual pasts and their bilingual futures
(Kramsch 1995; Castellotti and Moore 1997; Moore 2002; Levine 2003; Liang 2006), and when
code-switching is permitted, it can in and of itself be used as a tool in identity construction (Belz
2003; Liebscher and Dailey-O’Cain 2007; Ellwood 2008; Fuller 2008; Fuller 2009; Fuller 2012).
While nearly all researchers agree on their rejection of the virtual position, however, there are still
key areas of disagreement in the literature. These are discussed in the next section.

New Debates
First of all, it is important to note that a uniformly accepted view that the primary language
has a place in the foreign language classroom does not imply a uniformly accepted view of the
precise amount of primary language that should be allowed in such classrooms. In fact, researchers
have proposed two distinct and conflicting alternatives to the virtual position. The first is the
maximal position (e.g., Cook 2001; Turnbull 2001; Turnbull and Arnett 2002; Turnbull and
Dailey-O’Cain 2009b; Oguro 2012), which states that instead of attempting to force the classroom
to be target-language-only, teachers should instead be striving to use (and thereby encourage
learners to use) the most target language possible within the realities of a classroom environment
and the goal of effective communication. The basis for this position is the argument that when
learners primarily or only encounter the target language in the classroom, the teacher is the main
linguistic model for the target language, and it is important that learners be enabled to take
advantage of that resource (Turnbull 2001). Under the maximal position, some classroom
code-switching is seen as being allowable and even necessary—both in order to provide learners
with the cognitive benefits of their primary language and to allow them to communicate as fluent
bilinguals do—but at the same time, teachers should be cautioned that an overuse of the first
language would have the consequence of reducing learners’ exposure to target language input,
and be avoided. Neither ‘maximal’ nor ‘overuse’ are explicitly defined under this model. Instead,

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teachers are simply encouraged to use the target language whenever it is not overtly damaging
to the learning process or the learning environment. Further research is also encouraged to help
researchers and teachers understand more precisely how ‘maximal’ can be defined in terms of
quantity (Turnbull 2001, 537).
The maximal position has been criticized on several grounds, most vehemently by Macaro
(2009). Most importantly, he argues that it is not sufficiently distinct from the virtual position,
because it still states that the ultimate ideal is the use of the target language as often as possible.
Relatedly, he also maintains that to take such a position is to regard the use of the primary lan-
guage as inherently suspect, and as something that necessarily has a negative effect on the ideal
classroom situation, rather than as something that, in fact, might enhance learning more than its
non-use would. He further goes on to criticize the maximal position for being insufficiently
grounded in research, arguing that there are no theoretical underpinnings for a position that
demands that the target language be used “as much as possible” and that it fails to show, for
example, that 85% target language use would always be better than 75% target language use
(Macaro 2009, 38). On the contrary, he argues (in some overlap with the aforementioned three
stances for the rejection of the virtual position) that there are three bodies of research that give
evidence that classroom primary language use is beneficial enough to be wholeheartedly
embraced rather than merely tolerated.
The first of these is cognitive processing theory (e.g., Ellis 2005), which claims that the pri-
mary language is not contained in a conceptual store separate from all subsequent languages, and
that the mental lexicon is not inherently language-specific. The second is sociocultural theory
(e.g., Vygotsky 1986; Antón and DiCamilla 1998), which suggests that private speech that takes
place in the primary language is a key component of learning. The third body of research men-
tioned by Macaro is the work comparing code-switching in foreign language classrooms to
code-switching in bilingual communities (e.g., Liebscher and Dailey-O’Cain 2004), which sug-
gests that the kind of code-switching that is often stigmatized as “falling back on” the primary
language can in fact be found in naturalistic environments as well, among fluent bilinguals, where
it is not considered to have that stigma. The alternative to the maximal position that emerges out
of these critiques is the optimal position (e.g., Macaro 2001; Macaro 2009; Levine 2011; Tian and
Macaro 2012), which states that the reason to allow primary language use in foreign language
classrooms is that using it can actually be more beneficial to target language acquisition and to
the goal of eventual proficiency in the target language than exclusive or near-exclusive use of the
target language would be. According to this position, it is just as important to look at the potential
detrimental effects of not using the primary language as it is to look at the potential detrimental
effects of using it, and principled decisions must be made about when to use each language that
take both sets of considerations into account.
The second ongoing debate concerns the extent to which teacher intervention into learner
code-switching in the classroom is desirable, and if it is desirable, what form it should take. Several
researchers have argued that an important goal for future research is a set of principles that teach-
ers should use in their own code-switching practices. Castellotti and Moore (1997), for example,
argue that teacher code-switching must be deliberate if it is to increase learner proficiency and
bilingualism, and that teachers should decide in advance of a given lesson whether they are going
to use the first language or not. Macaro (2001), in focusing on vocabulary learning, insists that
researchers “need to provide, especially for less experienced teachers, a framework that identifies
when reference to the first language can be a valuable tool and when it is simply used as an easy
option” (545). Finally, Levine (2003) argues that instructors should “seek to formalize the rela-
tionship between the L1 and the target language, in order to create, in essence, bilingual norms
that tend to develop organically in multilingual environments outside the classroom” (355).

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Dailey-O’Cain and Liebscher (2009), on the other hand, demonstrate that learners code-switch
in ways that are not modeled by their teachers, and from this they draw the conclusion that
“envisioning the foreign language classroom as a bilingual community does not entail saddling
the instructor with the task of formally training learners to behave as bilinguals, or even modeling
the conventional code-switching norms found in non-classroom bilingual communities” (Dailey-
O’Cain and Liebscher 2009, 143). They even go so far as to argue that because code-switches are
often interpreted differently, depending on whether the person doing the code-switching is the
teacher or a learner, teachers modeling or explicitly teaching ideal learner code-switching will
have limited success, and a similar concern is also voiced by Chavez (2003), who questions
whether intentional influence on learner code-switching practices is either possible or desirable.
As an alternative to deliberate teacher-driven intervention into classroom code-switching
practices, then, Dailey-O’Cain and Liebscher (2009) argue that a distinction between teacher
code-switching and learner code-switching is essential, with different behaviours desirable for
each. For learners, they propose a laissez-faire approach in which teachers do not intervene beyond
“[giving] students permission to use both languages during classroom interaction,” (143) arguing
that learners will then automatically “tend to use them in ways that promote both second-
language learning and bilingual language behaviour” (143). For teachers, then, they argue that it
is not necessary to explicitly model code-switching practices, which affords them the possibility of
“maximizing their own target-language use in the classroom, while at the same time making space
for a bilingual community of practice—and the resulting naturalistic norms of code-switching—
to develop among learners” (143). In response to this proposal, Levine (2011) argues against a
purely laissez-faire approach, on the basis that pedagogy should always be more reflective than
that. He does not, however, argue for the explicit teaching of proper code-switching practices or
even teacher modelling of ideal learner code-switching behaviour. Instead, he argues for a “cur-
ricular architecture based on multiple code use in the language classroom” that involves “system-
atically raising teacher and learner awareness of code choices in conversation, both in and outside of
the classroom, and of using this awareness to foster a multilingual classroom community of practice
that also promotes avid L2 use, and hopefully L2 acquisition” (82–83). This architecture encom-
passes three pedagogical strands, the ultimate goal of which is “resignifying the use of the L1, and the
use of code-switching as conventional classroom language use, toward unmarking the L1 and
toward optimizing L2 use” (83). Levine maintains that this resignifying is “not only possible and
feasible” but that “it may be crucial to the success of classroom L2 learning” (146–147).
While it is certainly possible that these debates may ultimately fail to end in one or the other
of the sides being conclusively proven right, their existence does give rise to several obvious
directions for future research. In all the discussion about whether the maximal position or the
optimal position leads to better target-language learning, studies are conspicuously absent that
compare learning outcomes in classrooms in which the teacher attempts to “maximize” the target
language to classrooms in which the teacher instead attempts to use the primary language in the
principled ways governed by “optimal” use. The arguments of both sides of that debate would
be enriched by such a contrast. Similarly, in order to understand whether a laissez-faire approach
to primary language use by learners or an explicit curricular architecture based on multiple code
use in the language classroom lead to better learning outcomes, a similar comparative investiga-
tion is also necessary. In this latter case, it will also be particularly important to take classroom
type and learning aims into account in any such investigation. This is because it may ultimately
be that the laissez-faire approach is more appropriate for advanced content-based classrooms that
focus less on target language learning and more on content learning through the target language
(e.g., Liebscher and Dailey-O’Cain 2004), while an explicit architecture is more appropriate for
earlier stages of language learning (e.g., Levine 2009), but without a comparative investigation of

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learning outcomes of both kinds of pedagogies, it is difficult to make strong arguments in favour
of either approach’s superiority in any sort of classroom. Furthermore, in both of these cases,
studies that make use of experimental and quasi-experimental research designs are ultimately
needed in order to make the case not only that a particular approach is generally beneficial, but
that it actually produces superior learning results to another (cf. Ferguson 2009, 234). The need
for these kinds of studies, among others, is discussed at greater length in the next two sections.

Research Approaches
Although there are any number of research methodologies (and combinations of research meth-
odologies) that have been used in various contributions to the field of primary language use in
foreign language classrooms, this section focuses specifically on the three most common broad
trends within the field in terms of approaches to data collection and analysis. The first of these
is the investigation of attitudes and beliefs by teachers and/or students about primary language
use in the foreign language classroom, whether through survey techniques or through interviews
(e.g., Kharma and Hajjaj 1989; Duff and Polio 1990; Macaro 1997; Macmillan and Turnbull
2009; Şimsek 2011; Yavuz 2012). These studies have been carried out using many variations on
the methodology and in many countries and educational contexts, posing different kinds of
questions about perceptions of functions of code-switching and the desirability of banning the
primary language. Interestingly, the three positions represented by teachers and learners alike in
the results of these studies are the same ones that have been found throughout the years in the
academy: the virtual position, the maximal position, and the optimal position. One particularly
interesting innovation in this body of research was made by Wang and Kirkpatrick (2012), who
measured not only the attitudes of teachers toward primary language use in the foreign language
classroom in China, but also the direct influence on those attitudes from a very strict official policy
governing language use in foreign language classrooms. This suggests that the debate may be shaped
not only by pedagogical success, but also by power dynamics and language ideologies.
Another common research methodology involves in-depth qualitative analyses of excerpts
from interactions (either learner-learner or teacher-learner, and either occurring naturally in
classroom discourse or elicited), using some form of discourse analysis. Studies in this tradition
that come from within the field of language pedagogy tend to analyze these interactions in terms
of the pedagogical functions of switching between the target language and the primary language
(e.g., Polio and Duff 1994; Castellotti 1997; Macaro 2001; Rolin-Ianziti and Brownlie 2002),
often from the point of view of sociocultural theory (e.g., Antón and DiCamilla 1998; Swain and
Lapkin 2000; Thoms et al. 2005; Majer 2011). By contrast, while studies in this vein coming from
within a sociolinguistic tradition often have similar goals, their methods of analysis are often
influenced by conversation analysis and/or interactional sociolinguistics and, perhaps as a result,
usually deal more with communicative functions of code-switching rather than strictly pedagog-
ical ones (e.g., Liebscher and Dailey-O’Cain 2004; Üstünel and Seedhouse 2005; Unamuno 2008;
Fuller 2009; Fuller 2012). A few studies combine both sociocultural and interactional forms of
analysis in a hybrid approach (Dailey-O’Cain and Liebscher 2009; Levine 2009). Kibler (2010)
and DiCamilla and Antón (2012) have also used this combination of approaches in an inno-
vative way in investigating how the primary language can be used to negotiate meaning during
target-language writing tasks.
As mentioned earlier, the kinds of experimental and quasi-experimental approaches that
employ pretests and posttests to measure variation in learning under different pedagogical condi-
tions, such as permission to code-switch versus a target-language-only environment (e.g., Macaro
2009; Macaro et al. 2009; Turnbull et al. 2011; Tian and Macaro 2012), are still in their infancy

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in this field. Of the few studies in this vein that have already been done, some have focused on
degrees of success in vocabulary learning (Macaro 2009; Macaro et al. 2009; Tian and Macaro
2012), while others have focused on an increase in target-language complexity to measure learn-
ing (Turnbull et al. 2011). The early results of these studies have been promising, demonstrating
quantitative evidence for beneficial effects of a learning environment in which the use of the
primary language is permitted and used strategically, and/or for the notion that code-switching
promotes learning. However, there is much work yet to be done in this corner of the field. While
the discourse-analytic studies mentioned earlier have certainly gone a long way toward pointing
us toward specific kinds of instances in which the pedagogical and communicative functions of
classroom code-switching are evident and in which the primary language in the foreign language
classroom can be shown to be useful or beneficial, it is only experimental research designs that
compare different classrooms that can ever show whether permitting code-switching is more
beneficial than not permitting it, or whether certain pedagogical innovations are more effective
than others. Ferguson (2009) also argues that it is this experimental area of the field in which
there is the greatest need for further attention on the basis that controlled, experimental designs
for data collection and quantitative forms of analysis are able to produce broadly-based general-
izations that are likely to be more convincing to policymakers—including those educators who
hold administrative positions within universities or schools—in the long term. To this end, more
kinds of studies in different types of classrooms and with a broader focus on the acquisition of
different parts of the language than just vocabulary will ultimately be necessary, as well as a focus
on how bilinguals emerge over time. It is important to note, however, that such studies will need
to take care to control for the variables they target, and this can be fraught with methodological
problems in a classroom context.
In addition to an increased focus on experimental approaches, ongoing qualitative and mixed-
method studies (including ones that make use of a longitudinal approach not yet seen in this
field’s existing body of research) would provide further insights into the use of “the” primary
language, which, in practice, may encompass more than one language for individual students.
This multiplicity of language resources has not been explored to the extent that it could be,
despite an emerging conceptualization of the shift toward multilingualism and multicompetence
(Franceschini 2011). In particular, while the pedagogical and communicative functions of the
primary language in the foreign language classroom have certainly been described and analyzed
within discourse analytical approaches, the next step in qualitative research should be to link this
analysis with research methods that explore conceptualizations of multilingualism and multicom-
petence, both from the perspective of learners as well as teachers and policymakers. To this end,
linking actual primary language use in classrooms with teacher cognition research (e.g., Borg
2006) would be a fruitful endeavour.

Implications for Education

As the literature reviewed in this chapter has shown, while there are certainly still open debates
among scholars of primary language use in foreign language classrooms, the evidence against the
virtual position is so overwhelming that it is difficult to find proponents of it among researchers.
It is only in the area of policy that the debate over the merits of the virtual position still rages on;
in fact, the remaining opponents of code-switching in the classroom all come from official
policies for target language use in the classroom, which have as strong an influence as ever in
educational policy throughout much of the world (Swain and Lapkin 2005 and McMillan and
Turnbull 2009 for Canada; Rohsenow 2004 and Wang and Kirkpatrick 2012 for China; Probyn
2009 for South Africa; and Raschka et al. 2009 for Taiwan, just to name a few examples). It is

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not immediately obvious why this is the case, though four possible explanations come to mind:
(1) policymakers may be unaware or only peripherally aware of the findings that have come out
of the academy because most researchers have tended to publish their admonitions of existing
policies in academic publications rather than intervening in policy directly; (2) policymakers
are, in fact, aware of the research findings but reject them, perhaps because of the limited quan-
titative evidence based on controlled experiments (Ferguson 2009); (3) policymakers are aware
of the research findings and accept them, but are reluctant to make changes due to logistical or
funding concerns, or are unsure which changes to make because of the variation in researchers’
suggestions; or (4) the monolingual bias is still so persuasive that it is a hindrance to a rethinking
of language teaching and learning as a multilingual endeavour. Regardless of which of these
reasons proves to be the ultimate explanation, however, improved communication between research-
ers and policymakers would go a long way toward introducing policymakers to our results and
convincing them of their merits. It should also be said that the onus is ultimately on the research-
ers rather than on policymakers to make these kinds of overtures, since it is the researchers who
are demanding a change from the status quo. We now know a great deal about the pedagogical
and communicative benefits of primary language use in foreign language classrooms; it is time to
make a greater effort to speak with policymakers about these benefits in their language and on
their turf.
Once those dialogues have begun on a broader scale, however, researchers already have a good
start on what kinds of policy changes to suggest, because some important strides have been made in
recent years in terms of potential curricular improvements. Oguro (2012) proposes a Scaffolded
Teacher Speech Model, which applies the sociocultural theory notion of scaffolding (strategies
used by a teacher or advanced learner that support novice learners in their learning by initially
limiting complexity and then gradually removing those limits as acquisition occurs) to the issue
of how teachers might maximize their use of the target language in the classroom. When used
as a critical component of maximizing target language use, Oguro argues, the primary language
can serve to amplify complex target language messages and aid in the task of comprehending
them. Blyth (2009) also proposes (and reports on the results of) a new model for course materials
that involves featuring not just monolingual speakers of the target language, but bilinguals and
language learners as well, and also incorporates strategies for language learners to notice differ-
ences in language use among different kinds of speakers. Finally, while Levine’s (2011) innovative
curricular suggestions have been discussed briefly above, he also goes beyond them to propose
specific classroom activities that would meet their goals: overtly comparing real-world commu-
nication with language classroom communication, identifying and acquiring phrases that help
learners communicate in the target language, and an exercise identifying the functions and mean-
ings of code-switching or not switching codes, just to name a few. The common goal among all
of these strands is strategies instruction, which entails explicitly identifying the practices of suc-
cessful learners and then training learners in these practices.
Finally, Butzkamm and Caldwell (2009) propose many techniques for systematic classroom
use of the primary language, in an approach that they term the Bilingual Reform in foreign
language education. One of these is the “sandwich technique,” in which a complex utterance in
the target language by the teacher both begins and ends with the same utterance in the primary
language, in order to facilitate comprehension while still exposing the learner to what the utter-
ance sounds like in the target language. A second technique is “mirroring,” in which the teacher
not only translates the target-language utterance into idiomatic use of the primary language, but
also literally, word-for-word, in order to make the target-language structure of the utterance more
transparent. This latter technique has the added benefit of what the authors refer to as “dual
comprehension,” enabling learners to understand the utterance both functionally and structurally,

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making it far easier for them to use the structure in their own communication in the future.
Although the pedagogical and curricular suggestions proposed by these three researchers come
from different theoretical positions, they are not at all incompatible, and taken together, they are
an excellent start to concrete policy proposals that could ultimately replace the widespread pro-
hibition of primary language use in the foreign language classroom.
While many questions still remain about the best practices in terms of primary language use
in foreign language classrooms, there is surprising unanimity among researchers from different
traditions that a prescribed target-language-only environment is more detrimental than benefi-
cial to learners. It is therefore crucial that the virtual position be laid to rest in policy and in
classroom practice just as it has been laid to rest in academic debate. This will inevitably meet
with resistance in foreign language programs that have invested a great deal of time and effort
into turning the virtual position into official policy, but that only makes it all the more impor-
tant to underscore to skeptical teachers and policymakers that conceiving the foreign language
classroom as a bilingual community of practice entails turning an impossible goal (teaching
learners to behave as target-language monolinguals) into a possible one (teaching learners to
behave as bilinguals). This new goal not only serves the learning of the structures of the target
language and the functions of communicating in the target language than exclusive target
language use far more effectively, but it is also an optimistic goal that serves to encourage and
empower teachers and learners alike.

Further Reading
Antón, M. and DiCamilla, F. J. (1998). Socio-cognitive functions of L1 collaborative interaction in the
L2 classroom. The Modern Language Journal, 83(2), 233–247.
Kramsch, C. (Ed.) (1995). Redefining the Boundaries of Language Study. Boston: Heinle and Heinle.
Levine, G. S. (2011). Code Choice in the Language Classroom. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.
Li Wei and Martin, P. (Eds.) (2009). Special issue on conflicts and tensions in classroom codeswitching.
International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 12(2).
Macaro, E. (1997). Target Language, Collaborative Learning and Autonomy. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
Turnbull, M. and Dailey-O’Cain, J. (Eds.) (2009). First Language Use in Second and Foreign Language Learning.
Bristol: Multilingual Matters.

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 26
Language Assessment in the
Educational Context
Dina Tsagari and Jayanti Banerjee

Introduction
Like the wider field of educational linguistics, language assessment is a transdisciplinary field
that encompasses linguistics, general education, psychology, sociology, economics, and politics.
The development of a language test or assessment does not take place in isolation; it demands
an understanding of the nature of language ability and language use as well as measurement
theory (Bachman 1990, 8). Additionally, the final shape of a language test or other assessment
is influenced by beliefs about language, language learning, and learner psychology as well as
demands from the wider society for certain standards of attainment. In this chapter, we histor-
ically locate language assessment in the field of educational linguistics and outline recent
innovations in the field. We also exemplify corresponding research epistemologies and discuss
their contributions to teaching and learning. Looking particularly at classroom-based assess-
ment, we discuss the importance of enhancing student involvement, incorporating special
language and other needs, and improving teacher literacy in assessment, as ways of improving
good practice in the field.
Throughout the chapter, two terms will be used: testing and assessment. In this chapter we
take assessment to mean “. . . that part of evaluation that includes the collection and analysis of infor-
mation about student learning” (Genesee 2001, 145). Therefore, we see that the primary purpose
of assessment is formative in nature; that is, it is meant to evaluate and understand student
performance in class, identify the specific needs of individual students, tailor instruction to
meet these needs, monitor the effectiveness of instruction, and make decisions about advance-
ment or promotion of individual students to the next level of instruction (see also Brindley
2001). Testing, however, is generally associated with summative measurement procedures,
which are carried out at specified times of a school year when all students are usually tested
on the same content. Furthermore, a test, measuring a sample of language behavior, often takes
the form of a ‘paper-and-pencil’ test or a computerized/computer-adaptive version, as is the
case with a number of high stakes, standardized tests nowadays. Its administration is very
formal, with clear processes and instructions, and under timed conditions. Test results are
either communicated via the teacher orally, through official reports, or appear on the screen
of a computer (Chapelle 2001).

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Dina Tsagari and Jayanti Banerjee

Historical Perspectives
Prior to and during the 1970s, language assessment, particularly in the form of tests, was influ-
enced by structural views of language. In its purest form, this view advocated breaking language
into its constituent parts so that each element could be isolated and taught. Tests in this period
took a psychometric-structuralist approach, focusing on discrete aspects of language knowledge.
For instance, a test item might focus on the test takers’ knowledge of a particular word or their
ability to distinguish sounds in the language (i.e., phonemic discrimination tests). The advantage
of this approach was that results were easily quantifiable. However, it ignored the fact that “cru-
cial properties of a language are lost when its elements are separated” (Oller 1979, 212).
The psycholinguistic-sociolinguistic approach that followed took the view that language is
dynamic and creative, and is used to achieve communicative ends. The language tests during
this period aimed to capture the use of language in communication under controlled condi-
tions. Typical tasks included cloze passages and dictation; these were integrative, global measures
in the sense that they combined the testing of discrete aspects of language knowledge such as
grammar, vocabulary, and discourse and reported the results as a single score. The disadvantage
of the psycholinguistic-sociolinguistic approach was that the tasks were still indirect measures
of language proficiency and were not genuine interactive communication.
Canale and Swain’s (1980) work describing communicative competence helped the field to
take the next big leap forward. They showed how the ability to use language communicatively
involved grammatical knowledge, sociolinguistic competence, and strategic competence. Their
early model has since been developed into a model of communicative language ability “consist-
ing of both knowledge, or competence, and the capacity for implementing, or executing that
competence in appropriate, contextualized communicative language use” (Bachman 1990, 84).
Tests increasingly included sections that elicited contextualized performances, were interactive,
and engaged the test takers in processing realistic discourse.
In the 1990s, the concept of test washback emerged, and there was a growing awareness that
testing is often “the engine that drives learning” (Cowan 1998). It was initially believed that
good tests promoted good teaching and learning (i.e., had good washback) while bad tests pro-
moted unacceptable teaching and impeded learning. It was also believed that tests based on
theories of communicative language ability would lead to better language teaching and learn-
ing. Alderson and Wall (1993) problematized this notion, arguing that a ‘good’ test might still
result in undesirable teaching and learning outcomes. They listed a number of washback
hypotheses, such as ‘tests will have washback on what teachers teach,’ ‘tests will have washback
on how learners learn,’ and ‘a high-stakes test will have more impact than a low-stakes test.’ This
seminal paper resulted in a number of empirical studies, including Cheng, (2005), Wall (2005)
and Tsagari (2009), which showed that many factors (other than the test itself) influence the
nature of test washback. These include teacher ability; teachers’, students’, and material writers’/
publishers’ understandings of the test; the availability of resources; and the general social and
political context.
Washback studies brought the attention of language assessment researchers into the classroom,
but the focus was largely upon standardized tests. In fact, until recently most language assessment
research in the educational context focused, unfortunately in our view, upon large-scale tests. It was
also largely assumed that the principles that are so helpful for standardized testing (such as general-
izability, validity theory, and reliability) would be similarly useful in more interactional educational
settings such as the classroom even though, as we argue later in this chapter, some concepts are not
reasonable goals and might even fly in the face of more important educational aims. This resulted,
as Graue observes, in a situation where teachers were judged to be lacking in assessment skills and

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where “assessment and instruction [were] often conceived as curiously separate in both time and
purpose” (1993, 291).
In recent years, therefore, there has been increased attention on classroom-based assessment as
a different paradigm. Classroom-based assessment draws either implicitly or explicitly from the
interplay between teaching, learning, and assessment—be it in the form of ‘dynamic’ (Antón 2012;
Poehner 2008), ‘formative’ (e.g., Black and Wiliam 2009; Broadfoot and Black 2004; Rea-Dickins
and Gardner 2000), ‘diagnostic’ (Alderson 2005; Jang 2012), or assessment feedback (Hattie and
Timperley 2007; Cheng and Wang 2007). Overall, effective classroom-based assessment practices
involve, according to Turner (2012, 65), “strategies by teachers to plan and carry out the collection
of multiple types of information concerning student language use, to analyze and interpret it, to
provide feedback, and to use this information to help make decisions to enhance teaching and
learning.” Such types of information are usually embedded in classroom activities and come in a
variety of guises. They can be on-the-way, formative assessments such as informal quizzes or exer-
cises, presentations, journals, conferences, observations or recitation, or have a more summative
purpose, such as a collection of work in a portfolio, a project, or a standardized test (see also
Rea-Dickins 2008). However, it should be noted that the recent interest in classroom-based assess-
ment is not intended to dismiss traditional educational measurement or large-scale tests. Rather it
is an acknowledgment that educational assessment straddles two paradigms: the ‘scientific’ para-
digm, in which standardized assessments are used to arrive at easily interpretable and comparable
information about individual students, and the ‘social-constructivist’ paradigm, in which assess-
ment supports and is a productive part of teaching and learning. The remaining concern, however,
is that standardized assessment is still privileged over the more contextualized assessment engaged
in by teachers. One of the dangers of this imbalance is that the curriculum narrows to cover only
what is tested. Of greater concern is the potential effect that this imbalance has upon the position
of teachers in the assessment process: Their professional judgment tends to be subordinated to the
results of large-scale tests.

Core Issues and Key Findings

Four basic issues will be discussed in this section—namely, validity, reliability, fairness, and test
use—as they are the cornerstone of quality in language testing and assessment.

Validity, Reliability, and Fairness

Test fairness is freedom from bias; assessments should not disadvantage groups of test takers on
any basis other than a lack of the knowledge or skills being assessed. In standardized tests, it is com-
mon practice to assure test fairness first through a rigorous item review process that includes
explicit attention to fairness and bias principles (Ackerman 2011) and second by examining items for
bias using differential item functioning (DIF). This statistical investigation of response patterns
explores the possibility that an item or group of items have disadvantaged test takers on the basis
of age, gender, cultural background, or first language (Banerjee and Papageorgiou 2011).
Reliability refers to the consistency of the measurement. Ideally, a language test (be it stand-
ardized or customized for a small group of learners) should afford the same result for a test taker
each time she or he is assessed. It is often presented as a corollary of fairness for it protects the
student from the subjectivity (and possible bias) of the teacher.
Validity subsumes both reliability and fairness. The validity of a test or an assessment is
grounded in the soundness of the interpretations that are made of the test scores or performances.
Traditionally, the proposed interpretation relates to the construct that the test intends to measure

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(AERA, APA, and NCME 1999, 9). In the case of language proficiency, this would include lan-
guage knowledge (such as morphosyntax) and communicative competence (such as an under-
standing of implicature). However, defining the construct of a language assessment is a complex
enterprise and arguably “no agreement exists concerning a single best way to define constructs
of language proficiency to serve as a defensible basis for score interpretation” (Chapelle, Enright,
and Jamieson 2010, 4). As a result, many language testing researchers and language test developers
are turning to Kane’s (2006) argument-based approach to test validation. This involves laying out
the proposed score interpretations as a series of claims and then amassing the evidence to support
those claims. Types of evidence include proof that the test scores are consistent, the relationship
of the test scores to other measures of student ability (such as teacher judgments, which are
informed by formative classroom-based assessments, including the observation of student perfor-
mance in class and more structured activities like short quizzes, exercises, and journals), as well as
detailed analyses of the processes that students engage in to complete the tasks (cf. Green 1998).
Validation is ongoing; new evidence should be gathered continuously to maintain and support
the proposed interpretation of the scores.
It is generally argued (as we have in the previous paragraph) that an assessment cannot be
valid—the inferences drawn cannot be sound—if the assessment does not yield consistent results.
This seems a reasonable claim until one considers deeply the aims of educational assessment, the
different contexts in which it takes place, and the different purposes for which students are assessed
(Moss, Girard, and Haniford 2006). Indeed, the focus of validity theory on large-scale assessment
has unhelpfully narrowed its scope in a number of ways, not least the emphasis on measurement
consistency in all assessment contexts.
Moss (1994) argues for reliability to be an optional goal. Too much attention to reliability
constrains us from exploring and capturing the range of students’ capabilities. Activities such as
portfolio assessment and self-assessment are not interchangeable but, like snapshots taken with a
camera, provide different insights into student learning and progress. Using the case study of a
student named ‘Cory,’ Moss shows how a contextualized approach to assessment, that takes into
account the product of class assignments as well as standardized measures, provides a more accurate
insight into student learning and skills. Validity theory must expand to accommodate and support
the contextualized nature of assessment in a teaching and learning setting (Moss et al. 2006) so
that a validity argument can be made for classroom assessments (as a complement to or in place of
standardized assessments). However, as we point out in the “New Debates” section of this chapter,
more research is needed to understand the nature of the various methods used for classroom assess-
ment purposes and the connections between assessment feedback and learning.

Test Use
In a keynote address at the Language Testing Research Colloquium in 2003, Patricia Broadfoot
spoke about the policy initiatives worldwide to promote student achievement and to raise stand-
ards by introducing standardized assessments that force teachers to achieve pre-determined results
(Broadfoot 2005). In England and Wales, statutory assessments have been added to a system that
already had two major exam periods when students were 16 and 18 years old (the General Cer-
tificate of Secondary Education, GCSE, and the Advanced Level examinations, respectively).
Nowadays students are also tested at age 5 and then at three key stages (ages 7, 11, and 14). In the
United States, the No Child Left Behind Act (2001; also known as NCLB, or P.L. 107–110)
mandates the testing of students each year between grades 3 and 8 (ages 9–13) plus one grade in
high school (ages 15–18). Both policy initiatives have the aim of giving all children access to a
minimum standard of education and learning opportunities. Schools have annual progress targets

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and those whose students consistently fail to exhibit adequate yearly progress are put in admin-
istration to help them improve.
On the face of it, these initiatives were designed to ensure that children had equal access to
resources and received the attention they needed. Unfortunately, the policies were managed entirely
through the use of test results. Broadfoot (2005) describes the extraordinary pressure this places on
children. Ravitch (2010) links this to rising dropout rates, especially among African American and
Hispanic students. Chalhoub-Deville and Deville (2008) weigh up the effects of the NCLB legis-
lation upon English Language Learners (ELLs). They call the goals overly optimistic and, by impli-
cation, bound for disappointment. For reasons of expense, item types tend to be limited to
multiple-choice; open-response items that might lend themselves better to eliciting higher-order
skills are more expensive and, therefore, less common. This means that the content covered by the
tests is narrowed.
Menken (2009) also points out that ELLs must take the same tests of academic content as
English L1 children. She argues that this, in effect, makes content tests into language tests for
ELLs. Menken’s concern (2009, 105) is that this undermines the Bilingual Education Act, return-
ing language to a source of educational inequity. Even though accommodations such as extended
time, test translations, and the use of bilingual dictionaries can be offered, Menken feels that “most
of those currently being used fail to reduce the achievement gap between native-English speakers
and ELLs” (2009, 107). This situation is further complicated by current research that shows how
intertwined language and content are. Kieffer, Lesaux, Rivera, and Francis (2009) evaluate the
effect and effectiveness of accommodations for ELLs by conducting a meta-analysis of 11 studies.
They find little evidence that the accommodations improved the performance of ELLs. They
suggest that the “differences in performance between native English speakers and ELLs may be
more because of variation in the necessary academic language skills required by content area
assessments” (2009, 1188). This view is confirmed by Llosa and Avenia-Tapper (2013), who argue
that ELLs need to be able to use certain (sometimes complex) language constructions in order to
talk about the content that they know. In their review of research looking at the language of
science textbooks and talk in science classrooms, they find that all students (including ELLs) need
to be able to argue from evidence, use passive constructions, and other complex language con-
structions. More work is needed in this area; we need to better understand what language ELLs
need in order to both learn and show their learning of academic content (see also Schleppegrell
2012). And since the research to date has not drilled down to the grades in which the need for
each language construction emerges, we need to understand better exactly when that language
is needed.
Despite the complex nature of these issues, however, we do not believe that the practice of
testing is the problem. Instead, we would argue that it is the way that testing is implemented—
such as the decision to use standardized tests instead of classroom-based assessment and also the
ineffective coordination among standards, curricula, and assessment. As Chalhoub-Deville and
Deville (2008) point out, decisions about a child’s readiness at each stage of their education should
be made individually and not for the group as a whole. This is usually best achieved by giving
teachers and schools the autonomy to make decisions in the interests of their students rather than
by applying blanket policies (however well-intentioned).

Research Approaches
The deeply situated nature of educational assessment has resulted in the use of research approaches
such as case studies, classroom observation, and interviews that allow for context-rich data col-
lection. Case studies allow researchers to pay attention to contextual details in the analysis of a

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small number of events or people. This can result, as Stake points out, in the proliferation of
information, “more to pay attention to rather than less” (1978, 7). Stake’s comment is open to a
pejorative interpretation and risks us losing the very aim of this expansion, which is to add to and
improve our understanding of the issues at hand. This is certainly the case in Moss (1994). She
uses a case study of a single student to contrast the restricted perspective of a standardized instru-
ment with the more complex picture of the student’s achievements and abilities that was built up
by combining evidence from a variety of learning products. Classroom observations have also
been used as a research-gathering tool in order to gain a clearer picture of the teaching and
assessment practices used in the classroom. Cohen, Manion and Morrison (2000, 305) argue that
observations can “discover things that participants might not freely talk about in interview situ-
ations, move beyond perception-based data and access personal knowledge.” Non-participant
observations have generally been preferred in the field, especially in analyzing classroom dis-
course, since active participation in the lesson might influence the reactions of teachers and
learners and, therefore, affect the accuracy of the data collected (Tsagari 2012). However, there is
also scope for participant observation where, rather than attempting to maintain objectivity and
neutrality, the observers try to gather data through emic perspectives and interaction with their
participants.
It is also possible to gather rich data using standardized interview techniques such as the rep-
ertory grid procedure. This procedure is based on personal construct theory (Kelly 2003), which
holds that people have construct systems in order to process and organize information. These
construct systems are open to change as new and possibly contradictory information comes in.
Our constructs influence our perceptions, are not always internally consistent, but represent the
truth as we see it. Access to teachers’ personal constructs can be extremely useful in understanding
their assessment practices. Leung and Teasdale (1997) use the repertory grid technique to study
how teachers use the English National Curriculum. They began by video-recording both English
as a mother tongue (EMT) and English as an additional language (EAL) students in language
classrooms. This footage was edited into 12 performances—all of seven-year olds (Key Stage 1 in
the English National Curriculum). The performances were then randomly grouped into sets of
three performances and teachers were asked multiple times to compare and contrast the perfor-
mances. Each time they were asked how two of the performances were similar to each other and
different from the third. This elicited the teachers’ assessment constructs. Leung and Teasdale
(1997) used this information to develop a rating sheet with each of the constructs; the teachers
then viewed each performance again, gave it a rating (0–6) on each construct, and also indicated
how usable the construct was (0–2). The ratings were analyzed using cluster analysis to understand
better how the different variables (constructs) coincide and are related. The ratings were also ana-
lyzed using logistic regression to see if the ratings predicted whether the student was EMT or EAL.
The results of this work were interesting because even though teachers were able to award high
scores for accent and fluency to EAL students (constructs that clustered with the construct ‘native-
speaker-like’), the ratings overall assessed the EMT students higher than the EAL students. More
than this, the EMT students typically scored ‘average for Year 2’ or higher on each criterion while
few of the EAL students did so. Leung and Teasdale (1997) found that the construct of ‘native-
speaker like’ influenced the ratings in such a way that disadvantaged the EAL students.
Though there is always scope for large-scale analyses of test data, and such analyses are com-
monplace when school districts or states wish to evaluate the progress of students in different
schools, different grade levels, or across time, in this section we have shown that the majority of
research approaches in educational assessment highlight the individual. The aim of context-rich
data collection methods is to better understand the survey data and provide insights that might
otherwise be lost in broad-stroke summaries.

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New Debates
Whatever the format, length, or purpose of the assessment, language teachers and other education
professionals use those assessments to gather information about what the students can and cannot
do, what they need more practice in, and how well they have mastered a particular aspect of the
curriculum. Teachers interpret students’ performances in order to make decisions about their
learning (and to inform what is taught in subsequent lessons). It is therefore important that lan-
guage assessment supports teachers in their decision-making by undertaking further research in
a number of directions as suggested below.

Classroom-Based Assessment
Classroom-based assessment has grown in a relatively short period, and a small number of collo-
quia (e.g., EALTA-CBLA SIG Symposia), edited volumes (e.g., Tsagari and Csépes 2011), and
research papers (e.g., Hill and McNamara 2012) have addressed a range of classroom-based assess-
ment concerns and challenges. These illustrate not only the growth of interest in how assessment
is enacted in language classrooms but also broaden the construct of assessment that recognizes the
socially situated nature of assessment and accept the role of assessment as a pedagogic tool. In
these studies, we also observe a range of methodological tools, including questionnaire surveys
administered to teachers and students and interviews with teachers, as well as classroom observa-
tions and the adaptation of interventionist action research approaches. Through these, we hope
that the field will gain a clear definition of classroom-based assessment—for example, understand-
ing the characteristics of assessment methods used for classroom-based purposes, the nature of
assessment feedback that can lead to enhanced learning, how learners may be engaged in language
learning through pedagogically-oriented assessment approaches, and how classroom-based assess-
ment can be researched.

Assessment Literacy
The field of language testing and assessment is beginning to see the importance of classroom
learning contexts and the teacher factor in providing information to help inform teaching and
learning, as well. Indeed, teachers deal with assessment procedures, responsibilities, and duties in
their professional life on a daily basis, ranging from setting, designing, and marking tests to com-
municating testing and other assessment results. Teachers also develop or adapt scoring schemes
for their institution, region, or country. In many contexts, teachers are increasingly faced with
external testing procedures—for example, school-leaving examinations and international tests
fulfill a consultative role, advising learners on the choice of external proficiency tests or offer
exam-preparation courses. Furthermore, new developments in foreign language teaching require
new assessment competencies of teachers. For example, the European Language Portfolio
(Schneider and Lenz 2001) highlights self-assessment as a supplement to teacher assessment. Peer
assessment has also been added to the pedagogic agenda of the innovative language teacher in
many educational systems. These developments call for new skills to be acquired by teachers (see
also Edelenbos and Kubanek-German 2004).
Recently, teachers’ competence in LTA has come to the forefront (Fulcher 2012; Hasselgreen,
Carlsen, and Helness 2004; Inbar-Lourie and Donitsa-Schmidt 2009; Yin 2010; Inbar-Lourie
2013; Vogt and Tsagari forthcoming). Researchers have either investigated the preparedness and
awareness of teachers to work with current conceptualizations of assessment or illustrate how
teacher understandings of classroom assessment have been developed through specific interven-
tions. These studies also attest to the urgent and largely unrecognized need in many policy

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contexts for ‘teacher learning’ and professional development opportunities leading to the strength-
ening of teacher assessment capacities. However, we still know little about the ways in which
language teachers cope with these new demands or whether they possess the new competencies
required of them in the first place or whether and to what extent teachers can be or are pre-
pared for these new challenges. Also, we know little about how language teachers create their
assessment instruments for monitoring, recording, and assessing learners’ progress and achieve-
ment in the language classroom. We also know little about how teachers’ day-to-day assessment
decisions and practices are influenced by assessment policies, the tensions created by those
policies, and teachers’ assessment training needs. In other words, we know little about the status
quo of teachers’ ‘assessment literacy’ (cf. Stiggins 1991; Walters 2010). Further research is
needed to define more precisely what is meant by ‘assessment literacy’ and how teachers can
be supported to develop their professional understanding and skills to promote student learn-
ing (e.g., assessment for learning rather than assessment of learning; the Assessment Reform
Group; Black et al. 2003).

Learner Involvement in Assessment

Learners are given a prominent place in language assessment, as they are considered ‘important
stakeholders’ (Erickson and Gustafsson 2005). Actually, good practice in the field recommends
that students’ views of the assessment procedures should be taken into account because they
contribute valuable insights into the development and validation of assessment instruments and
procedures (Cheng and DeLuca 2011; Xie 2011). Sharing assessment criteria and procedures
with students is also said to facilitate learning, student participation, and metacognition, as well
as enhance motivation (Anderson 2012; Frey 2012). Assessment methods such as self- and
peer-assessment, for example, are tools that can strengthen student involvement (Black 2009;
Falchikov 2003; Finch 2007; Stiggins 2001). Students’ views of assessment, in particular, are
important variables that influence their effort, efficacy, performance, and attitudes towards the sub-
ject matter and, importantly, their learning (Dorman, Fisher, and Waldrip 2006; Van de Watering,
Gijbels, Dochy, and Van der Rijt 2008).
Student involvement in assessment can also provide teachers with information about instruc-
tion (Carr 2002; Ekbatani and Pierson 2000). Teachers can thus gain insights into areas that seem
problematic during instruction (Wenden 1998); develop habits of reflection and self-evaluation;
record progress in preparation, implementation and evaluation; and yield results derived through
consensus (Williams 2011).
However, despite students’ centrality in language assessment, little empirical evidence exists that
can show the extent to which students’ attitudes and perceptions of assessment are indeed taken
into consideration or whether students’ involvement in assessment processes is active (Gijbels and
Dochy 2006; Sambell, McDowell, and Brown 1997; Struyven, Dochy and Janssens 2002).
Research has mainly focused on aspects such as students’ language attitudes and their impact on
language learning (Lee 2001;Yang and Lau 2003), the influence of language assessment on teachers
and teaching methods (Cheng 2005; Wall 2005), and teachers’ practices and perceptions towards
LTA (Cheng, Rogers, and Hu 2004; Tsagari 2011).

Assessing Language Learners With Special Needs

The numbers of children diagnosed with specific learning differences (SpLD; e.g., dyslexia, dyspraxia,
dyscalculia, Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder) as well as those with other disabilities
like visual, hearing, or physical impairments, is steadily increasing today; so is the number of

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students enrolled in special education. This situation, combined with greater awareness of indi-
vidual human rights, has led to an increased demand for appropriate teaching and testing and
assessment provision. This is of particular concern to second or foreign language test providers
(Taylor 2012; Abedi 2012) and teachers (Kormos and Smith 2012; Kormos and Kontra 2008;
Nijakowska 2010) who are very often faced with the challenge of having to depart from the
established testing procedures and alter their assessment protocols, administration, and/or con-
tent in order to accommodate the special needs of second language learners (SLLs) with
disabilities.
In this context, future research should discuss the theoretical, ethical and practical considera-
tions involved in the assessment of such populations. Researchers need to explore the theoretical
models and research findings that better identify the language and special needs of SLLs with
SpLD and other disabilities and evaluate the effectiveness of accommodation practices employed
so far. Studies of both high stakes tests and classroom-based assessments that are related to the
special needs of SLLs should also be conducted by professionals and researchers working in the
areas of psychology; special education; and second/foreign language teaching, testing and assess-
ment. Studies of both cross-sectional and longitudinal nature should be encouraged as well as
studies conducted with young and adult SpLD and other disabilities in either high or low stakes
environments (see Tsagari and Spanoudis 2013).

Implications for Education

Given the unprecedented expansion of language assessment during the 21st century, there
has been an increasing need for the profession to meet the changing needs of teachers,
students, and other stakeholders. For example, the notion of assessment literacy, the “. . .
knowledge and understanding of the principles and practice of assessment” (Taylor 2009, 25),
is considered an important aspect of the professionalism of language teachers, which fos-
ters teachers’ empowerment and autonomy. Language teachers with a solid background in
assessment are well equipped to integrate assessment with instruction and use appropriate
forms of teaching leading to enhanced learning (Coombe, Al-Mamly, and Troudi 2009;
Inbar-Lourie 2008; Malone 2008). However, despite the importance placed on the ‘assess-
ment literacy’ of language teachers in the international literature, the area is still relatively
under-researched.
If educators, particularly those in teacher training language programs, are to assist teachers to
use their assessment time effectively, more must be learned and done about meeting teachers’
training needs. The sheer number of language teachers around the globe, as well as the central
role that assessment plays in teaching and learning, offers room for further investigation. Future
research needs to present findings of large-scale research surveys conducted in various educational
contexts aiming at investigating language teachers’ assessment literacy in terms of teachers’ prac-
tices and training needs, identifying any possible intervening factors that might have an influence
on teachers’ assessments. It would, therefore, be important to develop understandings from holis-
tic perspectives that recognize and promote understandings of and interactions between the
nature of language, second language learning, and assessment.
It is also important for the field to reconfigure assessment to promote productive student
involvement in meeting learners’ and teachers’ needs; students and teachers should collaboratively
design effective assessment procedures and use the results from well-designed assessments to
improve learning. Students need to become active participants and decide what is of importance
to them and how they can reach their goals (Clark 2006; Sambell, McDowell, and Brown 1997).
We, therefore, propose that an assessment culture of collaboration can be established that will

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eventually lead to increased metacognitive awareness of students’ learning and engagement in a

critical but healthy and effective assessment environment that can result in greater improvement
in language learning (Carless 2011).
Actually, the notion of collaboration is crucial in language testing and assessment and is con-
sidered to be as important as validity and reliability, providing an important prerequisite for
responsibility and respect for students, thereby contributing to fairness. The EALTA Guidelines
for Good Practice in Language Testing and Assessment (EALTA 2006) stress the importance of
collaboration among all parties involved in the process of developing instruments, activities, and
programs for testing and assessment. Collaboration is necessary between different contexts and
fields—schools and universities, testing organizations and teachers, test developers and researchers,
testers and test takers. It is also crucial between colleagues with different specializations within
the field of language testing and assessment, be they teachers in classrooms; teacher educators;
policy makers; or test developers and researchers, including content specialists, item writers, and
psychometricians.
We believe that the time is ripe to call for extensive and fruitful collaboration at all levels
of the educational system, and language teaching and testing should be promoted that consid-
ers both the realities and characteristics of educational contexts. Such collaboration should
focus on different stakeholders, both in test development, administration, and evaluation and
in the design and use of formative assessment procedures in the classroom (see Tsagari and
Csépes 2012).

Further Reading
Hill, K., and McNamara, T. (2012). Developing a comprehensive, empirically based research framework for
classroom-based assessment. Language Testing, 29(3), 395–420.
Moss, P. A., Girard, B. J., and Haniford, L. C. (2006). Validity in educational assessment. Review of Research in
Education, 30, 109–162.
O’Malley, M., and Valdez Pierce, L. (1996). Authentic assessment for English language learners. New York:
Addison-Wesley.
Shepard, L. (2000). The role of assessment in a learning culture. Educational Researcher, 29(7), 4–14.

References
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Ackerman, K. (2011). Avoiding Construct-Irrelevant Variance or the Need for Sensitivity Guidelines During Item
Development. Paper presented at the 8th Annual Conference of EALTA, Siena, Italy, May 2011.
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Alderson, J. C., and Wall, D. (1993). Does Washback Exist? Applied Linguistics, 14(2), 115–129.
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 27
Analyzing Classroom
Language in CLIL
Do Coyle

The term classroom discourse labels a real world event of immense complexity. Whether one expe-
riences it as a live observer, or watches or listens to recordings, or studies transcripts, one is invar-
iably overwhelmed by the multiplicity of levels of action and meaning that are present
(Dalton-Puffer 2007, 15).

Introduction
Classroom language in any setting where a foreign, second, indigenous, or additional language is
used is open to wide interpretation and debate. The nature of the language used by both the
teacher and the learners is highly complex, depending on the cultural context, the goals, and the
projected outcomes of the learning. It also depends on the teachers’ values and belief systems;
linguistic and cultural background and skills; and the professional development, learning, and
experiences in which individuals engage. Characterized by tensions among theories, pedagogies,
and practices, the concept of classroom language in Content and Language Integrated Learning
(CLIL) has been influenced by diverse, interconnected, yet separate developments, including lan-
guage learning in foreign language classrooms (MFL, TEFL, and TESOL), language learning in
immersion settings, first language subject learning, and deeper understanding of literacies in both
first and other languages. Before considering these influences in more detail, a historical overview
will situate classroom language in CLIL contexts and provide the reader with a sense of how and
why current challenges have evolved.

Content and Language Integrated Learning

as an Evolving Phenomenon
During the first decade of the 21st century, CLIL became an established phenomenon in the field
of education (Eurydice 2006, 2). Although the principles of being educated through an alterna-
tive language have been established for centuries (Dalton-Puffer 2007), CLIL focuses on the
integration of content learning and language learning. Since its early European pioneering phase
in the 1990s, when CLIL was perceived as an important contributor to the European Commis-
sion’s Language Policy, (ref. CLIL/EMILE–The European Dimension: Actions, Trends and Foresight

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Potential, Marsh 2002), the concept of integrating language learning and subject learning has
been the attention of two ‘curiously divided’ groups (Dalton-Puffer 2007, 3)—that is, policy
makers and practitioners on a European and, more recently, a global stage. Defined as a dual
focused educational approach in which an additional language is used for the learning and teach-
ing of both content and language (Coyle et al. 2010, 1) the interpretation and enactment of CLIL
takes on many different forms according to the contexts where it is realized and the variables
which impact. As Baetens-Beardsmore (1993, 39) notes ‘there is no single blueprint of content
and language integration’.
Lasagabaster and Sierra (2010) and Llinares, Morton, and Whittaker (2012) usefully distin-
guish CLIL from existing bilingual models, highlighting conceptual and contextual variants, such
as length of exposure to the language, the linguistic level of learners, content as a subject discipline
or as thematic interest, and the extent to which a CLIL program is more content-oriented or
language-oriented.
Moreover, a rapidly growing practitioner-led movement of teaching subject or thematic stud-
ies through a language which is not the learners’ first has tended to focus on an additional Euro-
pean Language as the vehicular language—usually English—with two major consequences. First,
there was a plethora of small-scale classroom pilot studies by CLIL teachers to experiment with
different approaches to language and subject learning in an attempt to demonstrate that neither
the language nor the subject would ‘fall behind’—yet often without an articulated theoretical
foundation. Second, CLIL research agendas were fractured, implicating a range of different per-
spectives from applied linguistics and educational theories drawing on diverse fields such as
second language acquisition and language learning, cognitive processing and meaning making or
concept formation, functional linguistics, neurosciences, and discourse theories. The theoretical
basis for CLIL had not yet evolved; instead it used an eclectic selection of findings from research
in related settings, usually from Canadian immersion classrooms and Second Language Acquisi-
tion studies, to justify practices rather than problematize integrated learning—in some senses, a
necessary step in an organic process.
During the last three decades, as English increasingly became the CLIL vehicular language,
the notion of learning a subject and language simultaneously extended to the fields of English as
a Second Language (ESOL) and English as an Additional Language (EAL). Whilst some countries
developed CLIL in languages other than English, a renewed interest in content-based language
learning, task-based learning, and communicative principles came to the fore ‘ideally suited to a
focus on communication, to the development of needed language skills through the interpreta-
tion, expression, and negotiation of meaning’ (Savignon 1991, 274). Subject teachers with little
experience of teaching through an alternative language were required to integrate language tasks
into their repertoire and language teachers were faced with adapting communicative tasks beyond
lexical and grammatical practice (Coyle et al. 2010). Teaching to a syllabus organized accord-
ing to pre-determined grammatical chronology was no longer appropriate, even in more
language-oriented CLIL classes. At the same time, the subject dimensions were increasingly being
explored in specific contexts (Gajo and Sierra 2002; Hanse 2000; Wolff 2005; Coyle and
Baetens-Beardsmore 2007), yet without a shared understanding about the kind of classroom
language required in a range of integrated settings.
By 2004, the CLIL Compendium of experts was calling for a wider range of research-driven
expertise to explore the multi-disciplinary and holistic features of CLIL. The need for more
objective empirical data to substantiate results ‘widely acclaimed in CLIL but rarely achieved’
(Llinares et al. 2012, 215) was also reiterated by other researchers (Coyle and Baetens-Beardsmore
2007) demanding that CLIL develop its own research base building on pedagogic and theoretical
influences presented in Figure 27.1.

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Figure 27.1 Pedagogical and Theoretical Influences on CLIL Classroom Language

Classroom Language in CLIL

Four key strands that have impacted on the development of CLIL classroom language will now
be considered.

From Communication to Interaction

In line with Halliday’s (1975) view of language as an ‘instrument of social interaction with a clear
communicative purpose’, debates about classroom language have been anchored in the concept
of communicative competence for decades. Canale and Swain (1980) identified different contribu-
tory competences—grammatical, sociolinguistic, discourse, and strategic—that are needed to
enrich classroom discourse. Research carried out by Savignon (1983), Hymes (1971), Canale and
Swain (1980) and Bachman (1990), for example, emphasized the sociocultural component as an
inseparable part of communicative competence. According to Schulz (2006, 254), however,
communicative competence was neither realistic nor sufficient to fully develop classroom
discourse.

It is unrealistic because neither time nor instructional context is sufficient or appropriate to

develop a meaningful and lasting level of proficiency. It is insufficient because short-lived,
communicative survival skills are taught without intellectually challenging content.

As the emphasis on classroom language shifted from controlled practice and repetition with
a dominance of teacher talk to more communicative classroom activities, the importance of
‘interaction—of live, person-to-person encounters’ (Littlewood 1981) was increasingly researched. In
Coyle et al.’s (2010) summary of Savignon’s (2004) principles for communicative language teach-
ing, they highlight language as a tool for communication and the significance of using the lan-
guage in order to learn. This echoes Schmidt’s (1983) conclusion that interactional competence
was the main tenet of being able to communicate.

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Do Coyle

Yet learners cannot communicate when they have nothing to communicate about nor a ped-
agogy to facilitate communication (Allwright 1984). Savignon (1991) acknowledged that the
classroom as a social context for learning had been neglected. Interaction presupposes that learn-
ers have the appropriate communication skills to engage in encounters, the relevant linguistic
skills to express meaning, and opportunities to participate in either a controlled or authentic
discursive environment (Long 1996). Seedhouse (1996) suggested serious flaws with the com-
municative orthodoxy, bringing into question the limits of genuine or natural communication
that could be generated in a classroom. In CLIL settings, the potential for genuine communicative
interaction as a means to acquire new knowledge and learning is paramount.

Focus on Form and Focus on Meaning

Tensions between focus on meaning and focus on form have been debated since applied linguis-
tics came into being (Llinares et al. 2012) and are pertinent to CLIL where attention has to be
paid to both language and content development. It is well documented in immersion settings
(e.g., Swain 2000 and Lyster 2007) that a focus on meaning enables learners to develop overall
communicative competence but with identifiable linguistic gaps. Effective communication
requires a move away from de-contextualized focus on form to a focus on meaning constructed
through ‘discourse rich’ environments (Genesee 1994, 1). Lyster (2007) emphasizes ‘noticing’ and
language awareness as fundamental to ‘restructuring linguistic inter-language representations’ to
proceduralize more target-like representations in classrooms where both language and content
are targeted. His counterbalanced approach argues for the systematic integration of form-focused
and meaning-focus activities, where the salience of language features enables learners to ‘process
input for comprehension of subject matter as well as restructuring their representations of the
target language through noticing and awareness activities’ (2007, 133).
According to Swain (2000), whilst SLA in the 1980s was dominated by the concept of the
input hypothesis focusing on ‘comprehensible input’ (Krashen, 1985), the development of the
output hypothesis (Swain 1985) was a process involving negotiating meaning through ‘pushed’
output. This has implications for language as a processing tool involving four functions (Kowal
and Swain 1997): the noticing function (Izumi 2002, 570), to trigger in learners a ‘deeper and more
elaborate processing of form’ leading to a ‘more durable memory trace’; the hypothesizing-testing func-
tion, encouraging learners to experiment with language supported by teacher use of elicitations
and clarification requests rather than recasts (Loewen 2002; Mackey 2002); the meta-linguistic
function, whereby language is perceived as a mediating tool (Wertsch 1985) to enable learners to
engage in ‘collaborative dialogue’ (Swain and Lapkin,1998) and where language is used externally
and collaboratively to support problem solving and knowledge co-construction; and the fluency
function, whereby producing language in a meaningful context through practice leads to increas-
ing access to L2 knowledge.
If thinking aloud mediates the internalization of new knowledge, to construct and de-construct
knowledge and regulate human agency, then it follows that this impacts not only on how we
perceive the role of language in any classroom, but also which language is used at particular
points. As Swain and Lapkin (2000, 269) note, ‘to insist that no use be made of the L1 in carrying
out tasks that are both linguistically and cognitively complex is to deny the use of an important
cognitive tool’. However, the use of L1 as a cognitive and scaffolding tool invokes the use of
code-switching and languaging as part of classroom talk. Drawing on work by Brooks and Donato
(1994) and Swain and Lapkin (2000), Wannagat (2007) highlights the importance of L1 for ‘task
involvement’. Macaro (2009) argues that excluding L1 from the communicative L2 classroom
may also limit cognitive and meta-cognitive opportunities. Perhaps van Lier’s (1996) notion of

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creating a focus on language is more helpful and resonates with exploring language using in the
classroom context since classroom interaction does not separate function from form (Tarone and
Swierzbin 2009).

Meaning Making
Over recent decades, across Europe, language learning approaches have become increasingly
influenced by more general theories of learning, especially social constructivism (Bigge and
Shermis 1998). There has been a significant move away from transmission models of teaching to
a focus on learning and classroom interaction (e.g., group work and pair work to encourage
problem solving and higher-order thinking). In the 1980s, the Language across the Curriculum
(LAC) movement in the UK (Bullock 1975) targeted awareness-raising across both primary and
secondary sectors that every teacher is a language teacher—albeit in the first language of learners.
Other influences from L1 subject learning on CLIL can be attributed to an increasing interest in
‘the thinking curriculum’, including language for expressing higher-order thinking (McGuiness
1999). Anderson and Krathwold’s 2001 revision of Bloom’s Taxonomy, which identified four
types of knowledge (factual, conceptual, procedural, and meta-cognitive), each demanding dif-
ferent types of language, cements classroom language as a fundamental requirement for cognitive
engagement in the learning process.
Given that subject discourse involves different types of knowledge construction, Veel and
Coffin (1996, 194) propose that subject learning and the types of language that ‘embody that
learning’ are explicitly linked and culturally rooted—that is, building scientific knowledge does
not necessarily involve the same language as explaining historical time or biological recount.
Llinares et al. (2012) argue that making explicit the way language works in CLIL subjects requires
subject teachers to be aware of intuitive subject genres (i.e., how different types of explanations are
embedded in subject discourse, such as how a scientific explanation may differ from a historical
explanation) to enable them to intervene appropriately in the knowledge construction and lin-
guistic skilling of learners (Morton 2010). This intervention impacts profoundly on classroom
language.

Literacies
Cummins’ (1979) seminal work on basic interpersonal communication skills (BICS) and cogni-
tive academic language proficiency (CALP) has been highly influential in bilingual settings.
Whilst BICS, or social language, focuses on language needed in everyday situations, CALP, or
academic language, refers to the language needed for schooling, including more cognitively chal-
lenging literacy skills. Although not intended as an ‘either-or’, Cummins’ research demonstrated
that social language is not sufficient for academic success and that an emphasis on academic
language was required. This resonates with CLIL settings in which learners need to develop both
social and academic language in order engage in the language for socializing and the language of
schooling (Zwiers and Crawford 2011). According to Schleppegrell (2004), both are essential for
effective dialogic and interactive learning.
A link between academic language and literacies should also be highlighted—a point returned
to later. Academic language proficiency cannot be achieved unless learners are literate in the
broadest sense in the CLIL language—for example, having an awareness of the genres and regis-
ters that make up subject literacies. There are also links with Hornberger’s (2002) continua of
biliteracy. Love (2009) shifts the emphasis onto subject teachers by advocating that an under-
standing of ‘literacy pedagogical content knowledge’—that is, how content knowledge is

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constructed through language and literacy—must be made transparent to learners. This implies
fundamental understanding of text types, grammar, and vocabulary. According to Llinares et al.
(2012, 16), the implications of literacies for classroom language are immeasurable since CLIL
teachers will need to

identify these genre and register features in the materials and activities they use, and highlight
them for their learners. The main context in which they do this is through interaction in
the classroom.

Of particular importance are studies that demonstrate how particular kinds of classroom dia-
logue have profound effects on the nature of learners’ thinking (Wertsch 1979; Wells 1999;
Mercer and Littleton 2007). Focusing on teacher-pupil dialogue (Mortimer and Scott 2003;
Alexander 2008), exploratory talk, thinking aloud, and sharing ideas for collaborative learning
demand classroom language. Whilst these studies have been conducted in first language class-
rooms, the implications for CLIL in terms of scaffolding for deeper learning are profound.
In many contexts, CLIL has been heralded as a change agent, challenging traditional pedago-
gies. It is clear that research studies which promote dialogic approaches to learning, involving
co-constructed content knowledge, will also demand specific language and literacy skills, which
fundamentally challenge the dominance of teacher talk and the initiation-response-feedback
(IRF) exchanges between learners and their teacher. Positioning CLIL in theoretical paradigms
reveals its hybridity. As has been argued thus far, CLIL points to a dynamic interchange between
linguistic and educational theoretical perspectives that cross both cognitive and social realms.

Classroom Language and Educational Linguistics

The nature of classroom language in CLIL settings is as diverse as the contexts themselves, because
the goals and outcomes of using and learning the language determine the ways in which the lan-
guage itself is practiced and used. However, as García (2009, 211) notes, the propagation of CLIL
responds to the growing need for efficient linguistic skills, bearing in mind that the major concern is about
education, not about being bilingual or multilingual. As the previous sections have shown, CLIL in gen-
eral, and classroom language in particular, is inextricably linked to a variety of theoretical under-
pinnings drawn from the field of Applied Linguistics and yet cannot, by definition, exist without
recourse to pedagogic and educational theories. Therefore, if educational linguistics investigates
holistically the broad range of issues related to language and education (Hult 2008, 12) and sits at the inter-
section of educational and linguistics (Spolsky 1974), CLIL would appear to fit into the broad
definition of educational linguistics because in its entirety it is rooted in pedagogies which enable
learners to learn both language and content together whilst acknowledging that classroom language
(e.g., subject discourse, academic discourse, dialogic interventions) is at the core of the learning.
Whilst much of the first part of this chapter has been about analyzing how CLIL classroom lan-
guage has evolved, the second part will focus on research that has been carried out in what can be
justified as informing the field of educational linguistics. According to Brumfit (1996, 12) when
practices are informed by linguistic research but are not limited to it, then educational linguistics
supports the study of language in ‘real-world situations where the problems and conventions are
defined by non-linguists, whether the general public or language professionals’. He continues by
suggesting that classroom research studies involving language need to be positioned in the field of
(applied) linguistics, and they must also involve educational researchers and teachers, in order to
provide an understanding of ‘the inevitable “messiness” of classroom and broader educational prac-
tice, in which so many agendas are competing for attention in limited space’ (1992, 12).

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Thus far, attention to CLIL classroom language has drawn on the relationship between lan-
guage and cognition; the role of language as a socializing agent and learning tool, and language
acquisition and learning. The next section will analyze some core research studies which situate
CLIL classroom language in the field of educational linguistics and which identify future research
agendas.

Core Issues and Key Findings

Classroom Interaction for Language Learning and Language Using

An important comparative study by Gajo and Serra (2002) into the teaching of mathematics
through the first (Italian) and second language (French) of primary school pupils focused on the
elaboration of verbal interaction in order to scaffold basic cognitive processing of input. They
analyzed the language structures in both L1 and L2 and discovered differences between L1 and
CLIL learner knowledge processing. Monolinguals appeared to rely more on informational
knowledge (knowing what) and bilinguals used more operational knowledge (knowing how).
These findings suggest that language used in more L1 transactional settings relied more on mem-
orization, whereas in operational settings more verbal interaction appeared to take place between
peers and teacher. Gajo and Serra (2002) also noted that teachers paid greater attention in the
CLIL class to the language of mathematics and suggest that constant comprehension checks by
the teacher result in higher levels of communication in the classroom. In Coyle’s (2011) study,
the CLIL teachers, many of whom were language teachers, also focused almost exclusively on
meaning, with constant comprehension checks and closed questions requiring only short answers
from the learners. Dalton-Puffer’s study (2007) found that student discussions were carefully
controlled, perhaps due to limitations in teacher language. Similarly, Nikula (2010) found that in
CLIL lessons there was less variety in the teacher’s language and, according to Dalton-Puffer’s
(2007) data, less humor. Smit (2010) argues, however, that possible limitations in CLIL teacher
linguistic competence and confidence may lead to greater engagement in classroom discourse by
learners, especially at tertiary level, since they feel more on an equal footing with their teachers.
Maillat’s study (2010) reports that students engaged in richer interactions in CLIL lessons due to
the ‘masking effect’ (i.e., where learners ‘hide’ behind the L2, allowing them to suspend their
personal beliefs and take on alternative identities). Other studies suggest a lowering of CLIL
learner anxiety in using the language (Nikula 2010; Maillat 2010) that goes beyond a lack of error
correction with a tendency to use less formal language.
De Graaf, Koopman, Anikina and Westhoff ’s study (2007) developed an analytic tool for
language use in CLIL classrooms. Targeting CLIL content teachers, the study identifies indicators
of effective classroom language: input that is at a (just) challenging level; meaning-focused pro-
cessing, including explicit and implicit types of feedback; form-focused processing using recasts,
confirmation checks, clarification requests and feedback; pushed output, facilitated through dif-
ferent interactive formats and enabling language practice with corrective language feedback; and
strategic language use, especially developing compensation strategies to address comprehension
and language production issues. The study confirms the need for content-oriented teachers to
be made aware of the implicit and explicit linguistic implications of classroom language. It also
suggests that all CLIL teachers need to understand at a deeper level the challenges of working
towards language-rich classrooms.
Initiation-response-feedback (IRF) interaction patterns between teachers and pupils are often
criticized as limited and restrictive (van Lier 1996). Llinares et al. (2012) suggest that when feed-
back becomes ‘follow on’, a richer space for exploring meaning through dialogue is constructed.

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‘An alternative pattern occurs when, instead of making an evaluation of a student’s response, the
teacher gives feedback to the student to prompt further elaboration’ (Mortimer and Scott 2003).
Follow-on accompanied by contingent scaffolding (Gibbons 2002) suggests that when classroom
language is integral to task planning, it becomes a means in itself for developing linguistic aware-
ness and language use whilst constructing new knowledge. According to Alexander (2008, 30)
learner understanding requires guided progressive questioning and discussion to ‘prompt, reduce
choices, minimize risk and error and expedite “handover” of concepts and principles’. Dialogic classroom
studies have thus far been mainly conducted in L1 classrooms. Llinares et al. (2012) note their
relative absence in CLIL settings, suggesting that the potential for providing an ‘optimum envi-
ronment’ (Haneda and Wells 2008) for developing dialogic CLIL classrooms remains to be
investigated.

Integrating Language Learning and Content Learning

The role of language in the CLIL classroom is increasingly under the microscope as it moves
beyond language-oriented settings into wider learning contexts. Mohan and Beckett (2003)
draw attention to the neglected role of language and discourse in content learning—in L1 as
well as L2 settings. His study on grammatical scaffolding to support concept formation and
causal explanations notes that the recasts required by specific CLIL sequences are not the same
as those expected to support L2 in more general settings. Learners and teacher have to collabo-
rate over the functional relation of language and subject meaning. This involves complex
manoeuvres and semantic paraphrasing underpinned by what Mohan and Beckett (2003) calls
causal lexico-grammar and grammatical metaphor, where through an ‘editing’ process speakers
negotiate changes to the language to enhance the meaning—that is, interaction focuses on the
relation between language and meaning, as in ‘to stop the brain aging we can use our bodies and heads’
being recast by the teacher as ‘yes we can prevent our brain from getting weak by being mentally and
physically active’ (2003, 428).
In other words, new ways of approaching classroom language are required, which draw on
collective understanding from SLA research but which also differ from each other significantly.
Gajo (2007, 568) calls for ‘precise reflection on the linguistic aspects of subject knowledge and
on the role of discourse in the learning process’ as he suggests that discourse mediates and
re-mediates subject and knowledge paradigms in specific ways. The knowledge paradigm involves
both communication and authentication (Hanse 2000)—that is, the more opaque the discourse,
the more information is needed from the language paradigm; the denser the discourse, the more
support is needed from the subject paradigm. He emphasizes the need to re-conceptualize ‘com-
municative competence’ to make more explicit the interrelationship between subject knowledge
and language knowledge.
Other studies corroborate this stance. Mariotti’s (2006) study emphasizes the importance of
negotiation sequences and, as previously stated, Lyster’s counterbalance approach provides ‘con-
tinual opportunities to process input for comprehension through noticing and awareness activi-
ties’ (2007, 133). The Language Triptych (Coyle and Baetens-Beardsmore 2007; 2010) was developed
as a conceptual tool for developing a focus on language—especially aimed at subject teachers who
may not have had any linguistic training and at language teachers who needed an alternative to gram-
matical chronology. The Triptych links three domains (knowledge, cognitive processing, and lan-
guage) using content knowledge as a trigger for classroom planning from three perspectives: language
of learning, language for learning, and language through learning. Language of and for are compatible
with Snow’s content-obligatory and content-compatible language. Language of provides access to the
core language that learners need in order to start to construct meaning of content—including

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lexis, key terms, and associated language structures. Language for ensures that related linguistic
functions that allow learners to participate fully in task and use language to interact with others
is accessible. Coyle’s language through takes a different direction from Gajo’s content-autonomous
language. Instead it connects more with ‘follow-on’ language that enables learners to delve more
spontaneously into meaning-making using unplanned language.

Linguistic Demands of Subject Genres and Literacies

For Dalton-Puffer (2007) CLIL classroom language analysis concerns situating linguistic behav-
ior in academic settings. Yet classroom language use in CLIL depends to a large extent on the
education cultures associated with the subject discourse and pedagogies (Bonnet 2004; Whittaker
and Llinares 2009). The degree to which learners are required to verbalize complex content
depends on variables such as the cultural content of the subject and the traditions of the subject
pedagogies embedded in particular contexts (Pessoa et al. 2007).
Drawing on Systemic Functional Grammar, the Sydney School adopt a functional linguistics
approach to investigating subject-specific genre clusters and literacies in science (e.g., Halliday
and Martin 1993) and social subjects (e.g., Veel 1997). These provide an orientation to genre
from the perspective of system and structure, and place genre within a general model of lan-
guage and social context, resulting in genre analysis. These studies identify discursive language
functions associated with different subject genres (e.g., chronicling, reporting, explaining, and
arguing). Veel and Coffin (1996) emphasize the link between the types of language expected
within subject parameters and the types of language that embody that learning. This goes far
beyond the notion of subject-related lexis that often concerns CLIL teachers in the early stages
and directs classroom discourse towards being subject-embedded, literacy-oriented, and cultur-
ally driven.
Llinares et al.’s (2012) seminal study provides an in-depth analysis of the genres of science,
geography, and history as school subjects. Their study develops a tool to enable a deeper under-
standing between teachers and their learners of the types of discourse needed to access the
knowledge and cultural base of subject disciplines. Schleppegrell’s work (2006) also emphasizes
the need to understand language functions of text to connect subject knowledge and the use of
language so that ‘cognitive functions intrinsic to a subject become visible through a focus on
genres’ (Llinares et al. 2012, 147). Schleppegrell (2004) also takes the view that language should
be viewed as whole rather than separating meaning and form, advocating that a theory of lan-
guage which is discourse- and meaning-based also promotes a focus on language as part of
learning at the same time as new content is introduced. This view links with the trajectory from
oracy to literacy that plays a significant role in subject learning in CLIL settings and which
requires more specific targeted language goals (Dalton-Puffer 2007).
Widening the arguments further and taking up a previous point, evolving views of literacy
have particular relevance for CLIL classroom language. For example, Hornberger’s continua of
biliteracy model plots the trajectory from oral to written language in line with Llinares et al.
(2012); Martin-Jones and Jones (2000) suggest multilingual literacies to refer to ‘multiple ways
in which people draw on, and combine codes of their communicative repertoires when they
speak, sign and write’ (García 2009, 339); and pluriliteracy practices (García, Bartlett and Kleifgen
2007) moves towards an interrelated and flexible use of language built on a key principle of
exploring and valuing hybridity. Whilst pluriliteracies have as yet had little influence on CLIL
classroom language, and arguably CLIL contexts are not necessarily bilingual, nonetheless research
suggests that the potential of classroom discourse as a discursive literacy tool is not yet fully con-
ceptualized in CLIL settings. Morton’s study (2010) concludes that a focus on classroom genres

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might be a powerful tool in promoting the development of oral and written academic literacy in
CLIL learners.
An analysis on classroom language in CLIL has also to take account of which languages are
used and when. Whilst code-switching is well researched in the field of bilingual education, in
CLIL settings the emphasis is somewhat different. In most CLIL contexts, it is likely that the CLIL
vehicular language is at a lower level than the first language of the learners. This raises the dilemma
of language choice when dealing with understanding difficult subject concepts or even engaging
in regular classroom ‘banter’. Extremes of practices range from prohibiting the use of any other
language than the vehicular language to translating and emulating monolingual classrooms. Bor-
rowing from recent studies on first and other language use in language classrooms (Levine 2003),
Liebscher and Dailey-O’Cain (2005) found that students code-switch when they are unable to
express what they want to say in the L2, but also for ‘discourse related functions that contextualize
the interactional meaning of their utterances’ (2005, 235). Macaro’s (2009) study in class-
rooms similar to CLIL suggests that code-switching could be a systemic, principled, and planned
approach to language development, which acts a linguistic bridge between language learning and
meaning-making. This aspect of classroom language in CLIL remains under-researched and con-
tentious, built on the underlying fear that use of the first language will provide an ‘easy way out’
for reluctant learners and a safety net for CLIL subject teachers whose language skills are insuffi-
ciently advanced.
In this section, a range of studies relating to the integration of language and subject learning
and the intricate ebb and flow between linguistic demands related to academic literacies and
subject understanding, and subject demands on discursive and linguistic progression, reveal the-
oretical tensions and complex interrelationships that have not yet been translated into the prac-
titioners’ repertoire for enacting classroom discourse.

Research Approaches
Curriculum content learning and language learning, which are still generally seen as two
separate pedagogic issues should be consciously taken into account in an integrated way in
classroom-based bilingual research.
(Leung 2005, 4)

Research approaches to classroom language in CLIL tend to fall into two categories. The first
focuses on class-based research or action research usually carried out by teachers gathering data
to validate the outcomes of adopting a CLIL approach. These studies are localized, qualitative,
and tend to be unreported in academic literature, although sometimes they are disseminated
through professional association websites and publications (e.g., Coyle, Holmes, and King 2009).
The second consists of empirical or more substantial corpus-driven studies carried out by aca-
demic researchers. Whilst classroom discourse has been extensively researched, there are relatively
few robust and rigorous studies within a CLIL context. Bonnet’s (2010) analysis of CLIL research
in Germany identifies disparities in findings and weaknesses in current research design, which he
suggests is applicable beyond the national context. According to Bonnet, some of the conclusive
positive research about the effectiveness of CLIL is limited, and, in order to maximize the validity
of the research, both micro and macro perspectives need to be taken into account.
Ruiz de Zarobe and Catalan’s 2009 edition of Evidence from Research in Europe brought together
12 research studies and commentaries on the state of CLIL. Seven studies focused on linguistic
aspects of CLIL (e.g., vocabulary, syntax, morphology) and only two on classroom language in

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relation to subject learning (communicative competence and analysis of the spoken word). These
two seminal studies are presented as follows.
Dalton-Puffer (2007) defends theoretical and methodological pluralism in approaches to
her in-depth analysis of classroom discourse. She uses a multi-perspectival analytical frame-
work involving speech acts, genre analysis, oral practices, discourse grammar, and conversation
analysis. Her study, predominantly qualitative, focuses on naturalistic classroom interaction
through audio-recordings of CLIL lessons to construct a corpus of 40 lessons transcripts.
Some data were analyzed according to Tryadic Dialogue (Lemke 1990) for analyzing the
importance of the ‘F’ move in knowledge construction; other data were analyzed for interac-
tion patterns, which demonstrated the dominance of teacher-led whole class discussion.
Teacher interviews were also conducted to gain insights into individual linguistic and profes-
sional circumstances and their impact on classroom approaches. Data also included field
notes, teaching materials, and documents. The corpus had subsets focusing on differing anal-
yses (e.g., 10 lessons were coded and quantified according to questioning activity); some
transcripts were coded for occurrences of speech functions (e.g., defining, explaining, and
hypothesizing); conversational analysis was used to interpret feedback and correction, espe-
cially using the CA repair schema as an analytical tool (van Lier 1988). Dalton-Puffer con-
cludes that further research on ‘broadening and sharpening the theoretical basis of CLIL’
(2007, 297) is essential, especially focusing on more explicit academic language learning goals
if CLIL potential is to be realized.
A second multi-study by Llinares, Morton, and Whittaker (2012), The Roles of Language in
CLIL, uses a trans-European 500,000-word corpus of CLIL secondary classroom data from
Spain, Austria, Finland, and the Netherlands with an additional 200,000 words corpus from CLIL
pre-school and primary settings. Using Cenoz’s (2009) Continua of Multilingual Education to
enable linguistic, sociolinguistic, and school factors to combine in different ways, comparative
data were situated along the continua. The researchers constructed a three-part analytic frame-
work, which involves subject literacies, classroom interaction, and language development, adopted
from work by Mortimer and Scott (2003). Based on systemic functional linguistic principles, it
provides a rich description of CLIL classroom language and tools for further systematic research.
Their findings provide classroom examples of interaction patterns leading to knowledge con-
struction and dialogic exchange that promote meaning making and language development.
These examples emphasize the role of genres and registers required for deep understanding of
different academic subjects and the need for subject teachers to raise awareness of functional
language as an essential element of learning.
Coyle’s (2011) qualitative study on 23 CLIL secondary classrooms in the UK analyses class-
room discourse using the LOCIT process (Coyle 2010). This innovative research approach
involves learners and teachers as researchers; video-recorded lessons are analyzed by learners and
their teacher independently for learning moments using digital tools (Coyle www.abdn.ac.uk/
locit). A comparison of edits from video recorded lessons facilitates dialogue between learners
and teachers to enable shared understanding as to how learning takes place and the kind of class-
room interaction that supports it. The process provides rich data using content analysis by those
involved in dialogic intensions in CLIL classrooms. It also allows a meta-analysis of the data by
external researchers to understand the types of discourse used in CLIL classrooms using Coyle’s
Language Triptych (Coyle 2013). Findings report that there is a focus on language of and for learn-
ing but few incidents of language through learning. This reiterates the need for teachers to under-
stand more about the interrelationship between discursive practices and knowledge construction
in CLIL contexts.

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Current Debates

Integration
As indicated in the previous section, one of the major concerns involves the complexities of
integrating subject and language learning across a range of settings where contextual variables
come into play. Whilst particular attention has been paid to classroom language, an evolving
understanding of the demands of integrating subject and language learning is resulting in increas-
ing awareness of the significance of language in CLIL classrooms. Drawing on Gajo’s (2007) call
for defining a ‘new communicative competence’ for CLIL, the quest to find ways to conceptual-
ize the learning of language and the learning of subject knowledge through language from a
holistic perspective remains.

Academic Discourse
A second challenge concerns the role of academic discourse in CLIL, which focuses on the kinds
of language needed for effective learning and the catalysts for developing the registers and genres
of appropriate discourses (Meyer 2010). Current interest is increasing in investigating the role of
pluriliteracies in CLIL across subjects and languages (European Centre for Modern Languages
2012). This questions interpretations of BICS/CALP that suggest that learners need basic inter-
personal communication skills before they can develop academic proficiency. The sequential
nature of language skilling is under the microscope, and building on the work of Morton (2010)
and Whittaker and Llinares (2009) involves deeper exploration of literacy practices, including
both oral and written literacy development in CLIL environments.
Increasing attention is being paid to interaction in CLIL settings, yet the nature, development
and enactment of integrated academic discourse remains open to debate. As Dalton-Puffer
(2011, p. 193) affirms, ‘a genre focus might furnish the much sought after analytical tool that
captures content and language integration’. She also notes that much more work is required, both
conceptually and empirically, across different CLIL contexts so that notions of discourse func-
tions and genres in CLIL classrooms can be ‘regarded as settled’.
Debates around the nature of academic discourse also involve the role of using more than one
language in the CLIL classroom. This issue is contentious because in some contexts using a lan-
guage other than the CLIL vehicular language is perceived as inappropriate. The use of more than
one language that is common to learners has not yet been widely debated as an overt pedagogic
strategy. Concerns around the clarity of the motivations and procedures for using two languages
need to be deliberated, otherwise ad hoc use, triggered by misunderstandings of integrated learn-
ing processes, may seriously affect learning outcomes. Increasingly, there is renewed interest in
making explicit the language features in academic discourse, but in ways that diverge from more
traditional linguistic appropriation, so that equal attention is paid to both focus on form and on
meaning.

Cultural Implications
Taking into account Coyle’s (2010) 4Cs Conceptual Framework for CLIL, the role of culture or
cultures has been largely ignored thus far. Unpacking the role of cultures—ranging from class-
rooms and pedagogic traditions to sociocultural dimensions associated with different languages
as well as the subjects disciplines and cultural alliances—that impact on different levels of class-
room discourse has not yet been rigorously investigated.

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An Evidence Base
Coyle and Baetens-Beardsmore’s 2007 call for the CLIL research agenda to connect and be con-
nected, along with seven recommendations for establishing a rigorous research agenda, involves
a rigorous re-evaluation of classroom language in CLIL. Bonnet (2010), too, calls for an inte-
grated approach to CLIL research, which connects qualitative and quantitative paradigms with
product, process, and participant-oriented perspectives. He suggests adapting a documentary
method approach to analyze ‘interactional performance in order to reconstruct from this a gen-
erative deep structure that causes people’s actions’, in a space where functional-pragmatic analysis
of language sits alongside a reflexive-emancipatory concept of subject competence. Approaches
such as these could integrate complex notions of competence in two domains (i.e., subject matter
knowledge and language). If a robust evidence base is the ‘paramount goal’ of CLIL research,
Bonnet (2010) affirms that a focus on widening its scope through creating links to existing large-
scale qualitative studies and using quantitative instruments from other related fields is required,
resulting in a ‘meta-analysis of CLIL research’.

Implications for Education

Throughout this chapter the contextual variables associated with CLIL classrooms have been
emphasised. How integrated learning happens will depend on micro and macro level factors.
How discourse unfolds, likewise. Perhaps the greatest challenge is to harness this diversity for both
the breadth and depth of its richness and contribution to the academic and professional fields in
terms of how integrated learning happens (Dalton-Puffer 2011). The conditions for maximizing
the benefits of classroom language depend on an accrued and dynamic shared understanding of
pedagogic practices. They forefront the need for systematic teacher education that is tailored to
the needs of teachers (i.e., a content-oriented teacher will not necessarily bring the same under-
standing of CLIL teaching as a language-oriented teacher; their discursive and cultural commu-
nities may have some commonalities but also some marked differences). Overcoming these
differences and constructing a knowledge and skill base for CLIL that is built on the fundamental
role of classroom discourse as both a sociocultural linguistic and pedagogic phenomenon is an
essential task for teacher education.
It could be argued that CLIL pedagogies are still in their infancy. An increasingly robust evi-
dence base will be needed to support professional learning as well as professional expectations
that CLIL teachers will carry out classroom research. Situating these challenges within the para-
digm of educational linguistics is an exciting and necessary stage in the development of the
transformative potential of CLIL to enrich the learning of young people, not only from a second
language or additional language perspective, but also within the norms of learning through the
first language. Educational linguistics is poised to play a major role in these developments if it can
offer a communal space at the intersection of linguistic and pedagogic understanding for stake-
holders (i.e., the learners, the teachers, teacher educators, and researchers). Collaboration in this
space has the potential to yield pedagogic principles about the nature, appropriateness, and effi-
cacy of classroom discourse. Current teacher education practices do not acknowledge the
immense complexity of discourse, nor do they analyze or investigate the nature of classroom
language, its role in concept formation, or its use to support the development of another language
in CLIL classrooms. The implications for transforming approaches to tasks, activities, and inter-
actions in CLIL classrooms are immeasurable and fundamental to 21st century learning.
For this to be achieved, researchers are challenged to situate pedagogic and language study in
the educational linguistics paradigm on both micro and macro levels, teacher educators are

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challenged to raise awareness of and address the multiplicity of discursive functioning, and
teachers are challenged to rethink the nature of classroom language and experiment with its
complexities from both pedagogic and linguistic perspectives to provide learners with greater
transparency of ‘talking learning’ to understand better the complexities of classroom language
(van Lier 1996, 203).

Further Reading
Coyle, D., and Baetens-Beardsmore, H. (2007). International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism.
Special Issue: Research on Content and Language Integrated Learning, 10(5).
Coyle, D., Hood, P., and Marsh, D. (2010). Content and language integrated learning. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Dalton-Puffer, C. (2007). Discourse in content and language integrated learning (CLIL) classrooms. Amsterdam:
John Benjamins Publishing.
Dalton-Puffer, C., Nikula, T., and Smit, U. (Eds.) (2010). Language use and language learning in CLIL class-
rooms. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
European Commission. (2002). D. Marsh. (Ed.) CLIL/EMILE The European dimension: Actions, trends and
foresight potential. http://ec.europa.eu/languages/documents/doc491_en.pdf
Llinares, A., Morton, T., and Whittaker, R. (2012). The roles of language in CLIL. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Marsh, D., Maljers, A., and Hartiala, K. A.-K. (Eds.) (2001). Profiling European CLIL classrooms: languages opens
doors. University of Jyväskylä, Finland & European Platform for Dutch Education, The Netherlands:
University of Jyväskylä.
Ruiz de Zarobe, Y., and Catalan, R. M. J. (Eds.) (2009). Content and language integrated learning evidence from
research in Europe. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.

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 28
Heritage Language Education
in the United States
The Chinese Case

Yun Xiao

The era of globalization has prompted the United States to realize that there is an unprecedented
need for individuals with high-level proficiency in languages other than English (Brecht and
Ingold 2002). Heritage languages (HLs) are hence recognized as a national resource to supply that
shortage. As an immigrant country, the United States has a rich linguistic heritage, with over
140 non-English languages spoken by immigrant and indigenous peoples (Brecht and Ingold 2002).
Data in the 2010 U.S. Census (Hoeftel et al. 2012) show that there is a total of over 309 million
persons in the U.S. population, out of which over one-third reported their race and ethnicity as
“minority.” Between 2000 and 2010, this group increased from 86.9 million to 111.9 million,
representing a growth of 29%. Among them, the Hispanic and the Asian populations have grown
over 43% each. Moreover, as of 2010, 12.7% of the total U.S. population is foreign-born (as
compared with 10% in 2000), and 20.1% of the persons over age 5 speak a language other than
English at home (as compared with 18% in 2000). Such increases reflect the United States’ his-
toric immigration pattern and result in an increase in language diversity, a pattern that will likely
continue (Shin and Kominski 2010, 11).
Unlike the hard-won foreign language proficiency of English-speaking U.S. Americans, the
reservoir of proficiency in languages other than English brought by the immigrant “minority”
population to American soil is rich and ready to use. To preserve and tap it, an HL Initiative was
launched in 1999, followed by a sweeping HL movement in research and education. However,
the role of HLs in the nation’s security and prosperity is just beginning to be understood. HL
education, which has operated outside of the formal education system, is just approaching the
mainstream agenda. Likewise, HL research has not yet found a place in language acquisition
theories (Lynch 2003). Recent HL studies have touched upon a range of issues by employing
various theories such as first and second language acquisition, theoretical linguistics, applied lin-
guistics, sociolinguistics, bilingualism theories, discourse analysis, and language socialization (e.g.,
Wong-Fillmore 1991; Valdés 2000; Fishman 1991; 2001; Peyton, Ranard, and McGinnis 2001;
Brecht and Ingold 2002; Cummins 2005; Polinsky and Kagan 2007; Lo Bianco 2007; Wang 2007;
Brinton, Kagan, and Bauckus 2008; He and Xiao 2008; O’Grady et al. 2011). The list is long and
includes many related fields, but there is not a coherent approach on its own, and HL research
from an educational linguistic perspective alone is hardly obtainable. So far, little is known about
the issues and social factors that are associated with HL education in the U.S.; the effect of

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immigrant home backgrounds; and the impact of the social factors on HL maintenance, loss, and
shift. Using data from studies on Chinese as a HL (CHL) and elsewhere, this chapter aims to shed
light on the inquiry.

Definitions of Heritage Language and Classification of

Heritage Language Speakers
Heritage language has been associated with a variety of terms and definitions, depending on the
context it is situated in or the perspective it is viewed from. It is called home language in bilingual
education, non-English language in the English-speaking mainstream society, world/modern lan-
guage in foreign language education, ancestral/ethnic language in immigrant/indigenous commu-
nities, and heritage language in relation to one’s family heritage. In the educational setting, HL is
often defined by learner’s proficiency: A heritage learner is a student who is raised in a home where
a non-English language is spoken, who speaks or at least understands the language, and who is to
some degree bilingual in that language and in English (Valdés 2000). To reflect their language
change, HL speakers are also defined as “people raised in a home where one language is spoken
who subsequently switch to another dominant language” (Polinsky and Kagan 2007, 368). From
various standpoints, these definitions capture the characteristics of HL speakers one way or another.

Heritage Language Education in the United States:

Core Issues and Key Findings
With evidence for recent CHL studies, this section will discuss some of the HL issues on debate,
with a focus on its linguistic characteristics, variations, and advantages; language shift and attri-
tion; and environment and prospects.

Linguistic Characteristics, Variations, and Advantages

Data from CHL studies demonstrate a constellation of linguistic complexities in HL learners’
language skills, literacy, grammar, and discourse development, which leads to the claim that the
HL speakers’ proficiency in general does not fit well into the ACTFL proficiency framework, in
that they range from having only a few rudimentary words or phrases to having a solid command
of speaking, listening, reading, and writing skills (Hendryx 2008). Some of them may have a
smattering of speaking and listening skills but with marginal reading and writing abilities, and
others may be fluent or nearly fluent in a Chinese dialect but have little knowledge of the stand-
ard Mandarin norm. Furthermore, Koda et al. (2008) report that CHL learners are sensitized to
the structural properties of Chinese compound characters, which enables them to have better and
faster development in the target literacy, and Ming and Tao (2008) note that CHL learners possess
pre-existing Chinese grammatical knowledge that enables them to make fewer morphosyntactic
errors and perform better in their written compositions. However, some researchers report that
CHL proficiency and grammar knowledge are increasingly deteriorating and lost over time (Jia
2008; Jia and Barley 2008). In a study that investigates HL maintenance and loss among recent
Chinese immigrants (n = 85) in New York City, Jia (2008) found that with an increasing expo-
sure to English and a steady growth of English skills, HL skills continuously declined over the
years, with reading and writing skills experiencing greater attrition than speaking skills. Similarly,
using multiple tasks such as story retelling, multiple cloze test, and picture description (N = 36),
Jia and Bayley (2008) found that the use of Chinese morphological marker –le by the participants
declined as their length of residence in the United States increased.

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The author’s research studies (Xiao 2004; 2006; 2010) reveal that CHL learners possess skewed
Chinese language abilities, with linguistic advantages over their non-heritage counterparts in
some areas but not in others. By examining college beginning students’ performance in their
semester-long achievement tests, an SAT II, and a writing task (HL = 20, non-HL = 18), Xiao
(2004) found that CHL learners did significantly better than their non-HL counterparts in lis-
tening, speaking, grammar tests, and mid-term and final written exams but not in vocabulary
quizzes, character writing, or reading. In a follow-up study, Xiao (2006) examined CHL learners’
Chinese syntactic development (CHL = 94, non-HL = 54) at three instructional levels (begin-
ning, intermediate, and advanced) in two American universities. Through a 25-item grammati-
cality judgment test and a 6-item English-to-Chinese translation, the study found that CHL
learners had a significantly higher group average than their non-HL counterparts in the gram-
maticality judgment test and also produced more acceptable sentences in the translation test
across the three instructional levels. However, the CHL learners did not show advantages over
their non-HL counterparts in the more complex discourse-oriented constructions in the trans-
lation test. This finding was further confirmed by Xiao’s (2010) subsequent study, in which
learners’ Chinese written samples were collected over two consecutive semesters, out of which
four of the data sets (CHL = 2, Non-HL = 2) were analyzed. The results showed that over devel-
opmental time the participants, heritage and non-heritage alike, consistently produced structur-
ally simple and discursively loose SVO constructions, and CHL learners did not show meaningful
advantages over their non-heritage counterparts. Furthermore, neither HL or non-HL learners
showed notable changes in their target discourse features, although some progress was made by
particular individuals or in particular features.
Data presented in this section demonstrate that HL learners are characterized by a high level
of linguistic variation with various advantages over their non-HL counterparts in the language
classroom. In a country where language education has been about either teaching the English
language to foreign language speakers or teaching foreign languages to English speakers, such HL
linguistic complexities are no doubt a serious challenge to HL education and foreign language
instruction as well.

Language Shift and Attrition

Historically, HL speakers’ proficiency was viewed as an ethnic asset, needed for effective commu-
nication within families and communities, and fostered by family transmission and community
maintenance efforts. Yet HLs are famously known to disappear or shift to the dominant language
by the third generation (Fishman 1991). One typical example is that, despite the intense and
persistent HL maintenance efforts by the Chinese-speaking community and its long history of
Chinese community language schools in the U.S., a remarkable generational language shift is
reported, in which 29.4% of the children (age 5–16) in the surveyed homes spoke English only
at home by the second generation and 91.4% of them did so by the third generation (Alba et al.
2002). This observation is supported by findings from combined immigrant studies in New York
and greater Los Angeles, which show that by the third generation, only 34.3% of the surveyed
homes spoke a non-English language and 97% of the individuals preferred speaking English only
at home. A further analysis concluded that among those of Mexican origin, the Spanish language
“died” by the third generation, and all other languages died between the second and third gen-
erations (Rumbaut 2009).
In contrast to the gradual shift among generations as indicated above, an “abrupt shift” in
individual learners has been noted in U.S. American formal educational settings, which shows
that HL learners typically acquire their home language at a young age and lose it after entering

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mainstream schools (Wong-Fillmore 1991; Bougie et. al. 2003, 349). Moreover, in order to gain
acceptance, they typically drop their home languages and make English their primary language
(Pease-Alvarez et al. 1991; Li 2003). The findings indicate that, in the U.S. American formal
school system, HL learners are under societal pressure to assimilate and acculturate, which com-
pels them to quit using their home languages, resulting in HL loss and shift.
The macro and micro levels of HL shift discussed above—the generational language shift in
ethnic communities and the individual shift in the American school system—are obviously fail-
ing the massive efforts and lofty goals of sustaining HLs as a national resource. Theorists of lan-
guage ecology believe that “languages, like living species, evolve, grow, change, live, and die in
relation to other languages and also in relation to their environments” (Hornberger 2003, 320).
Accordingly, it makes urgent sense to examine the ecological environment where HLs are orig-
inated and situated, including the ideologies, social discourse, educational policies, and mainte-
nance efforts. From this standpoint, I now turn to the consideration of issues related to the HL
environment and prospects in the educational and home contexts in the U.S., with CHL as the
example.

Environment and Prospects

Although there is a strong social discourse of diversity and multilingualism in the U.S., few U.S.
students receive long-term, articulated instruction in any foreign language (Brecht and Ingold
2002, 1). The ACTFL report (2010) shows that only 18% of the 50 million or so American public
students are enrolled in foreign language courses, and most of them occur in grades 9–12 only.
As stated in the report, although ample research studies continue to demonstrate that children
learn languages best when they begin at a younger age, elementary students in the U.S. are in
general not enrolling in language courses. The data indicate that, over time, a large number of
HL speakers’ attainment achieved at home and ethnic communities is not continued or main-
tained in the school system. Take the CHL, for example: Data show there are over 200,000 CHL
students currently enrolled in Chinese community language schools (see details below), but only
20,292 students of Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) enrolled in the American public school
system in 2004–2005 and 59,860 in 2007–2008 respectively (8), out of which half were estimated
to have HL background. The remarkably small Chinese enrollments in the American public
schools suggest that, despite the decade-long HL campaign, the nation has not yet developed or
implemented educational policies to maintain or preserve HL resources (Brecht and Ingold
2002). Then what hinders/harms HL maintenance in the U.S. American school system?

(1) The No Child Left Behind Act

Among the many U.S. ideologies, processes, or policies that are blamed for harming multilingual
development or HL maintenance, such as “de-ethnization and Americanization processes (Fish-
man 1966a),” “the anti-bilingual education acts” (Krashen 1996), “the one-nation one-language
English-only US ideology” (Hornberger 2003), the No Child Left Behind Act (2001; NCLB,
Public Law 107–110) is the most tangible agent that does the harm, reinforced by regulations,
benchmarks, and standards (Hornberger 2003; Shin 2006; Lo Bianco 2007; Wang 2007; to name
just a few). Through her observation of annual testing in reading and math for all students in
grades 3 through 8 in the American public school system, Shin (2006) reports that, with an
exclusive focus on English, NCLB assigns little value to the bilingual abilities of language minor-
ity students and requires schools to move these students into mainstream English-only classrooms
as quickly as possible (127–128). Schools that do not demonstrate immigrant students’ rapid

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Yun Xiao

acquisition of English and continuous improvement in standardized test scores in math and read-
ing (English-coded only) are subject to heavy penalties, such as state takeover or restructuring.
As a result, many bilingual or foreign language programs, especially east-Asian languages such as
Chinese, are eliminated.
The above observations provide us invaluable information to understand why ethnic language
attainment is dissipated in the American education system and why HL-English bilinguals are
quickly converted to English-only monolinguals (Lo Bianco 2007).

(2) One Origin, Two Prospects

Although “home” is the origin of the mother tongue—the language to which a child has the
first exposure—that language’s prospect differs by the social context it is situated in. Due to
the outstanding differences in input, home literacy resources, and access to the formal school
system, the language that originates in a mainstream home can automatically develop into the
first/societal language with uniform success, while a language that originates in an immigrant
home evolves into a first/heritage language with high variation, loss, and shift. Ample studies
show that while mainstream homes provide optimal input with rich literacy resources and
activities in the dominant language, immigrant homes struggle to offer the needed HL literacy
resources and activities (Xu 1999; Xiao 2008a; among others). Xiao (2008a) examined the
home literacy environment of 127 CHL college students in three American universities and
found that, compared to mainstream homes, the CHL home literacy environment was bleak—
HL reading materials and literacy activities were, in most cases, inadequately constructed for
its learning or development. Specifically, a large number of Chinese immigrant homes pos-
sessed zero to minimal HL reading materials; level-appropriate HL recreational literature
readings, which are so abundant in the dominant language, barely existed in their homes. In
addition, there is a lack of intergenerational continuity in the use of the mother tongue in the
immigrant groups, and the family, far from being an exclusive sphere of mother tongue dom-
inance, appears to be a meeting ground for two competing languages—the ethnic mother
tongue and English (Fishman 1966b, 180–181). As a result, the first/societal learner language
follows a universal learning timetable and achieves uniform success when the learner reaches
adulthood (Bley-Vroman 1990), while the first/heritage learner language exhibits incom-
plete/partial linguistic knowledge when the learner relearns his HL in her/his adult life
(Wiley 2008; Xiao 2008b).
By examining the HL environment and prospects in the formal education system and at HL
learner homes, this section shows that NCLB is the formidable agent that impedes the HL devel-
opment in the American education system and that HL homes provide input and opportunities
that are too insufficient to foster its growth. Moreover, compared with the first/societal language,
the HL is an endangered species, according to language ecology theory (Hornberger 2003) and
hence the calls for concerted efforts to maintain and sustain it—for which I now turn to the
Chinese case.

Heritage Language Education in the U.S.: The Chinese Case

Despite the many odds against HL development noted in the U.S. American education system
and immigrant homes, the capacity of the Chinese language has been rapidly expanding in the
United States in recent years. Chinese education at the grass-roots level has not merely quanti-
tatively but also qualitatively taken on a role as a more significant pedagogical trendsetter than
either its K–12 or collegiate counterparts (McGinnis 2008, 231). Using the language

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maintenance and sustainment framework of capacity, opportunities, and desire (Lo Bianco 2010),
this section will describe and analyze some broad issues associated with the Chinese heritage
language situation and prospects in the United States.

Capacity: Who Are the Chinese Speakers in the United States?

Chinese speakers in the U.S. are a relatively new immigrant group, mainly made up of contem-
porary immigrants arriving around the turn of the 21st century. They can be divided into three
groups based on their time of arrival. The first group arrived in the 1840 era, attracted by the
California Gold Rush. By 1870, there were 63,199 Chinese living in the U.S., most of whom
were Cantonese-speaking fishermen or laborers. Subsequently, there were two major waves:
1949–1980 and 1980-present, spurred by China’s takeover in 1949 and its economic reform
starting in the late 1970s. By 1980, there were 812,178 persons of Chinese origin (0.36% of the
U.S. population) living in the U.S., and by 2007, there were over 3.5 million, 1.15% of the U.S.
total (Hoeffel et al. 2012) . In addition, the recent influx is characterized by the largest number
of Mandarin speakers and students/scholars in history. Moreover, Chinese immigrants in the U.S.
were historically highly concentrated, with 78% of the first group residing in California, mostly
clustered in Chinatowns (Chang 2003). This pattern continues with the later groups. By 2010,
over half of the Chinese immigrants in the United States resided in just two states: California and
New York (McCabe 2012), where one finds the largest Chinatowns. California had the largest
number of Chinese immigrants in 2010, with 577,745 individuals and 32.0% of the total Chinese
population, followed by New York with 20.8% of the total. This congregation pattern is reflec-
tive of Chinese language education in the American school system, in which California had the
largest number of Chinese enrollments in 2007–2008, followed by New York (American Coun-
cil on the Teaching of Foreign Languages [ACTFL] 2010). Such coincidence suggests that the
higher geographic concentration of the immigrant community is, the better HL maintenance and
education it has.
Empowered by advanced education and job skills, the contemporary Chinese immigrant
community has been enjoying a rising socioeconomic status. Many of them have entered the
U.S. American mainstream market and become successful professionals or entrepreneurs.
Data from the 2008 American Community Survey show that Chinese immigrants, both male
and female, have higher or much higher employment rates than the average of all foreign-born
in the elite areas such as business, science, technology, education, and medicine. Such increas-
ing socioeconomic status would automatically lead to their residential up-mobility and social
network shift. It is anticipated that the role of Chinatowns as the Chinese ethnic boundaries
will be watered down in the next generations, and the future Chinese-speaking community
will be less geographically concentrated and gradually disperse to the wider mainstream com-
munity (Xiao 2011). Therefore, unlike their early pioneers who saw no future in the U.S. and
prepared their children for Chinese language skills to return to their homeland, contemporary
Chinese immigrants view America as a land of promise and prepare their children for the
societal language and job skills. As suggested by Alba et al. (2002), such advantageous socio-
economic status is a major driving force for assimilation and counter-force for HL
maintenance.
In this section, I have touched upon the major characteristics of the Chinese speaker popula-
tion in the U.S., such as the large number of new arrivals, their high geographic concentration,
and rising socioeconomic status. While the former two drives HL maintenance, the latter drives
assimilation and language shift. Together, they are exerting significant conflicting influences on
the course of Chinese HL maintenance and education in the United States.

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Yun Xiao

Opportunities: What Is Behind the Expanding Chinese Language Education?

(1) The Increasing Maintenance Efforts at All Levels

Contrary to the constraints on non-English language instruction implicated by the NCLB Act
in the American education system, Chinese as a community language has been unprecedentedly
boosted by efforts from governments (i.e., U.S. and China), nongovernmental agencies (e.g., Asia
Society and College Board), and grass-roots organizations. With the recent recognition as a
“critical language” by the U.S. government, Chinese has become a major recipient for a series of
significant initiatives from the U.S. government, such as the National Security Language Initiative
(NSLI), the Foreign Language Assistance Program (FLAP), the Pipeline Flagship Programs, and
the summer STARTALK program, to name just a few. Since 2002, nine K–16 Chinese Flagship
Programs have been established, which “intend to change the way Americans learn languages
through a groundbreaking approach to language education for students from kindergarten
through college.” (Meanwhile, NSLI granted a seven-year funding plan to establish summer
Chinese STARTALK programs.) Since its onset in 2007, tens of thousands of students and teach-
ers across the United States have benefited. In summer 2012, 47 states participated in it, with
183 programs in operation.
Meanwhile, the Chinese government has been joining forces with the U.S. government and
lending significant support in funding, intelligence, and other resources. Since 2003, Hanban, The
Chinese National Office for Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language (has launched a number of
initiatives, which include the Confucius Institutes and classrooms, Chinese Guest Teacher Pro-
gram, Chinese Teacher Certification Scholarships, Chinese Language Learning Materials, and AP
(Advanced Placement) Chinese Summer Institutes. These projects have brought not only Chi-
nese teachers and learning materials to the U.S., but also American students and educators to
China. In addition, Hanban has established the Chinese Education Services and Chinese testing
centers in the U.S., which promote and supervise three standardized Chinese proficiency tests for
American students: the YCT (Youth Chinese Test) for K–12 students, the BCT (Business Chinese
Test) for business professionals, and the HSK (The Chinese Proficiency Test) for various levels of
Chinese learners but mostly for college students. These efforts have been vigorously driving
forward the Chinese HL maintenance and education in the United States.

(2) The Expansion of Chinese Community Education

Chinese community education has been the centerpiece of the ethnic Chinese population for
over 100 years. Data show that almost all U.S.-born Chinese children or young arrivals have some
level of experience in Chinese community schools (Xiao 2008a), where they learn the heritage
language and culture, make friends, and weave the ethnic fabrics. Although the ecological envi-
ronment for Chinese immigrants goes up and down from time to time in the U.S., these schools
stay strong, especially in recent years. Data show that the first Chinese heritage language school
was established in San Francisco in 1886 (Liu 2010), with Cantonese as the major medium of
instruction and classic written Chinese texts as the teaching materials. By the end of the 1920s,
there were over fifty Chinese-language schools, with most of them in the western states (Chang
2003), which offered much longer teaching hours (after school and full days at the weekends)
than the contemporary Chinese schools (2–3 hours per week at the weekends). However, they
were, in general, independent of each other, with no interaction or collaboration with each other
until 1994, when two non-profit organizations were established to serve and lead: NCACLS
(National Council of Associations of Chinese Language Schools), which was established by

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immigrants from Taiwan, and CSAUS (Chinese School Association in the United States), estab-
lished by people from China. Each of these two organizations has its own member schools and
lends support to them in curricula development, mainstream communication, advocacy, and
articulation. Under their leadership, the Chinese community schools have been rapidly expand-
ing. By 1996, approximately 82,675 students were enrolled in 634 Chinese language schools
across the country (Chao 1997). At the present time, there are 200,000 students enrolled in these
schools. Specifically, NCACLS has close to 100,000 persons across 47 U.S. states, and CSAUS has
over 100,000 students and 7,000 teachers across 43 U.S. states. Together, they cover all the major
and medium metropolitan areas across the country.
Nevertheless, the community Chinese schools are supported by grass-roots efforts and man-
aged by volunteers and parents. They are not yet a full-fledged education system; they are marked
with mini-operation (two to three hours per week), insufficient funding provision (makeshift
classrooms and facilities), and out-of-date traditional teaching practices (instructors are mostly
untrained volunteers) (Xiao 2008a). Unlike the formal education system, the community Chi-
nese schools have no benchmarks or national/state regulations to follow or guide them, nor
power to track or reinforce the academic standards. One hears many compliments about their
contributions as well as many complaints about their teaching qualities. From her four-year-long
observations, Wang (2004) reported that, in the Chinese community classrooms, students were
asked to copy and memorize Hanzi over and over again, with the instruction seldom going
beyond sentences. She concluded with an alarming message that “there was no sense of progress
or achievement and students basically stay at the same level, unable to move forward in their HL
proficiency or literacy” (368). Such observation is supported by the researcher’s decade-long
mindful tracking of Justin, an 11-year-old U.S.-born second-generation Chinese immigrant
child. The data show that Justin has had a rich but trying experience in his language develop-
ment, which includes a sudden switch from a monolingual Chinese environment to a monolin-
gual English environment at 2, a complete loss of his home language proficiency by 3, relearning
his home language as a foreign language in weekend Chinese school by 5, being treated as a LEP
student in the formal school system at 6, and remaining in a weekend Chinese class for English
speakers only at the present time.
For better insight, I am quoting Justin’s summary of his CHL learning experience obtained
from my interview with him in summer 2012:

I was pretty good in Chinese when I was 2–3 years old because everybody spoke Chinese,
then I lost it when I went to preschool because everybody spoke English. When I was five,
I started Chinese school. My teachers were very good, but I only learned “yi diandian (very
little).” My teachers don’t talk Chinese in class, they only speak Chinese when teaching
Chinese (characters or words).

These data support the important role that the Chinese community language schools are
playing in CHL maintenance, but as grass-roots efforts they need substantial support and improve-
ment to meet the goals.

Discussion and Conclusion

With large-scale and individual case data, this section examines issues and social factors associated
with HL maintenance and education in the U.S. and the Chinese HL maintenance and educa-
tion, in particular, which gives rise to a number of significant findings.

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Yun Xiao

(1) Mismatch Between Practices and Goals

The present analysis reveals a serious mismatch between the mainstream educational practices and
the national goals for HLs. On the one hand, the “non-English” HL proficiency is urgently
needed by the nation, with the pressure of globalization and international competition looming
large; on the other, the test-driven NCLB educational practices limit the “non-English” language
instruction, with foreign language education underrepresented at grades 9–12 and minimal at
elementary level in the American school system (ACTFL 2010). Due to the limited involvement
of the U.S. school system, the daunting task of HL maintenance and education has been mainly
left to community language schools, which are, however, grass-roots makeshift entities outside of
the education system. Ironically, the reality well fits Fishman’s paradoxical observation (1966b,
394) that there are two large worlds of non-English languages in the United States: One is the
officially recognized and supported world of “foreign language” instruction in non-ethnic high
schools and colleges, and the other is the largely unrecognized and unsupported world of ethnic
language maintenance efforts. These two worlds come together in the U.S. but do not meet.

(2) Immigrant Families’ Desire and Dilemma

The evidence furnished in Fishman’s study reveals the alarming callousness towards the linguistic
needs of multilingual children, who have no choice but are forced to act on whatever the envi-
ronment dictates, and their parents never question or request that regular schools (pre-school,
kindergarten, elementary school) offer Chinese classes. Instead, they view this as their family
responsibility and fight the battle on their own. This is supported in Shin’s observation that
first-generation immigrant parents exhibit a greater tendency to believe that schools are working
in the best interest of their children and do not question, even though they are troubled by many
of the school practices (2006). As passive participants, the immigrant families are constantly pulled
in two competing directions: the de-ethnization and Americanization processes on the one hand,
and the cultural-linguistic self-maintenance on the other (Fishman 1966a, 15), during which the
same individuals and groups have to be simultaneously devoted to both.

(3) Community Language Schools and HL Learning

HL learners’ linguistic experience in the community language school, as noted above, raises the long-
time concerns for the teaching pedagogy and quality of these schools. Given the fact that they take
in overwhelmingly more HL students than the mainstream school system, these schools are in fact
the major player in HL maintenance and education. Thus, pedagogical advancement and up-to-date
teaching methodologies are crucial. Instead of teaching the students with bits and pieces of Chinese
in English, teachers should make use of the ethnic community and culture to create meaningful
contexts for learners to use the language. Moreover, to fulfill its mission, the national HL campaign
should reach this grass-roots level by bringing them the meaningful collaboration with the main-
stream school system and sufficient support in funding, facility, and teacher training. Without the
needed guidance and support, teaching quality concerns will linger, and these community language
schools will remain “immigrant clubs” instead of well-structured educational institutions.

(4) Implications for HL Research and Pedagogy

Scholarship provided in this chapter shows that, as in any new field of research, urgent advance-
ment is needed in HL research methods, assumptions, and frameworks. First, instead of being easy
to learn, HL loss is inevitable, and relearning it is difficult and costly. Next, there are two types

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of “home languages”: one originated in societal/dominant homes and the other in immigrant
homes. Unlike the former, which enjoys optimal and sufficient input, rich literacy activities and
materials, and compulsory home-school continuation, the latter suffers from mixed and insuffi-
cient input, limited literacy activities and materials, and inescapable home-school disconnection.
In this thread, some of the assumptions/frameworks, which have been influential in the field but
arguably treat HL as the societal first language, need to be further tested and reconsidered, such
as (1) at preschool age, HL children do not lose their native language proficiency (Ou and McA-
doo 1993, 252), (2) HLs are easy to learn (Krashen 1996), and (3) HL learners are exposed to
optimal input (O’Grady et al. 2011). It is hoped that the next generation of HL research will not
only integrate interrelated research perspectives for further investigation but also differentiate
first/immigrant home language from the societal home language with the contextual factors
taken into consideration.
To counter the HL loss and shift, which starts as quickly as the second generation and as early
as pre-school years, there need to be drastic responses from the U.S. American formal education
system and better coordination of the government HL initiatives and government language pol-
icies. In addition, the field expects:

• starting non-English language learning as early as pre-school years;

• providing more level-appropriate HL reading materials;
• supporting the community language schools and parents, morally, financially, and
pedagogically;
• recognizing qualified community language schools and granting them credit transfer status; and
• putting in place inter-institutional articulation among the various formal instructional set-
tings where HL education is conducted, including K–12 public and private schools, heritage
language schools, colleges and universities, and study abroad programs (McGinnis 1999).

Future Research
The next generation of HL research is anticipated to employ interrelated disciplines and strive to
improve the evidence base, with more longitudinal studies that assess the characteristics of HL
learning in different settings—such as immigrant homes, classrooms, and social networks—on
which the U.S. HL initiatives, language planning, and HL education should be grounded.

Further Reading
Chinese as a Heritage Language: Fostering Rooted World Citizenry (2008), edited by Agnes Weiyun He and
Yun Xiao. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai‘i, National Foreign Language Resource Center.
Heritage Language Education: A New Field Emerging (2008), edited by Donna M. Briton, Olga Kagan, and
Susan Bauckus. New York and London: Routledge.
The Education of Language Minority Immigrants in the United States (2009), edited by Terrence G. Wiley,
Jin Sook Lee, and Russell W. Rumberger. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.

Note
1 The Immigrant and Intergenerational Mobility in Metropolitan Los Angeles (IIMMLA) survey 2004–
2008 was conducted under the direction of Rubén G. Rumbaut, Frank D. Bean, Leo Chávez, Jennifer
Lee, Susan K. Brown, and Louis DeSipio of the University of California, Irvine, and Min Zhou of the
University of California, Los Angeles. Further information is available at www.russellsage.org/research/
Immigration/IIMMLA

379
Yun Xiao

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 29
Learner Language
Sisko Brunni and Jarmo H. Jantunen

Historical Perspectives
Since the beginnings of research on language learning and teaching, learner language analysis has
been the natural starting point for researchers. Even though learner language has offered infor-
mation on the language variants produced by learners, learner language has been researched to a
great extent to describe the learning process. By examining learner language, researchers have
aimed to discover what happens in language learning, on the one hand, and between different
language pairs, on the other hand, as well as how this should be taken into consideration in lan-
guage teaching. Ellis (2008) divides learner language research into four development phases:
examination of the errors that learners make, development phases in learning, learner language
variation, and pragmatic success.
Actual theory-based learner language research had a strong start in the 1960s with error anal-
ysis, which had a natural foundation in that much attention had traditionally been paid to errors
and how to correct them. Error analysis focuses specifically on analysing learner products, as
opposed to earlier contrastive research, where the tendency was to explain learning by comparing
the learner’s mother tongue and the target language and then predict problems in learning based
on this comparison. The fundamental idea was that by analysing and classifying errors, one would
be able to discover what happens in the learning process and how it proceeds (see Corder 1967;
George 1972; Richards 1974). As a method of studies using error analysis, especially in the early
decades, the theoretical framework has typically been the interlanguage theory. Interlanguage
(Selinker 1972; see also Corder 1971) is the language learner’s language system, which is system-
atic and is governed by its own laws. Typical characteristics of interlanguage are implicit language
knowledge, regularity, progress in phases, and variation (Ellis 1990). The interlanguage concept
has been widely replaced by the concept of learner language, which is not tied to similar premises.
For example, not all researchers consider variability as an inherent feature for interlanguage, and
learning strategies responsible for interlanguage development are very controversial issues (Ellis
and Barkhuizen 2005, 55).
Error analysis proceeds in phases, from collecting the product to identifying, classifying, inter-
preting, and evaluating errors (Corder 1974; Ellis and Barkhuizen 2005). Research data can be
collected from language spontaneously produced by learners, but due to the challenges related to

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the collecting process, completely spontaneous data is usually replaced with data that has been
defined according to certain criteria and collected specifically for the purposes of the research.
This data is first processed to find the errors based on grammatical rules and the rules of accepta-
bility; then, performance errors (mistakes) are distinguished from actual competence errors
(errors) when necessary (Corder 1967). Next, the detected errors are classified according to
certain taxonomy. The classes may include omissions, additions, misformation, or misordering
(Dulay, Burt, and Krashen 1982; James 1998). The reasons for these errors are sought through
interpretations; Richards (1971) lists mother tongue interference (interference errors), overgener-
alisation of the target language characteristics or the wrong kind of applications (intralingual
errors), as well as creating hypotheses based on inadequate language skills (developmental errors)
as background factors (for closer analysis, see Ellis 2008, 53–56). Finally, the errors are analysed
from the point of view of successful communication and comprehensibility of the message. Even
though error analysis has been much criticised, for example, for focusing specifically on what the
learner does not know (and not on what the learner knows) and for unsystematic collecting of
the background data in the studies, the method is still in use. Despite the limitations of this
method, the study of errors has a practical significance to language pedagogy, since it reveals
which features in language are difficult for a learner at certain levels. Without understanding the
nature of the error, teachers are not able to focus on the difficulties and problematic issues in
language acquisition. The latest applications of the method are its use in corpus-based learner
language research: Several learner corpora—such as International Corpus of Learner English (Granger
2003)—have been annotated making use of error taxonomy.
Research in the development phases of learning developed quickly alongside error analysis;
the research was guided by the presumption that language proficiency changes through certain
systematic phases and that second language development is at least partially similar to mother
language acquisition (L2 = L1 hypothesis). When defining learning, the researchers have aimed
to discover the point at which an expression appears for the first time and the point when it has
been adopted so well that the learner is able to use it almost continuously in a manner appropriate
to the target language. According to Ellis (2008, 68–69), the focus of the research is on obligatory
use situations of linguistic elements (obligatory occasion analysis), target-like language use
(target-like use analysis), and frequencies of linguistic elements (frequency analysis). In terms of
development, changes in fluency, accuracy, and complexity during learning may be examined.
The research objects and methods are closely related, because the linguistic elements examined
are described according to development phases and the comparison made with target language
instead of understanding that the learners’ product has its own system governed by its own laws
(cf. Bley-Vroman 1983 for comparative fallacy). The development phases are described based on
individual and small group data that is collected in longitudinal studies: language learners were
observed for a certain time period (usually less than a year) in order to examine the development
of their language proficiency (see, e.g., Wong-Fillmore 1979; Schumann 1978).
Longitudinal studies have revealed that the development of L2 proceeds in certain similar
learning phases and that these phases typically appear in a certain order, regardless of the learner
or their mother tongue (e.g., confusing languages and semantic and grammatical simplicity are
typical phenomena in the early phases of language learning). However, regardless of the learners’
general tendencies, the learners have their own learning paths and the pace of learning in par-
ticular varies according to the individual. This research tradition represents the meeting of two
different research questions in language learning: What are the universal characteristics of lan-
guage learning (e.g., cognitive processes of learning), on the one hand, and characteristics of
individual variation (e.g., learning strategies, age, motivation), on the other hand? How can the
effect that they have on learning be discovered? From the point of view of data use, research has

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proceeded more and more towards using authentic language data: Many case studies have been
based on real speech or discourse material. In current studies based on vast corpora, research on
individual variation and general tendencies are often combined.
Even though much research aims to find general tendencies in language learning, it has not
been able to ignore the vast and diverse variation in learner language. Using statistical analyses
and manipulation tests, research has focused on the variation brought about by the mother
tongue and target language as well as the social environment, on the one hand, and the variation
among language learners and the product of one language learner, on the other hand. Variation
in learner language has not been considered as an unusual phenomenon as such, since language
contains natural variation in any case: language changes by idiolect, register, region, et cetera. The
following models have been used to explain the variation present in learner language (Ellis 2008,
117–128):

1) According to the homogenous competence model, variation is a phenomenon that is a part

of the performance, and not as such a characteristic of the learner’s systemic language knowl-
edge. Variation presents itself as slips and performative errors, and the focus of research is
intuitive knowledge of correct or possible expressions, and not actual language use.
2) The sociolinguistic model emphasises the idea that the language user’s and learner’s compe-
tence inherently creates variation. Variation can be caused by the language itself (e.g., the
abundant and varied cases in synthetic languages), social context of the language use (such as
social status, age, or gender and the meaning of these factors in a language use situation) as well
as internal variation of individual speakers or external variation of different speakers in terms
of vocabulary, registers, and styles.
3) The psycholinguistic approach emphasises the ability of the language learner to process L2
information. It has been observed, for example, that preparation input and the time used on
the product affect the quality of the product and cause variation (e.g., Crookes 1989; Ochs
1979). In addition, language learners have the ability to monitor their product, or improve
it by reducing errors or by selecting forms more appropriate to the context.
4) The two latter factors are combined in the social-psychological model, according to which
variation is created through the joint influence of psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic factors
in institutional, social and other—such as ethnic—groups. Observations have been made, for
example, of how people engaged in discussion adjust (or do not adjust) their language
according to whether there are non-native speakers involved in the discussion (see Zuengler
1991).

Because language proficiency denotes not only the application of formal language knowledge
in practice, but also situational language competence, there has been increasing interest in learner
language pragmatics, or pragmatic competence. Pragmatic success is influenced by, for example,
the learner’s mother tongue, transfer, and the learner’s status in the conversation. Learners can, for
example, transfer the language use rules of their native language and home culture to the target
language and culture, which can manifest itself as over- or under-politeness or in different prac-
tices of who is allowed to address whom and start a conversation.
Based on the analysis of different interviews, role-play, and field situations, as well as introspec-
tive analysis, researchers have reached the conclusion that even if the formal language knowledge
of the learners is good, they still have many problems with politeness as well as with producing
requests, apologies, and refusals, especially from a pragmatic perspective. In addition, it has been
noted that in communicative situations, the language learner is often not an equal participant and
that their social status may change in the target society. It is therefore crucial to ask what kind of

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a status the conversation partners assign to someone whose language use is not native-like (see
Kang and Rubin 2009).
The previously described historical developments are not separate from each other method-
ologically or temporally. At present, none of these research traditions have entirely disappeared
from SLA research.

Core Issues and Key Findings

When researching second language acquisition, the object may be the product itself, the produc-
tion process and, even more generally, how the overall learning process takes place. By researching
the language produced by learners (the product), knowledge is accumulated on the simplicity vs.
complexity, atypical frequencies and structures typical of the vocabulary, and other linguistic
features of the learner language. Characteristics on the level of production, such as overgeneral-
isation, simplification, and avoidance strategies, are more difficult to study because they are not
clearly visible in the product but require experimental methods and interpretation of the results.
Characteristics explaining the products, however, may include, for example, the influence of L1
language and possible universals of the learner language (e.g., over-generalisation and simplifica-
tion have been suggested as more or less universal characteristics of language learning, see e.g.
Odlin 2002; Jarvis and Pavlenko 2008; Jantunen 2008), and this concerns research on the whole
learning process. Vast international cooperation projects focusing on several languages are neces-
sary in order to examine these factors in the future.
When the restrictions of error analysis were acknowledged and, instead of studying the defi-
ciencies in the language, the entire L2 product of the learner became the object of study, the
realisation was made that errors are not merely deficiencies in language skills but rather are an
essential and necessary part of language development. Based on this observation, researchers
started to examine the learner’s language system as its own system, as the abovementioned inter-
language (Selinker 1972), which has its own typical features (Ellis 1990). As the interlanguage is
not a perfect or stable system, new forms from both the external language environment as well
as the language itself infiltrate it easily. This can be seen, for example, in over-presentation and
irregular use of certain forms. Behind interlanguage there are the general learning and commu-
nication strategies that predispose towards oversimplification and overuse of expressions, on the
one hand, but also avoiding certain expressions and negotiation of meaning of other expressions,
on the other hand. Interlanguage can be characterised as mainly implicit language awareness; its
users are not aware of its regularities.
The central question in the research area of learner language is to discover the nature of the
language development process in order to explain and predict the acquisition process. By exam-
ining interlanguage, researchers have discovered that language learners construct their language
skills step by step and review certain phases during the process, but development does not by any
means proceed in a linear manner towards a target language product resembling that of native
language users of the language. Instead, it may include recession phases and the language may
fossilise at times (or stabilize; see Long 2003) to a certain stage. This observation is very signifi-
cant from a pedagogic point of view because it forms a basis for considering the order in
which, for example, morphemes should be taught. On the other hand, great variation may take
place in the language of one learner depending on the situation and the tasks; examining the
variation in learner language has, in fact, been an essential phase in examining interlanguage. This
variation is in part random, but it also exhibits signs of systematicity. For example, the odds for
some certain forms appearing may be predicted according to how much time the speaker has for
planning what they have to say and who the recipient is (see Tarone 1983; Preston 1996). Despite

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variation, the tendency is nevertheless that the learner proceeds phase-by-phase towards native-
like language.
From a pedagogic point of view, it is even more significant that the phases of language acqui-
sition of a certain language exhibit the same tendency for regularity of phases even on a general
level as the language development of an individual. For example, the formation of different
interrogative sentences is learnt in more or less the same order (e.g., Pienemann et al. 1988),
regardless of the background of the language learner. Understanding the phases of the language
development and the order of the phases may be a concrete aid in syllabus planning: what is
taught, when, and in which order. However, recent dynamic approaches L2 development
(cf. Larsen-Freeman 1997; de Bot et al. 2007) focus on patterns of variation that accompany
developmental trends: The trajectory of L2 development is not necessarily straightforward.
The development of different areas (e.g., vocabulary, syntax) of learner language can be exam-
ined through individual phenomena but on a more general level the development process can be
seen in the development of language accuracy, fluency, and complexity, which includes the separate
areas. Evaluation of language accuracy is based on the target language that the learner language is
compared to: The closer the learner language is to the language spoken by native speakers, the
more accurate it is. The studies focus mainly on grammatical issues; they examine, for example,
the number of correct sentences, the share of target-language morphologic or lexical expressions,
and self-corrections (see Crookes 1989; Ellis and Yuan 2005). The problem, however, is defining
which variety of the native language should be used as the norm in each case. Furthermore, it is
good to note that the concepts of “native language” and “native speaker” are arbitrary (Paikeday
1985), since native speakers also violate grammatical rules (Mulder and Hulstijn 2011, 491).
Fluency, on the other hand, is related to the language production process. Automatisation of
the language, reaction speed, corrections, breaks, and idiomacy of expressions, as well as native-
like usage, are seen as background issues. The methods focus either on measuring the speed of
writing or speech or hesitation expressing non-fluent language, which can be examined through
breaks or corrections, for example (see, e.g., Skehan and Foster 2008). Complexity, on the other
hand, tells about the learner’s ability to use non-automatised language that is difficult and pushes
the limits of the individual’s knowledge as well as command of complex linguistic structures. The
phenomenon is related to many levels of language: The language can be approached from an
interactive perspective, measuring, for example, the turns taken, or it can be measured from a
lexical or grammatical perspective (the number of words, number of sentences, subordinate and
coordinate relationships within sentences, or frequency of some grammatical feature, such as
number of verb arguments; see, e.g., Yuan and Ellis 2003).
Research on development areas is also significant in terms of language teaching and classroom
conventions. Teacher planning, expressions and structures used by the teacher, guidelines for assign-
ments, and the chance for students to plan their product—all of these are factors affecting the
development of the students’ accuracy, complexity, and fluency (see Skehan and Foster 1997;
Crookes, 1989; Tavakoli and Skehan 2005; Ellis and Yuan 2005; Rahimpour and Nariman-Jahan
2011; Skehan et al. 2012). On the other hand, task types, the students’ level of competence, and other
external factors may also affect how advance planning, for example, influences the product.
In recent decades, factors affecting the product and production process, especially crosslinguis-
tic influence, have become an important research topic, in addition to the analysis of learner
language characteristics. Mother tongue transfer has been an object of research for a long time.
In its initial stages, source language was seen merely as a negative influence interfering with target
language acquisition, whereas nowadays researchers believe that the mother tongue may have a
positive as well as a negative effect. In addition, the influence is not limited to structural factors
and the product, but the influence must always be examined on the level of language processing.

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One way to examine the effect of the source language is to examine the learner language prod-
ucts of learners of the same target language and speakers of a different source language and
compare the general tendencies and probabilities visible in these products. Another way to com-
pare the source and learner language is to look for statistically significant repetitions resembling
the source language in the learner language. The research of interlingual influence is at its most
effective when both methods are combined (Odlin 1989; Selinker 1992; Jarvis 2000). However,
the influence of the source language is such a complex process that even though at present much
of the research is done with non-English language data, and the vast learner language corpus data
have opened up new possibilities, the nature of the process cannot yet be completely explained.
There are many ways in which the source language may or may not have an effect.

Research Approaches
According to Ellis and Barkhuizen (2005, 9–11), SLA research may be divided into three research
paradigms: normative, interpretative, and critical analysis. The aim of the first is to test the gen-
eral hypotheses of L2 acquisition objectively; interpretative analysis aims to understand and
discover variables related to learning and their relations; and the last paradigm is interested in
sociopolitical and ideological issues in language learning. Each of these has its own typical
methods and data, even though the research paradigms are rarely seen in studies in a pure form.
Normative research traditionally uses tests and questionnaires directed at vast groups of learners
that are analysed, mostly quantitatively. Interpretative analyses are based on qualitative case stud-
ies, and the purpose of a study is not to generalise on a wide scale but “to describe and under-
stand some aspect of L2 acquisition subjectively” (Ellis & Barkhuizen 2005, 10). Like interpretative
research, at its most typical, critical analysis is also qualitative and is based on case studies. It aims
to identify the sociopolitical conditions and power relations that hinder learners from acquiring
target languages.
The data used in the research vary greatly depending on the research questions. They can be
divided roughly into three categories, according to Ellis and Barkhuizen (2005). Non-linguistic
data describes the reactions of a language learner to a certain stimulus or tests their understanding
and discovery of grammatical structures. This metalinguistic data helps access the language learn-
er’s intuitive and introspective knowledge regarding language, but the data is not exactly suitable
for examining learner language. Instead, different samples of the learners’ products are core mate-
rial for the study of learner language. Examining the expressions produced by learners starts with
collection and analysis of different elicited data.
Collecting elicited data has been relatively simple, which has guaranteed this approach’s pop-
ularity for research purposes—true to this day. Elicited data can be divided into two groups
(Corder 1981): Clinically elicited data have been assembled for a specific study, in which case they
may be data compiled from tasks that strive to describe the language in a general way and are
contextualised (e.g., shopping lists) or from tasks that are focused and aim to describe certain
structures or linguistic phenomena (e.g., tasks that produce requests or grammatical forms).
Experimental elicitation test data are most likely the best-known data used in language learning
research. They typically consist of different fill-in-the-blank exercises (fill in words or sentences)
or question-answer exercises, the purpose of which is to obtain as products those language fea-
tures that the researcher is interested in. The weakness of both types of elicited data is considered
to be that they do not represent the natural product of language learners. For this reason, research-
ers have turned to collecting data for the purpose of describing specifically the kind of language
that language learners would produce in natural language use situations.

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More recent research data are usually extensive, and when compiling them one may take into
consideration the fact that they would be suitable for research data for more than one study.
These data have typically been written language data, but spoken language and recently also
multimodal (e.g., video-recorded) data are increasingly used. The most extensive data are elec-
tronic corpus data, which at present are abundant. The most extensive and best-known data is
International Corpus of Learner English (Granger 2003), which includes argumentative essays by
advanced learners. So far, most corpora are indeed compilations of one text type and only contain
products by advanced students. Similarly to elicited data, corpus data also have their own prob-
lems from the point of view of research: Even though corpora at present represent natural learner
products, their data has not been produced entirely spontaneously, as the texts have usually been
collected for a corpus either during classroom teaching or, for example, through online compi-
lation. Like all instructors know, learners write using expressions that they master well or believe
they master. Therefore it is not easy to access expressions that the learners do not fully master,
which means that the corpus data, likewise any other learner data, do not reveal the whole pic-
ture of learner language and knowledge of a language. In addition, corpora only allow for
indirect analysis of the learning process because it is only possible to make interpretations based
on the data; it is not usually possible to ask the producer of the text why they have produced a
certain expression or how they have come to a certain solution. In addition to, or in combina-
tion with, learner language data, it is of course possible to collect introspective reports and
self-evaluations about the motives behind the product through interviews, forms, Script Logs
(which are recording tools for research on the process of writing and which keep a record of all
events on the keyboard), or think-aloud protocol. Such versatile combination of methods,
however, is still quite rare.

New Debates
To date, most of the research conducted has been such that cannot be used to carefully
describe the development of learner language with reference to different levels. This is due
to the fact that longitudinal studies have been made with very small sample sizes or that the
method has been a so-called quasi-longitudinal study, which means that the informants have
not been the same across different proficiency levels. With the current corpus methods, it
would be possible to compile extensive data that contain texts by the same text producers in
different phases of language learning. Ever larger corpora create the possibility for drawing
better comparisons and collecting quantitative data on the different phases of learner language
development.
The lack of spoken data in comparison to written data is partially related to the abovemen-
tioned situation. Despite the fact that collecting spoken language data is challenging, obtaining
this data is necessary for the needs of research; after all, spoken language is usually predominant
in relation to the written variant in terms of communication purposes. Extensive spoken lan-
guage data already exist to some extent, such as LINDSEI (Louvain International Database of
Spoken English Interlanguage, Gilquin et al. 2010) and MICASE (Michigan Corpus of Academic
Spoken English, Simpson et al. 2002), but they usually consist of discourses produced by English
learners. Researchers should therefore strive to collect data more extensively in different lan-
guages. The latter is also true of learner language data and research on a wider scale, as they
examine learner language and, through it, language learning. Considering the language situation
in the world, it is natural that English language corpora are dominant and the research is focused
largely on learning English and Indo-European languages.

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If we wish to examine language learning on a wider scale—for example, from the point of
view of universal tendencies—the current distorted situation does not grant the possibility for
this. It is therefore extremely important that both spoken and written data be collected from
other widely spoken—and studied—languages, such as learner’s Chinese and learner’s Indian, but
also less studied languages, such as Finno-Ugric languages. Examining smaller and less-studied
languages challenges previous studies and may bring up features of learning and learner language
that cannot be accessed through analysing current language data. For example, examining the
learning of synthetic languages rich in morphology would be particularly rewarding in terms of
learner language research.
English, which is poor in morphology, does not reveal morphological and morphosyntactic
problems. Even though analysis of morphological, morphophonological, and morphosyntactic
characteristics has a strong basis in, for example, research in the synthetic Finno-Ugric languages,
these characteristics have not been examined as extensively elsewhere—and whereas learner English
has been examined greatly in terms of syntax and vocabulary, lexical research has not become pop-
ular in researching, for example, learning the synthetic Finnish language. In order to obtain a general
description or a theoretical model regarding language learning, there is need to balance and increase
research objects in different languages, on one hand from the point of view of selecting language
phenomena to be examined and on the other hand from the point of view of researching registers
and genres.
The research in learning vocabulary is closely related to research in learning phraseology and
lexical priming, which means the expected preferences for expressions from lexical and gram-
matical factors to stylistic and textual co-occurrences (see Hoey 2005 on lexical priming). Both
are important from a pedagogic point of view: how the expressions should be taught in entities
larger than one word so that learning and reception would become easier and faster and so that
the learner product would become native-like faster. It is, however, questionable, whether the
native-like performance is most learners’ goal in the first place and whether the appropriate
model for language use comes from native speakers (Cook 1999). Research performed so far
(e.g., Nesselhauf 2005) has shown that even extremely advanced students make abundant phra-
seological errors when producing collocations atypical of the target language. In examining
priming and phraseology in learner language, there is also reason to move to a more abstract level
than collocations: how language learners master the semantic associations of expressions, and
what is the learners’ priming—or morphologic priming (the characteristics related to use of the
conjugated forms of words in the core and context of an expression) in general regarding syn-
thetic languages (see Jantunen and Brunni 2013).
Transfer and lately cross-linguistic influence in a wider sense has possibly been the most exam-
ined phenomenon in language learning (see, e.g., Odlin 1989; Jarvis and Pavlenko 2008). There
is still, however, ignorance regarding what is the significance of previously learnt languages in
language learning. How can mother tongue transfer be seen in learning and what kind of role in
learning and the product do second or third languages have? There is also a lack of extensive
research data as to how language learning and learnt languages affect the use of the mother
tongue; does learning other languages enrich one’s expressive repertoire, will it bring transfer to
the mother tongue—and if so, what kind?
Nowadays (in Europe) it is also important to start considering the applicability of the Common
European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, teaching, assessment (Council of Europe
2001) as a tool for describing learner language. There is reason to determine how the framework,
based on assessing active language proficiency, can be used to describe and assess the learner’s
products and what kind of structural and lexical characteristics are represented at which level. In
addition, there is reason to pay attention to the consistency of assessing the products: Are the

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assessment decisions made by different assessors consistent, and, if not, how and why are the
assessments different? The last question is critical when the products are being assessed for vast
language data such as corpora: How consistent must the assessments be in order to include the
product in research data?

Implications for Education

Currently one speaks of language acquisition and development instead of learning, and it is
understood that only a small part of the processes are due to classroom-type education. In fact,
the entire language system and language learning are seen, for example, in the Dynamic Systems
Theory, as a chaotic, nonlinear process in constant change, where everything affects everything
and the changes happening are due to both internal and external circumstances (Larsen-Freeman
1997; 2002; de Bot et al. 2007). For this reason, the traditional pedagogic key issues have become
more important than ever: Does guided teaching help in acquiring some language features, and
are there some teaching methods that are more efficient than others? How can all this be seen in
the learner’s product? When and in what order do certain language features manifest themselves
in the learner language and how do they become regular? The acquisition should be understood
as a holistic phenomenon instead of clear-cut learning processes and teaching methods that
would be functional to all language learners and all language learning situations. The complexity
of language teaching and acquisition is added to by the fact that the L2 teaching field is vast and
includes teaching children as well as adults, learning in classrooms, the internet, target-language
countries, or environments with no contact with the target language. In addition, the learner may
have an academic education or be illiterate. One of the great challenges of L2 pedagogy is to be
able to offer the best possible teaching for all those who need it. In this task, the language user
cannot be separated from the environment in which the learning takes place: learning is closely
linked to sociocognitive thinking, and there is need for holistic theories connecting language,
cognition, and interaction. Nowadays, learning environments and interaction are examined to a
great deal, for example, negotiations of meaning, communication strategies, influence of the
learning environment, and the teacher’s role in the teaching situation. With these research set-
tings, researchers aim to discover how and through what kind of classroom practices it is possible
to attain the aspired goals.
Developing L2 pedagogy is one of the most significant reasons why we began to study learner
language in the first place. When discussing teaching, its parallel concept, learning, must be
defined. Has a certain linguistic phenomenon been learnt when it occurs in the language for the
first time, or only after it has been used correctly in most cases? Research uses both definitions,
but since the former is a somewhat unreliable meter, some researchers (see, e.g., Pienemann 1985)
have defined the occurrence of a phenomenon in the learner language two times as the prereq-
uisite for learning. When learning has been defined, it becomes possible to examine the order of
learning phenomena, which—as stated previously—observes a certain order not only on an
individual level, but also on a general level. In this manner, it is possible to discover a language
learning theory or model for a certain language that could be used in producing teaching mate-
rials, teacher training, and developing assessment methods and equipment, as well as in concrete
classroom situations. However, it is dangerous to generalise, for example, a certain model con-
cerning English into a universal model, as language acquisition is affected by so many variables,
such as the proximity of the source and target languages and whether they are related. On the
other hand, we must keep in mind that language acquisition varies substantially also within one
language: Individual learning strategies, learners’ backgrounds, learning contexts, teaching meth-
ods, et cetera, all affect how a language is acquired and how learning paths will develop.

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Language development and acquisition of language features in a certain order also helps in
developing assessment methods, since the development process can be divided into levels accord-
ing to phases, with certain language features occurring at each phase. An example of such a skill
level description is the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, teaching,
assessment (Council of Europe 2001). Its primary purpose is to assist in comparing interpretations,
but it also functions as an aid in assessment and producing teaching material on a national level.
Language proficiency is described with the help of a six-step proficiency level scale, and it is thus
the basis for the common language policies of the European Union. A similar interlingual assess-
ment and comparison scale has not previously been in use.
It is a great pedagogic challenge to apply the results of the development work and research
knowledge in teacher training and study books. Researchers have long discussed, for example,
phraseology and its significance in second language acquisition. The phraseological units used by
learners and natives differ, and according to research even time spent in a target-language country
does not automatically make these units consistent; awareness of phraseology must be made clear
to the students through systematic teaching, which means a new type of approach to language
(Meunier and Granger 2008; Nesselhauff 2005). Lewis (1993; 1997) approaches the topic from
a pedagogic point of view and speaks of a so-called Lexical Approach, where the limits between
vocabulary and grammar are shaken also in the teaching, and vocabulary is seen more as a lexicon
that consists not only of words, but also of collocations, idioms, and institutional expressions. A
similar new approach to language and its acquisition is Hoey’s (2005) lexical priming, where
words are examined in their actual contexts of use and the focus is on their interactive relation-
ship to lexical, grammatical, and semantic co-occurrences. Only awareness of this will help
speakers develop into fluent, creative, and natural target-language speakers.

Further Reading

Historical
Corder, S. P. (1974). Error analysis. In J. P. Allen and S. P. Corder (Eds.), The Edinburgh Course in Applied
Linguistics Volume 3: Techniques in Applied Linguistics (pp. 122–154). London: Oxford University Press.
Odlin, T. (1989). Language transfer. Cross-linguistic influence in language learning. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press.
Selinker, L. (1972). Interlanguage. International Review of Applied Linguistics, 10(3), 209–231.

Recent
Ellis, R., and Barkhuizen, G. (2005). Analysing learner language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Jarvis, S., and Pavlenko, A. (2008). Crosslinguistic influence in language and cognition. New York: Routledge.
Meunier, F. and Granger, S. (2008). Phraseology in foreign language learning and teaching. Amsterdam: John
Benjamins Publishing Company.

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acquisition. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 10(1), 7–21.
Cook, V. (1999). Going beyond the native speaker in language teaching. TESOL Quarterly, 33(2) 185–209.
Corder, S. P. (1967). The significance of learners’ errors. International Review of Applied Linguistics, 5(4),
161–170.

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Corder, S. P. (1971). Idiosyncratic dialects and error analysis. International Review of Applied Linguistics, 9(2),
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Corder, S. P. (1974). Error analysis. In J. P. Allen and S. P. Corder (Eds.), The Edinburgh Course in Applied
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 Part 7
Ethics and Politics in
Educational Linguistics
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 30
“Who Gets to Say?” Political and
Ethical Dilemmas for Researchers
in Educational Linguistics
Kristen H. Perry and Christine A. Mallozzi

If the participant and the researcher belong to different cultures, it is possible

that both ethics and the research process will mean something different to each.1

Introduction: Who Says What Is Ethical?

In this chapter, we explore ethical and methodological issues of applying discourse analysis in
research involving language learners. Our interest in this specific topic is grounded in the many
methodological challenges and ethical dilemmas we faced as we attempted to analyze narratives
of adult refugees. This chapter does not represent an exhaustive review of the field; instead, we
seek to raise and describe important issues.
Historically, federal ethical guidelines for research emerged out of concerns regarding certain
research studies and practices that were highly problematic from human rights standpoints
(Brinkmann 2010; Cameron et al. 1993; Christians 2000; Denzin 2010; Howe and Moses 1999;
Lincoln 2005). In addition to being sparked by particular unethical research studies, these guide-
lines were also shaped by social, cultural, historical, and political worldviews, specifically those of
the global West/North. This viewpoint represents a utilitarian perspective that was grounded in
Enlightenment thinking (Christians 2000; Howe and Moses 1999), ultimately asserting that a
single set of moral considerations (i.e., respect for persons, beneficence, and social justice) could
guide all inquiry. These ethical guidelines have been codified in the Belmont Report, federal
guidelines, and various institutions’ Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) or Research Ethics Boards
(REBs)2; they emphasize informed consent, privacy/confidentiality, and accuracy, and oppose
deception in research. Thus, under typical scenarios, the determination of what is ethical is pri-
marily a top-down approach, guided by externally imposed guidelines and oversight processes.
Researchers who engage in qualitative research, however, have long questioned the applicabil-
ity of these ethical guidelines in situated research, particularly that which involves participants
across linguistically, culturally, and/or ethnically diverse populations (e.g., Brinkmann 2010;
Christians 2000; Denzin 2010; Howe and Moses 1999; Perry 2007; 2011). Most relevant to this
chapter are scholars’ arguments that (a) culture shapes understandings of research and ethics
(e.g., Koulouriotis 2011), and (b) that ethics is a dialogic, rather than prescriptive, process.3

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No chapter can possibly cover every ethical issue that may occur in research. However, there
are several common ethical issues that researchers involved in educational linguistics may face.
Like other types of qualitative researchers, those conducting discourse analysis with language
learners may face issues of power relationships, such as Who makes decisions regarding the research
study? How will participants be represented? or even Who determines what is ethical? Additionally,
educational linguistics naturally invites ethical questions related to language. When researching
communities in which the researchers’ and participants’ language proficiencies differ, difficult
questions may arise, including: Which language should be used for data collection and/or analysis?
Which participants should be included? Should translators be used, and, if so, how? How will differences in
meaning be recognized and accounted for?

The Macro-Microethics Continuum

How can researchers in educational linguistics address ethical issues, especially given the critiques
of many researchers, who argue that research ethics have been externally imposed and therefore
are inappropriate? Rather than wholly rejecting existing ethical models, scholars increasingly
offer distinctions between codified ethical rules and the ethical decisions made in the moment
of actually conducting research. For example, Guillemin and Gillam distinguish between macro-
ethics and microethics. Macroethics, or what they also call procedural ethics, represent the rules that
must be followed to satisfy external regulations. In contrast, microethics, or what they term ethics
in practice, refer to “the ‘ethically important moments’ in doing research—the difficult, often
subtle, and usually unpredictable situations that arise in the practice of doing research.”4
Kubanyiova (2008) similarly draws upon Haverkamp’s distinction between virtue ethics, or the
researcher’s ability to “discern ethically important situations and make ethical decisions,” and
what Haverkamp names as ethics of care, or ethics that “recognize the relational character of
research.”5 Thus, according to Kubanyiova, decision-making in situated research requires a
careful balance between macroethical principles, ethics of care, and virtue ethics. In answer to
the question of who determines what is ethical, the construct of microethics suggests that the
researcher, perhaps in consultation with participants, determines ethical behavior based on the
context of the research.
From a microethical perspective, a researcher’s ethical competence and ethical reflexivity are also
crucial, involving the “researcher’s willingness to acknowledge the ethical dimension of research
practice, his or her ability to actually recognize the ethical dimension when it comes into play,
and his or her ability to think through ethical issues and respond appropriately.” 6 Recognition of
the ways in which research and ethics are culturally situated is crucial, as Koulouriotis argued
based on her study of three education researchers working with non-native English-speaking par-
ticipants. As she found, “all the researchers touched on the potential disparity between how REBs
conceptualized ethical research conduct and how ethics and the research endeavor were perceived
in participants’ own cultures.”7 For example, researchers and institutions typically interpret mac-
roethical principles to mean that participants’ identities should be protected, which leads to
research practices designed to ensure anonymity. However, potential participants may not view
individual privacy as important—indeed, as Perry found, some Sudanese refugees associated
name-changing with the oppressive northern Sudanese regime, which often forced Southerners
to change their names to something Islamic. Given potential disparities, researchers need to
engage in culturally reflexive inquiry (Gildersleeve 2010; Palmer 2010), which is predicated on
cultural competence, “a critical disposition that is related to the researcher’s ability to accurately
represent reality in culturally complex communities.”8 Matters of microethics and macroethics
are complex in research on the culturally saturated site of discourse.

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What Counts as Discourse?

Defining discourse is not just interesting fodder for theoretical discussions of ontology and episte-
mology; these matters direct methodologies and, thus, have a bearing on research ethics. Defini-
tions of discourse vary both within and across fields of study (Bové 1995; Mills 2004); thus,
concepts about discourse cannot be blindly taken across disciplinary borders. However, we draw
inspiration from an exchange between Corcorran9 and Potter10 in discursive psychology literature
that identified analyses’ focus on what discourse is doing compared to what discourse means.
Because different epistemological approaches toward discourse necessarily will shape research
approaches, we describe ethical issues that may arise in considering what discourse means and does
in the following sections.

Who Says What Discourse Means?

Discourse can be studied for the objects, ideas, events, and more that it describes, as a system
through which meaning is communicated. Gee’s theory distinguishes Discourse and discourse,
though both are inextricably linked.11 Big “D” Discourse is defined as behavior, values, ways of
thinking, clothes, food, customs, perspectives; that is to say, big “D” Discourse encompasses the
ways of being in the world to achieve a certain meaning or identity. Little “d” discourse, termed
language-in-use, is the specific linguistic bits one uses in attempts to construct that intended
meaning or identity. Both can be analyzed for meaning.
Meaning is a primary consideration in educational linguistic research; as a result, researchers
must consider ethical issues in relation to meaning and who determines it. Research involving
linguistically diverse communities represents a challenge, because language and culture—and
accompanying meanings—may not be shared by the researcher and the participants in a study. As
Bell argued, “We may not understand the story that our participants are telling us, or we may think
we understand and impose on their story an interpretation that reflects our own assumptions.”12
As Janusch similarly noted,13

The perils of traversing lines between meaning and interpretation are tricky under the best
of circumstances, and no matter how much we may think we know about what someone
really means by what they say in another language, we are always working in the uncharted
territory of “third places.” (Kramsch 1993)

That is, meaning does not entirely belong to either the researcher or the participant, but rather
is negotiated in the space between.
The focus on discursive meaning would include attempts to understand language and lan-
guage behavior. In Australia, Arciuli, Mallard, and Villar studied the use of linguistic “fillers”
found in many languages, such as “um” and “like.” Although different fillers have varied lexical
status, these utterances were considered signs of disfluent speech of native-language speakers, and
even signs of lying, but Arciuli, Mallard, and Villar found that not all “ums” and “likes” are equal
in meaning and that these fillers may simply be signs of the speaker’s cognitive overload.14 Reasons
for cognitive overload are many, of which lying is only one. For a language learner not yet adept
at the language in focus, the cognitive overload can be significant. If assigning meanings to even
the simplest of utterances is contentious with a native speaker, a discursive linguist’s meaning-
making techniques used with native speakers may be less reliable with a language learner speaking
under added cognitive strain. The norms of a first language scaffold the acquisition of second-
language discourse, producing both oral and written discourse heavily influenced by the native

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language.15 Therefore, even if discourse analysis concentrates at the macro-linguistic level (e.g.,
narratives) and sets aside micro-linguistic markers (e.g., fillers), analysis that does not account for
first language influence and assumes non-native language norms marginalizes the language learn-
ers’ discourse. Further, a person may construct discourse in L1 in a similar way as he or she
constructs discourse in L2, but just because two people have the same L1, even acquired in similar
ways, does not mean each person will use their L1 similarly nor their L2 similarly.16 Attempts to
essentialize analyses or findings simply or mostly based on people’s native or non-native languages
is not only ill-advised, it is ethically questionable.
The language used in data collection and analysis (e.g., whether or not to interview and inter-
act with participants in their home language or in a different language, such as English) can be a
difficult ethical and methodological decision for researchers, particularly when researcher and
participants do not share the same first language. Palmer emphasized the importance of trying to
achieve conceptual equivalence in developing and testing interview or survey questions to “ensure
that wording and language are presented so as to ensure full understanding of terms, concepts,
and meanings,” although much meaning still can be quite literally lost in translation.17
These decisions may still be difficult even when researchers and participants share a language.
Li, for example, examined Chinese international students’ experiences in Canada in two different
studies. Although Li and the participants shared Chinese as a first language, she initially inter-
viewed her participants in English:

However, when I read through the first two transcripts, I realized that those simple English
sentences could not possibly contain the complex and sophisticated ideas, thoughts, and
feelings that I knew they wished to convey. When we later switched to the Chinese lan-
guage, our conversations flowed freely and lasted longer. It was more work for me to translate
the conversations from Chinese to English, but it was a more authentic and meaningful
experience for us all.18

Li’s experience seems to suggest that conducting research in participants’ first language (or,
perhaps, language of greatest comfort/fluency) may make the most sense, both methodologically
and ethically.
Other researchers have found the opposite to be true. For example, in her study of researchers
working with English learners, Koulouriotis described that one of her participants

discovered that by conducting the research in English she was helping the participants to
realize their ability to make themselves understood beyond their grammar or pronunciation.
Although she admitted that conducting interviews in English required intensive listening
and much work on the part of the researcher, she was surprised to learn that through par-
ticipating in research, participants felt a sense of pride and accomplishment.19

Indeed, Koulouriotis’ finding echoes Perry’s own experience: In her study of refugees in
Kentucky, 12 out of 13 interviewees declined the use of a translator, many of whom said they
wanted the opportunity to practice English. Nevertheless, Li’s concerns about sacrificed mean-
ing still exist, and an ethical dilemma may occur between the desire to honor participants’ choices
(and perhaps help to empower their nascent abilities) and the desire for accurate, valid data. In
order to mitigate some of these dilemmas, Li emphasizes “the importance of working alongside
research participants in order to co-construct their life stories in another language.”20
Decisions about translators may also present ethical dilemmas; even when translators are used,
meanings may not necessarily be shared. According to Baird, cultural congruence between research

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 Political and Ethical Dilemmas

participants and the selected interpreters is important “to accurately translate and interpret social
cultural patterns as well as language.”21 Indeed, one challenge Perry faced was convincing her IRB
that a university-approved French speaker from France would not suffice as a translator, because
that person would not understand West African French dialects and cultural issues. Cultural con-
gruence, however, will not solve all dilemmas related to meaning. Janusch, for example, explained
that her Chinese interpreters had to translate complex concepts in addition to words, “for which
there was perhaps no direct translation across the two cultures.”22
With respect to meaning, ethical issues also may exist related to bias or partiality. In their
educational research with refugees, Turner and Fozdar found that partiality became an issue for
them in two senses of the word—as incompleteness and as bias. The authors acknowledged that
ethnographic understandings are always incomplete or partial. However, they also found that
differences in education levels and English fluency among participants led to partiality in their
analyses, “since it is tempting to give greater weight to more sophisticated and articulate opin-
ions.”23 Not all researchers view this incompleteness or partiality as necessarily a problem, how-
ever, and this may be particularly true for those who view discourse as doing something as
opposed to representing a more static meaning.

Who Says What Discourse Is Doing?

Discourse can be also studied for the work that it performs and how descriptions of the world
are built and maintained as fact (or not) (Foucault 1972 [1971]). Understanding what discourse
is doing entails focusing on “discourse for its performative quality rather than using it as a simple
pathway to events and objects in the world.”24 Through discourse, understandings and positions
are established, invoked, challenged, masked, and disregarded, shaping the world in turn. Big “D”
Discourse as the ways of being in the world allows one to enact a certain cultural identity. Little
“d” discourse, or the language markers in use, are involved in pulling off this specific way of
being. For example, a person relocated to the U.S. can enact big “D” discourse (e.g., dress like an
“American”) and little “d” discourse (e.g., adopt English as an “American” language) to com-
municate “American” ideas as an “American.”
Determining what discourse is doing in a particular data sample may present similar ethical
and methodological challenges as determining what that data sample means. If the meaning of a
given discourse is contested, understanding what that discourse is doing may be even more prob-
lematic, particularly to a linguistic or cultural outsider. The consideration of silence in discourse
represents one methodological and ethical challenge that linguistic researchers may face in work-
ing with language learners.
Similar to the point made by Arciuli, Mallard, and Villar that no linguistic marker, no matter
how small, can be blindly assigned a meaning, silence as an absent presence is also complex in
discourse analysis for what it does. So often the topic of silence with learners of other languages
is that the people are silenced (i.e., stifled in their opportunity to use their voice, marginalized),
but silence within discourse can also be seen as an agentive action, as in people using silence
strategically or even unconsciously. Based on the premise that the spoken word can lull research-
ers into a potentially misleading sense of security, Mazzei offered a methodology to discursively
analyze silences. Hers was a project to “challenge the limits of spoken words in search of that
which was unspoken” among teachers who were “‘research subjects’” but “not passive partici-
pants to which a barrage of one-way questions was directed.”25 Mazzei developed a process for
listening (while reading and not reading transcripts) to learn how to hear “silent speech.”26 Like
hearing the rests of music or white space of poetry, Mazzei’s process of listening for layers of
meaning revealed an absent presence.

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Kristen H. Perry and Christine A. Mallozzi

Mazzei illustrated that silences are often present when the speaker assumes the listener knows
what he means; in short, why voice something that is already understood? “Silences provide both
form and substance to the text,”27 perhaps indicating who the speaker thinks is alike enough to
think the same way the speaker does. Those silences may functionally name who is Other and
who is Same. However, in a research project in which participants are co-researchers (e.g., action
research), how does one ethically engage in the task of exploring the silences that structure their
interactions? When a silence might be that which the speaker is unready to investigate or
acknowledge, who gets to choose the silences that are worthy and safe (or unsafe) to examine in
an ethical manner so as to not prompt harmful conditions? The co-researcher arrangement might
denote mutual agreement of process so that even bringing up the examination of silences can be
problematic. The complexities are exacerbated when a language learner is engaging in a mutual
research process. What counts as a silence for a native speaker might be quite different for a
language learner. That absence of voice may be a case of not having the words for a concept, not
wanting to commit a cross-cultural gaffe, or an assumed comprehension in a cross-language
conversation where, in fact, there is not understanding.
Instead of viewing the doing of discourse as a potential methodological pitfall, Farquhar and
Fitzsimons show the possibilities inherent in being lost in translation. Although being lost in trans-
lation implies both “the contingency of language and our inability to fully encapsulate otherness
within our frame of reference,” it also may be an opportunity rather than a limitation:

The phrase “lost in translation” brings together both openness to new ideas and a willingness
to embrace multiplicity. We explore the idea of being “lost” as a commitment to engaging
in a journey, to finding new meanings and trajectories, and to embracing destinations that
are tentative and negotiable.28

In viewing discourse and meaning as dialogic, Farquhar and Fitzsimon’s perspective reflects
Denzin’s29 emphasis on the dialogic nature of ethics.
Viewing research and ethics as dialogic means involving the researched community in
decision-making regarding the research design, data collection and analysis, ethical dilemmas, and the
ways in which findings and participants are represented. Translators, too, would be involved in the
same way, carefully selected from community representatives and therefore treated as participants
or co-researchers themselves. However, while translators may be fluent in both languages and
competent as interpreters, they still may need additional research training. For example, based upon
her use of community-identified Dinka translators in her research, Baird realized that interpreters
needed training to “have investment in the study and understand the methodology so that there
is full agreement about exactly how data will be collected and why certain protocols must be
followed,”30 such as respecting the confidentiality of other participants and accurately interpreting
participants’ statements and not summarizing or adding personal comments. Baird also suggested
that IRB processes be amended to include certification for translators, just as other research staff
members are certified. Translators could also participate in research training in discourse analysis,
so that they may understand the continuum of discourse and be better prepared to support dis-
course analyses that focus on what language may be doing. The research context is complicated
largely due to who is involved, a matter inseparable from the associated data.

Whose Data Is It?

One ethical dilemma faced by many qualitative researchers, including those who engage in dis-
course analysis with language learners, involves questions of who “owns” data in a study. The

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question of data ownership may be threaded throughout the research design, data collection,
analysis, and research presentations. Mosselson, for example, described her dilemma:

Critical theorists, including myself, question the ethics of this decision: my decision, my
design, my questions, and ultimately, my interpretations and analysis of the participants’
voices. Recognizing the inherent power dynamic in these choices, however, I argue, leads a
researcher to think more reflexively about the research and the data.31

Depending on the research design and the researcher’s epistemological and ethical perspec-
tives, decisions about the research may (a) be made entirely by the researcher, with little (if any)
consultation of participants, (b) be completely shared with participants, or (c) fall somewhere
between. Similarly, data may be perceived to be owned by the researcher, owned by the partici-
pants, or jointly shared.
In certain research designs, such as computer-mediated communication (CMC) studies in
which researchers and participants are distanced from each other in one way or another, power
relationships may be hierarchical, with researchers holding all or most of the power in a study. In
such cases, data are likely viewed as belonging entirely to the researcher. In studies in which
power relationships tend to be less hierarchical and instead are distributed or shared, participants
might be involved in all or most of the entire research process, beginning with asking research
questions and developing the research design, and extending throughout data analysis and pub-
lication or other representation of findings. Thus, the data and resulting findings are likely to be
perceived as co-owned between participants and researchers or as belonging entirely to partici-
pants. Negotiation within data-gathering itself may also occur: for example, Kirova and Emme
wonder, based upon their research with child participants, “Are all interviews equally controlled
by the researcher? Is there any room to negotiate power relationships . . .?”32 As Kirova and
Emme’s question implies, if researchers view participants as fundamental stakeholders who have
contributed substantially to all or most stages of the process, the researcher is likely to view data
as belonging, at least in part, to participants.
Because research involving language learners often involves language differences between
researcher and participants, power considerations related to data are also likely to involve decisions
about language. For example, if the researcher perceives that she owns the data, she is likely to
make decisions about the language of the study—including the language used in data collection,
data analysis, and written or oral presentations of the research—based upon her own language
proficiency(ies) and/or by the availability of translators. Similarly, selection of translators may not
be assumed to be an ethical issue and may simply be selected for the sake of convenience or to
satisfy institutional requirements. However, this perspective may lead to difficulties with other
ethical dilemmas related to meaning. In contrast, if the researcher perceives that data ownership
is in the hands of participants, she may be more likely to negotiate data/language decisions with
participants. Researchers who view data as shared or as owned by participants also may be more
likely to be aware of the potential for linguistic hegemony in research, particularly in multilingual
or post-colonial contexts. For example, Phillipson (2009) notes that most research is published in
English, even in countries where English is not a dominant or official language. Still, the language
is not the only consideration. How discursive data is shared is a concern with methodologies such
as computer-mediated conversation analysis and other analyses of online content, reported
exchanges in public sources (e.g., newspapers, policy papers), especially because people can appear
so far removed from the data gathering itself.33
Bowker and Tuffin outlined the benefits and drawbacks of using CMC to gather and discur-
sively analyze data from marginalized people.34 Although they focused on disabled persons, some

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points were applicable to language learners. Technologies may enable or assist data to be included
in cases when face-to-face data gathering is impossible, unlikely, or prohibitive (e.g., people feel
insecure speaking face-to-face). CMC allows people to produce data at a pace that suits them
rather than on the researcher’s timetable. However, the inability to respond to visual and social
context cues affects how Discourse can be analyzed. Different CMC (e.g., oral in lieu of written
communication) and procedures (e.g., use of translators) may be necessary because of factors such
as literacy levels or language experience. These pluses and minuses are not the same as ethical
considerations, which Bowker and Tuffin argued have not been adequately addressed by bodies
such as the American Psychological Association or IRBs in CMC matters such as informed
consent, security and identity issues, and other regulations. For the most part, this type of data
gathering is considered naturalistic and beyond the scope of IRBs.
Although IRB regulations typically are assumed not to apply to research in CMC, this does not
mean that ethical issues are non-existent. Researchers still must consider principles related to
respect, beneficence, and social justice. For example, while typical notions of vulnerability may not
apply (i.e., vulnerability to coercion or abuse in the research situation), the ways in which language
learners are described or discussed may be unjust, unethical, or otherwise provide opportunities
for potential harm to the population. In analysis of CMC, researchers may be more likely to view
the community as abstracted data, not as individuals. Thus, power issues may be given little atten-
tion in CMC, if they are even considered at all. However, we argue that, as with all qualitative data,
power relationships are nevertheless an important consideration related to the data in CMC. For
example, Black, in her ethnographic study of ELLs’ participation in online fanfiction groups, raised
the ethical issues of analyzing works and interactions voluntarily made public as part of an online
community. Although Black considers publishing work to the community (which can be accessed
by anyone) as implicit permission for others to analyze, as a researcher she seeks consent when
concentrating on an individual’s specific work and when identifiers are accessible.35
Determinations about who “owns” research data cannot be prescribed. Rather, these deter-
minations must be carefully made by researchers as they consider their proposed methods and
their potential data sources, perhaps in ongoing consultation with research participants.

Who Decides How People Are Represented?

As we alluded in the previous section, power considerations in educational linguistics include the
ways in which individuals—both participants and researchers—are present and represented in
research. Doná suggested that “representation can refer to ‘speaking of ’—constructing accounts
and writing texts—or it can mean ‘speaking for’ advocating and mediating” (2007, 220).36 Ethical
issues in this category may be related to: (a) how researchers conceptualize the nature of the
researched community, including the researcher’s own relationship to the researched community,
(b) how vulnerability is perceived, and (c) how the researched community is described in research
representations.

What Is the Researcher’s Relationship to the Researched?

In her work with refugees, Doná draws on Christensen and Prout’s research involving children
to identify four possible ways of representing individuals in research. According to Doná,
researched populations are positioned as:

Objects when their “lives and experiences are investigated from the perspective of others . . .
As ‘objects’, they have no power over the creation or production of knowledge about them”;

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 Political and Ethical Dilemmas

Subjects when “their involvement in the research process is limited to that of respondents
who answer questions developed by others, and where they have very limited power over
the research process apart from deciding what information to convey or retain”;
Social actors capable of making sense of their lives and research, “when they are in dia-
logue with the researcher and inform the content of the research process not simply as
respondents to pre-determined questions but as informants knowledgeable about their
experiences”; and as
Participants and co-researchers when they are “involved, informed, consulted, and heard,
within the new social sciences methodologies that see research as a co-production of knowl-
edge (Christensen and Prout 2002).” 37

The ways in which researchers themselves are represented within a research study are con-
nected to larger debates about a researcher’s status as an “insider” or “outsider” in the researched
community. These debates typically focus on whether an “outsider” can truly understand the
research context and the community or whether an “insider” can truly distance herself enough
for data and findings to be considered valid. More recent scholarship, however, questions this
debate. Gildersleeve notes, for example, that “insider-outsider debates tend to rely on static
notions of culture,”38 while Parker Webster and John suggest that the debates rely on Eurocentric
thinking:

These dilemmas involve interrelated dualistic relationships embedded in the western aca-
demic tradition, namely (a) the notion of insider and outsider in terms of ethnographic
research in general and critical ethnographic research in particular; and (b) the notion of
“the academy” and the power relations between coloniser/theoriser/knowledge producer
and Indigene/theorised/knowledge receiver.39

This sort of dualistic thinking may be less helpful than considering a researcher’s potential
relationship with the community as a continuum, in which various research participants may
view the researcher in different ways. For example, in Perry’s own research with Sudanese refu-
gees, participants often introduced her—a European-American—to other community members
by referencing the two years she had lived in southern Africa: “She lived in Africa, so she under-
stands.”40 Perry’s prior experiences allowed her to knowledgeably converse about African cultures
and certain customs, which differed from participants’ experiences with most other Americans.
Thus, participants treated Perry as neither a full member of the Sudanese community nor a full
outsider; rather, they appeared to view her relationship with them as somewhere in between—
indeed, the children in one family granted her “auntie” status.41
Another ethical issue related to the researcher’s own position relative to the research commu-
nity involves the potential for “Othering” the researched community (Bott 2010; Lahman,
Mendoza, Rodriguez, and Schwartz 2011; Mosselson 2010)—that is, depicting the researched
community as somehow fundamentally different or even exotic. “Inevitably,” Bott argued, “we
begin to identify/disidentify, like/dislike, familiarize/otherize and this impacts our representa-
tions of them in relation to ourselves.”42 Researchers advocate for both researcher reflexivity and
dialogue with participants to avoid ethical pitfalls related to representations of participants (Bott
2010; Doná 2007; Kirova and Emme 2007; Koulouriotis 2011; Li 2011; Mosselson 2010; Palmer
2010; Smith 2009). Ethical considerations of power relationships in research with linguistically
or culturally different communities must be grounded in learning as much as possible about the
community of study, both through extensive reading and “by spending extended time in the
community developing cultural competency and building relationships.”43

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Kristen H. Perry and Christine A. Mallozzi

Who Determines Vulnerability?

Decisions about how to represent the researched may connect with the researcher’s perspective
on participants’ vulnerability. The researcher’s view of participants on the object-co-researcher
continuum (Doná 2007; Christensen and Prout 2002) will shape decision-making around this
issue. Macroethical principles typically categorize entire groups (e.g., pregnant women, children,
or non-native speakers of English) as vulnerable. As a result, IRBs hold the power to determine
vulnerability based upon a priori categories and require researchers to put additional safeguards
in place for those individuals. In some instances, university IRBs may even restrict research. For
example, Perry found that some U.S. IRBs explicitly stated that non-English speakers should be
excluded from research, while others required language proficiency assessments for potential
participants or the use of institutionally approved translators in the informed consent and data
collection processes. While such decisions are well intentioned toward protecting individuals
from harm, making decisions on behalf of others is paternalistic and may be itself ethically
murky.44 Indeed, Prior warned that, when researchers assume that participants are powerless and
need the researcher to give them a voice, they run the risk of theoretical imperialism.45
Understanding the researched population as more than objects or subjects requires a nuanced
understanding of vulnerability. As Perry noted, vulnerability is not inherent in a given individual
but rather is a relationship between the nature of the participant, the nature of the study, and the
nature of the context in which the research is conducted.46 Moreover, because vulnerability is not
the same thing as incompetence, Lahman et al. suggest viewing participants as “competent and
capable yet vulnerable.”47 If individuals are viewed as social actors, participants, or co-researchers,
it makes less sense to conceptualize vulnerability as a priori categories that must be checked off.
Instead, researchers must think carefully about the ways in which participants may (or may not)
be vulnerable, given the study and the context—and, more importantly, involve participants in
discussions of vulnerability, the ways in which potential vulnerabilities may be mitigated, and the
ways in which dilemmas emerging from “ethically important moments” will be resolved.48 For
example, participants may negotiate whether or not to use their real names or a pseudonym.49
Naming one’s self and others is an optimal site for examining discourse and the ethical matters
of analyzing that discourse.
One aspect of the nature of the research context that may influence participants’ level of vul-
nerability is the language in which data are gathered. That is, interviewing participants in a second
language, in which they may feel less competent or less able to express their ideas clearly, may
increase vulnerability. Comparing data from five-year-old foreign language learners of English
and native English speakers, Garcia and Trillo examined the personal function of discourse,50
meaning Halliday’s categorization on discourse related to the thinking, feeling, perceiving of our
personal world.51 This personal function of language includes giving information about one’s self,
family, friends, possessions, feelings, and thoughts, and Garcia and Trillo found it was the most
common language function for both sets of five-year-olds. Garcia and Trillo also found that the
English language learners tended to use their first language when talking about themselves and
others in their world, and they surmise “that the children’s interest in speaking about their personal
world cannot be satisfied in the L2” beyond self-talk such as singing songs, reciting rhymes, count-
ing, or other low-demand linguistic tasks.52 More demanding tasks, such as bragging, a frequent
reason for language use with both ELLs and non-native speakers in the study, happened most often
using speakers’ L1. Garcia and Trillo theorized that the children did not see their L2 as sufficient
for doing the work of speaking about themselves in meaningful ways.
Leaders in discourse analysis (e.g., Goffman 1981; Fairclough 1989) have examined naming
others with pronouns. Using pronouns inserts people into speech, and opens opportunity to

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position those people. Drawing on data from persons with learning difficulties, Yates and Hiles
demonstrated the inconsistencies in using pronouns to talk about one’s actions and the position
one holds in self-described social worlds. Specifically, first-person I and fourth-person you
(a pronoun used to imply a generalized everybody) shift according to activities and context;
thus, I and you are not stable in language—they shape discursive interactions and likely deviate
from language rules acquired through formal foreign language lessons.53
Pronouns are among the function words that show how the individual or thing fits into the
communication and the constructed world from which the communication stems and help
researchers make informed analyses about how a participant sees the world and the participant’s
place in it; pronouns are part of the “who-doing-what”s that discursively create socially situated
identities and practices.54 A note from feminist movements reinforces the importance of language
in naming one’s self and one’s world. In reaction to histories of others speaking for women (e.g.,
through voting, preferred masculinized language) and pressure for women to use language that
signaled their lesser status,55 feminist researchers established the need to interview women as a
way to remedy “centuries of ignoring women’s ideas altogether or having men speak for
women”56 and social and conventional sciences’ egregious “gynopia”,57 meaning the inability to
see women. This risk of being discursively and effectually erased is a type of colonization to
which ELLs are already vulnerable.
Analyzing the way people speak about themselves and others is useful in understanding how
that person sees the world and his role in it; however, analyzing pronoun use in discourse is valu-
able only if the speaker’s worldview is given primacy and not subsumed by the researcher’s world-
view. This includes the researcher gaining a sense of what it means to talk about one’s self or other
people in the speaker’s culture and language. Positioning a person to speak about certain people
or things may be risky if frowned upon in their home culture. Indeed, even framing the speaker’s
world as us/them, me/you, he/she/it may be inappropriate as they may be foreign concepts in the
speaker’s worldview. As Foucault reminds readers, the categorization of people, animals, and con-
cepts is not natural or universal but discursively situated, politically charged, and thus of an ethical
concern.58 Vulnerability is a matter that clearly goes beyond a priori categories and may involve
considerations of language and understanding important cultural issues. Because discourse analysis
attends both language and culture, researchers will need to consider the ways in which the research
may position participants as vulnerable during both data collection and analysis. While macroeth-
ical research principles address vulnerability in one specific way, the issues we have raised in this
section may help researchers attend to microethical issues of vulnerability in their work.

Discussion: What Is Missing?

As described in the introduction, many qualitative researchers have challenged macroethical prin-
ciples as being too prescriptive or being inappropriate for qualitative research designs. Indeed, it is
true that these principles are grounded in quantitative, biomedical paradigms of research.59 While
the macroethical guiding principles of respect for persons, beneficence, and justice still apply in
discourse analysis and other qualitative designs,60 it is true that these principles provide a frame-
work that is, perhaps deliberately and necessarily, vague. Instead of asking whether or not the
prescribed ethics are appropriate, it may be more fruitful to consider the nature of macroethical
principles as applied in given research contexts. Indeed, as Koulouriotis notes, members of different
communities may interpret these principles differently through their own cultural lenses.61
The questions we have raised in this chapter will, we hope, enable educational linguists to
better navigate the macro-micro ethical continuum. Researchers, perhaps in collaboration with

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Kristen H. Perry and Christine A. Mallozzi

the researched community, can consider who determines: (a) meaning and/or what discourse is
doing, (b) the ownership of data, and (c) how people will be represented within the study. Ulti-
mately, as researchers and participants negotiate these questions, they are also addressing questions
of (d) who determines what is ethical in a given study.
As we conducted the literature review for this chapter, we also experienced moments of dis-
comfort, as we saw the ways in which language learners were treated or ignored in ethical/
methodological decision-making and in research reports. The relevant issues were often being
discussed relative to research with children, the disabled, or people with learning difficulties.
Indeed, as Perry found in her study of research universities’ IRBs, language learners are frequently
lumped together with others who are deemed incompetent, such as the developmentally disa-
bled.62 Equating adult language learners with children or developmentally delayed adults, or as
otherwise lacking, is inappropriate. Language learners may be more vulnerable than native speak-
ers in certain research contexts, but vulnerability must not be conflated with incompetence.
While the literature that we consulted does raise important issues, we argue that language learners
deserve to be considered in their own right—their unique contexts, experiences, and perspectives
deserve ethical and methodological discussion, too.
The field appears to be missing a substantive discussion related to ethics and educational lin-
guistics with respect to discourse analysis, and specifically discourse analysis with language learn-
ers. The limited ethical and methodological literature that our search did turn up, however, was
either so broadly generalized as to be too vague or else was too specific in describing the micro-
ethical and methodological dilemmas related to an individual researcher’s own work. Also, our
literature search repeatedly yielded pieces from the field of discursive psychology, highlighting the
lack of literature on ethics of discourse analysis in education. The wealth of methodological liter-
ature on discourse analysis in education evidences researchers’ recognition of the situated chal-
lenges of enacting specific research processes, such as the many forms of discourse analysis. Yet the
absence of attention to the ethical concerns of this methodology raises the question of researchers’
blind love of their methodology, preventing them from seeing the potential risks. Alternatively,
perhaps discourse analysts in education feel the literature on general research ethics is sufficient to
cover their specific methodology, but at once the field seems to be professing the importance of
describing discourse analysis only insofar as it can be portrayed as a non-ethical matter.
Also lacking is the presence of non-native speakers in the ethical literature on research focused on
them. We became increasingly uneasy at the pattern of native speakers discussing non-native speak-
ers, especially as we specify that language learners can range from being objects to co-researchers in
research.63 It would seem that when it comes to discussion of ethics, the voices of language learners
are virtually non-existent in the literature, indicating perhaps that they are relegated to object position
more than we researchers would like to admit.

Notes
1. Joanna Koulouriotis, “Ethical Considerations in Conducting Research with Non-native Speakers of
English,” TESL Canada Journal 28, no. 5 (2011): 3.
2. Clifford G. Christians, “Ethics and Politics in Qualitative Research.” In Handbook of Qualitative Research
(2nd ed.), eds. Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications,
2000), 133–155.
3. Norman K. Denzin, The Qualitative Manifesto: A Call to Arms ( Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2010).
4. Marilys Guillemin and Lynn Gillam, “Ethics, Reflexivity, and ‘Ethically important moments’ in
Research.” Qualitative Inquiry 10, no. 2 (2004): 262. doi:10.1177/1077800403262360
5. Magdalena Kubanyiova, “Rethinking Research Ethics in Contemporary Applied Linguistics: The Tension
between Macroethical and Microethical Perspectives in Situated Research,” The Modern Language Journal 92,
no. 4 (2008): 504. doi:10.1111/j.1540–4781.2008.00784.x

408
 Political and Ethical Dilemmas

6. Guillemin and Gillam, “Ethics, Reflexivity, and ‘Ethically important moments’ in Research,” 269.
7. Koulouriotis, “Ethical Considerations in Conducting Research with Non-native Speakers of
English,” 10–11.
8. Raychelle Harris, Heidi M. Holmes and Donna M. Mertens, “Research Ethics in Sign Language Com-
munities,” Sign Language Studies 9, no. 2 (2009): 112. doi:10.1353/sls.0.0011
9. Tim Corcorran, “Second Nature,” British Journal of Social Psychology 48, no. 2(2009): 375–388. doi:10.1348/
014466608X349513
10. Jonathan Potter, “Contemporary Discursive Psychology: Issues, Prospects, and Corcoran’s Awkward
Ontology,” British Journal of Social Psychology 49 (2010): 657–678. doi:10.1348/014466610X486158
11. James Gee, Social Linguistics and Literacies: Ideology in Discourses ( London: Falmer Press, 1990). James Gee,
An Introduction to Discourse Analysis: Theory and Method ( London: Routledge, 2011).
12. Jill S. Bell, “Reporting and Publishing Narrative Inquiry in TESOL: Challenges and Rewards,” TESOL
Quarterly 45, no. 3 (2011): 577.
13. Sandra Janusch, “Reality, Dysconsciousness, and Transformations: Personal Reflections on the Ethics of
Cross-Cultural Research” TESL Canada Journal 28, no. 5 (2011): 85.
14. Joanne Arciuli, David Mallard, and Gina Villar, “‘Um, I Can Tell You’re Lying’: Linguistic Markers of
Deception Versus Truth-telling in Speech,” Applied Psycholinguistics 31, no. 3 (2010): 397–411. doi:10.1017/
S0142716410000044
15. Jennifer Y. Kang, “On the Ability to Tell Good Stories in Another Language Analysis of Korean EFL
Learners’ oral ‘Frog Story’ Narratives,” Narrative Inquiry 13, no. 1 (2003): 127–149. Jennifer Kang, “Pro-
ducing Culturally Appropriate Narratives in English as a Foreign Language: A Discourse Analysis of
Korean EFL Learners’ Written Narratives,” Narrative Inquiry 16, no. 2 (2006): 379–407.
16. Mary J. Schleppegrell and M. Cecilia Colombi, “Text Organization by Bilingual Writers: Clause Struc-
ture as a Reflection of Discourse Structure,” Written Communication 14, no. 4 (1997): 481–503. doi:10.1177/
0741088397014004003
17. David Palmer, “‘Every Morning Before You Open the Door You Have to Watch for that Brown Enve-
lope’: Complexities and Challenges of Undertaking Oral History with Ethiopian Forced Migrants in
London, UK,” The Oral History Review 37, no. 1 (2010): 39.
18. Yi Li, “Translating Interviews, Translating Lives: Ethical Considerations in Cross-language Narrative
Inquiry,” TESL Canada Journal 28, no. 5, (2011): 27.
19. Koulouriotis, “Ethical Considerations in Conducting Research with Non-native Speakers of
English,” 7.
20. Li, “Translating Interviews, Translating Lives: Ethical Considerations in Cross-language Narrative
Inquiry,” 25.
21. Martha B. Baird, “Lessons Learned from Translators and Interpreters from the Dinka Tribe of Southern
Sudan,” Journal of Transcultural Nursing 22, no. 2 (2011): 121. doi:10.1177/1043659610395764
22. Janusch, “Reality, Dysconsciousness, and Transformations: Personal Reflections on the Ethics of
Cross-Cultural Research,” 88.
23. Marianne Turner and Farida Fozdar, “Dependency, Partiality and the Generation of Research Questions
in Refugee Education,” Issues in Educational Research 20, no. 2 (2010): 191.
24. Potter, Jonathan, “Contemporary Discursive Psychology: Issues, Prospects, and Corcoran’s Awkward
Ontology.” British Journal of Social Psychology 49 (2010): 658. doi:10.1348/014466610X486158
25. Mazzei, Lisa A., “Silent Listenings: Deconstructive Practices in Discourse-based Research.” Educational
Researcher 33, no. 2 (2004): 26.
26. Ibid., 31.
27. Mazzei, Lisa A., “Toward a Problematic of Silence in Action Research,” Educational Action Research 15,
no. 4 (2007): 633. doi:10.1080/09650790701664054
28. Sandy Farquhar and Peter Fitzsimons, “Lost in translation: The power of language,” Educational Philosophy
and Theory 43, no. 6 (2011): 653. doi:10.1111/j.1469–5812.2009.00608.x
29. Norman K. Denzin, The Qualitative Manifesto: A Call to Arms ( Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2010).
30. Martha B. Baird, “Lessons Learned from Translators and Interpreters from the Dinka Tribe of Southern
Sudan,” Journal of Transcultural Nursing 22, no. 2 (2011): 116–121. doi:10.1177/1043659610395764
31. Jacqueline Mosselson, “Subjectivity and Reflexivity: Locating the Self in Research on Dislocation,”
International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 23, no. 4 (2010): 483. DOI: 10.1080/09518398.
2010.492771
32. Anna Kirova and Michael Emme, “Critical Issues in Conducting Research with Immigrant Children,”
Diaspora, indigenous, and minority education 1, no. 2 (2007): 89. doi:10.1080/15595690701293710

409
Kristen H. Perry and Christine A. Mallozzi

33. Joan Mazur, “Conversation Analysis for Educational Technologists: Theoretical and Methodological
Issues for Researching Structures, Processes and Meaning of On-line Talk,” in Handbook of Research for
Educational Communications and Technology, ed. David Jonassen (New York, NY: Macmillan, 2004),
1073–1098.
34. Natilene Bowker and Keith Tuffin, “Using the Online Medium for Discursive Research about People
with Disabilities,” Social Science Computer Review 22, no. 2 (2004): 228–241. doi:10.1177/0894439303262561
35. Rebecca W. Black, “Access and Affiliation: The Literacy and Composition Practices of English-Language
Learners in an Online Fanfiction Community,” Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy 49, no. 1 (2005):
118–128. doi:10.1598/JAAL.49.2.4
36. Giorgia Doná, “The Microphysics of Participation in Refugee Research,” Journal of Refugee Studies 20,
no. 2 (2007): 212. doi:10.1093/jrs/fem013
37. Pia Christensen and Alan Prout, “Working With Ethical Symmetry in Social Research with Children,”
Childhood, 9, 477–497.
38. Ryan E. Gildersleeve, “Dangerously Important Moment(s) in Reflexive Research Practices with Immi-
grant Youth,” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 23, no. 4 (2010): 408. doi:10.1080/
09518398.2010.492809
39. Joan Parker Webster and Theresa A. John, “Preserving a Space for Cross-Cultural Collaborations: An
Account of Insider/Outsider Issues,” Ethnography and Education 5, no. 2 (2010): 178. doi:10.1080/1745
7823.2010.493404
40. Kristen H. Perry, “From Storytelling to Writing: Transforming Literacy Practices Among Sudanese
Refugees,” Journal of Literacy Research 40, no. 3 (2008): 317–358. doi:10.1080/10862960802502196
41. Kristen H. Perry, “‘Lost Boys,’ Cousins and Aunties: Using Sudanese Refugee Relationships to Compli-
cate Definitions of ‘Family,’” in Home-School Connections in a Multicultural Society: Learning from and with
Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Families, eds. Malu Dantas and Peter Manyak (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence
Erlbaum, 2009), 19–40.
42. Esther Bott, “Favourites and Others: Reflexivity and the Shaping of Subjectivities and Data in Qualita-
tive Research, Qualitative Research 10, no. 2 (2010): 160. doi:10.1177/1468794109356736
43. Valerie J. Smith, “Ethical and Effective Ethnographic Research Methods: A Case Study with Afghan
Refugees in California,” Journal of Empirical Research on Human Research Ethics 4, no. 3 (2009): 60.
doi:10.1525/jer.2009.4.3.59
44. Kristen H. Perry, “Ethics, Vulnerability and Speakers of Other Languages: How University IRBs (Do
Not) Speak to Research Involving Refugee Participants,” Qualitative Inquiry 17, no. 10 (2011): 1–14.
doi:10.1177/1077800411425006
45. Matthew T. Prior, “Self-preservation in L2 Interview Talk: Narrative Versions, Accountability, and
Emotionality,” Applied Linguistics 32, no. 1 (2011): 60–76. doi:10.1093/applin/amq033
46. Perry, “Ethics, Vulnerability and Speakers of Other Languages: How University IRBs (Do Not) Speak
to Research Involving Refugee Participants,” 1–14.
47. Maria K. E. Lahman, Bernadette M. Mendoza, Katrina L. Rodriguez and Jana L. Schwartz, “Undocu-
mented Research Participants: Ethics and Protection in a Time of Fear,” Hispanic Journal of Behavioral
Sciences 33, no. 3 (2011): 309. doi:10.1177/0739986311414162
48. Guillemin and Gillam, “Ethics, Reflexivity, and ‘Ethically important moments’ in Research,” 261–280.
49. Kristen H. Perry, “‘I Want the World to Know’: The Ethics of Anonymity in Ethnographic Literacy
Research,” in Developments in Educational Ethnography, ed. Geoffrey Walford (London: Elsevier, 2007),
137–154.
50. Ana L. Garcia, and Jesús R. Trillo, “Getting Personal: Native Speaker and EFL Pre-school Children’s Use
of the Personal Function,” International Journal of Applied Linguistics 17, no. 2 (2007): 198–213. doi:10.1111/
j.1473–4192.2007.00146.x
51. Michael A. K. Halliday, An Introduction to Functional Grammar (2nd ed) ( London: Edward Arnold, 1994).
52. Garcia and Trillo, “Getting Personal: Native Speaker and EFL Pre-school Children’s Use of the Personal
Function,” 208–209.
53. Scott Yates and David Hiles, “‘You Can’t’ but ‘I Do’: Rules, Ethics, and the Significance of Shifts in
Pronominal Forms for Self-positioning in Talk,” Discourse Studies 12 (2010): 535–551. doi:10.1177/
1461445610370128.
54. James Gee, An Introduction to Discourse Analysis: Theory and Method (London: Routledge, 2011), 30.
55. Robin Lakoff, “Language and Woman’s Place,” Language in Society, 2 (1973): 45–80. www.jstor.org/
stable/4166707
56. Shulamit Reinharz, Feminist Methods in Social Research ( New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 19.

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 Political and Ethical Dilemmas

57. Shulamit Reinharz, “Feminist Distrust: Problems of Context and Content in Sociological Work,” in
Clinical Demands of Social Research, eds. D. Berg and K. Smith ( Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1985).
58. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences ( New York, NY: Vintage Press,
1970).
59. Perry, “Ethics, Vulnerability and Speakers of Other Languages: How University IRBs (Do Not) Speak
to Research Involving Refugee Participants.”
60. Guillemin and Gillam, “Ethics, Reflexivity, and ‘Ethically important moments’ in Research.”
61. Koulouriotis, “Ethical Considerations in Conducting Research with Non-native Speakers of English.”
62. Perry, “Ethics, Vulnerability and Speakers of Other Languages: How University IRBs (Do Not) Speak
to Research Involving Refugee Participants.”
63. Doná, “The Microphysics of Participation in Refugee Research.”

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Education and Language Shift
Leanne Hinton

Historical Perspectives
Paul Garrett defines language shift as follows:

In a case of language shift, a community of speakers effectively abandons, not necessarily

consciously or intentionally, its use of one language in favor of another. The language that
speakers cease to use (in at least some domains) is typically one that has served since time
immemorial as their community’s vernacular and language of ethnic identity. Ultimately it
may be lost altogether if it ceases to be acquired and used in everyday contexts by members
of succeeding generations. Meanwhile, the language toward which the community is shift-
ing is in most cases a language of wider communication or one that otherwise offers (or, at
least, is perceived to offer) some significant advantage to those who speak it. Depending
on the circumstances, that advantage may be sheer survival, socioeconomic advancement,
politico-economic gain, social prestige, or some combination of these.
(Garrett 2011, 515)

It has always been clear that the language of education and the treatment of minority lan-
guages within the educational system play a big role in language shift. However, actual research
into education’s role in language shift was paid little attention until some teachers, parents, and
researchers began to question how children who come from a minority language environment
could best learn English without getting behind in their general education. Related to this was
the debate about whether students must leave their minority languages behind or whether bilin-
gualism should be the goal—that is, can and should language shift be avoided? Research on
education and language shift matured after the middle of the 20th century when bilingual edu-
cation became important in the United States. Education, language education, linguistics, sociol-
ogy, psychology and political science have all contributed to the question of the role of education
in language shift. Important fields contributing to the study of education in language shift
include studies of heritage language maintenance and attrition (Fishman 1966; Köpke, Schmid,
Keijzer, and Dostert 2007; Lambert and Freed 1982; Pan and Gleason 1986; Weltens, de Bot, and
van Els 1986), and debates about the benefits or negatives of bilingualism (Hakuta 1986),

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transitional vs. maintenance bilingual education (Crawford 1992; 2004), language death (Dorian
1981; 1992), language revitalization (Hinton and Hale 2001; Grenoble and Whaley 2006; McCarty
and Zepeda 2006; McCarty 2013), politics of language (Crawford 2000), and human language
rights (Skutnabb-Kangas 2000).

Core Issues and Key Findings

Schools have always had a major effect on language shift, and often purposely and even aggressively
promoted language shift, to the point where the process has sometimes been called “linguistic
genocide” (Skutnabb-Kangas 2000). Research on education and language shift has deep roots in the
national and international debate on minority issues and minority rights. We can only understand
this through an investigation of how language policies for the schools relate to minority issues, and so
we will focus on that here, from a historical perspective. First we will examine education and lan-
guage shift in the case of American Indian boarding schools. We will then examine the history of
educational language policy in general, and how it has affected language shift with regard to the
“colonial languages”—those languages that have been part of the United States since colonial days,
specifically German, French, and Spanish; and immigrant languages. Finally, we will focus on the
other side of language and education: the engagement of education in reversing language shift.

American Indian Education and Language Shift

There is no better example of what Skutnabb-Kangas calls “linguistic genocide” than the case of
educational policies for the indigenous peoples of North America in the late 19th and early
20th centuries. In 1892, Colonel Richard Pratt, the founder of the first Indian boarding school
in the United States, was quoted in the Official Report of the 19th Annual Conference of Char-
ities and Correction as follows:

A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one, and that high sanction of
his destruction has been an enormous factor in promoting Indian massacres. In a sense, I
agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be
dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.
(Prucha 1973, p. 260)

From the time of the first arrival of Europeans on American soil, the Native Americans were
seen as an obstacle to European hegemony over the land. Throughout much of the 19th century,
actions toward Indians were increasingly harsh and the relationship increasingly bloody through
the “Indian Wars” and massacres. But by 1880, the shock of the physical genocide of Native
peoples was leading the more philanthropic factions of white Americans to argue for another way.
The formation of a new approach was led by the Indian Rights Association, which sought “to
secure the civilization of the two hundred and ninety thousand Indians of the United States . . .
and to prepare the way for their absorption into the common life of our own people.” Colonel
Pratt established the first Indian boarding school, with that goal, and this motto: “To civilize the
Indian, get him into civilization. To keep him civilized, let him stay” (Pratt 2004 [1964]).
Despite the fact that this was the most humanistic viewpoint of the time, today the boarding
school era is seen as one of the grimmest chapters of American education. Children were forcibly
taken away from their families for nine months each year, and often more, and put into boarding
schools, where the express purpose was to remove them from their culture and prepare them for
life in the trades and services. Typically these schools were militaristic and heartless in many ways.

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Language was only one of the cultural practices to be taken away at the schools, but it was a big
one, and the notion that schools should eradicate the Native American languages was expressed
frequently, even long before the schools themselves were established. The Indian Peace Commis-
sion of 1868 put it this way:

In the difference of language today lies two-thirds of our trouble. . . . Schools should be
established, which children should be required to attend; their barbarous dialects should be
blotted out and the English language substituted. (Annual Report of the Commissioner of
Indian Affairs for the Year 1868, p. 87.)

This statement and others like it express what became the language policy of the Indian
boarding schools. Over a hundred boarding schools existed at the height of the policy. The Indian
Office required all instruction in the Indian schools to be in English, and children had to speak
nothing but English, both inside and outside of the classroom. The Indian boarding school sur-
vivors have harsh memories of what happened if they broke this rule. Carol Hodgson recalls her
friend Rose in their boarding school:

Rose was strapped for speaking her language. This is a common practice in schools all over
the place at the time. Her open hands were hit with a large thick leather strap, many times.
I received the strap on several occasions, although not as harshly as Rose did . . . I did see
many native children whose hands were strapped so long and hard that they were blistered
for days, as though they had been burned with fire.
(Hodgson 2000)

But whether or not corporal punishment was involved, being sent to a school that taught
everything in English, by teachers who had little understanding of how to help the children learn
the language, was extremely frustrating to the children, and resulted in poor progress in their
education.

[Elsie] Allen understood and spoke to no one for most of the [first] year. “My stay at Covelo
was not very fruitful because of the language barrier,” she wrote, “and I often cried at
night with homesickness.
(Allen 1972, quoted in Coleman 1993, 106)

Elsie Allen never taught her Pomo language to her children, not wanting them to suffer like
she did. She related her decision and its aftermath this way:

Every night [at Covelo] I’d lay awake and think and think and think. I’d think to myself, ‘If
I ever get married and have children I’ll never teach my children the language or all the Indian
things that I know. I’ll never teach them that, I don’t want my children to be treated like they
treated me. That’s the way I raised my children. Everybody couldn’t understand that, they
always asked me about it in later years.
(Hinton 1994, 176)

While some students retained knowledge of their language despite years away from home, a
decision, like Mrs. Allen’s, to not pass it on to their children was a common one. Others lost their
language altogether, which, along with the long absences from their families, created a chasm in
their relations with their home communities.

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A former Patwin student, Bill Wright, recounts:

I remember coming home and my grandma asked me to talk Indian to her and I said,
“Grandma, I don’t understand you,” . . . She said, “Then who are you?”
(Bear 2008)

The echoes of this indictment, “Who are you?” ring in the minds of many boarding school
survivors and their descendants. “Linguistic genocide” is not too harsh a term for the boarding
school policies of that era.

Multilingual United States and Early Schools

While the majority of early settlers in North America were English, the United States was a
multilingual country from the start, not only because of the hundreds of Native American
languages, but also because a number of languages had colonized parts of the land that it incor-
porated. German was a strong language from colonial times, for example; the Louisiana Pur-
chase brought French speakers under the American flag, and the Mexican-American War
resulted in the incorporation of Spanish-speaking California and the southwest. Puerto Rico,
a Spanish-speaking commonwealth of the U.S., was granted to the U.S. at the end of the Spanish-
American War.
Until the late 1800s, education was a much more locally run affair than it is today. During
colony days, schooling was often up to the communities or families, and apprenticeships often
took the place of formal education. With the formation of the nation, the constitution left the
responsibility of education to the states, and the states themselves were often spotty in the provi-
sion of education, all the more so in the early settlements in the territories and contested lands.
Thus, in colonial times and well into the 19th century, in areas where the home language was not
English, schooling usually took place in the heritage language.
German schools were especially noteworthy. Some of the most progressive educational tech-
niques came out of colonial German Pennsylvania. Christopher Dock was one of the great
schoolmasters of the prerevolutionary era, and his book Schul Ordnung (School Management),
actually the very first U.S. American book on teaching methods, was published in 1770, for use
in German schools in Ohio and Pennsylvania. For a full century it was used in its original German
edition before finally being translated into English (see Dock and Brumbaugh 1959). The Ger-
mans in the U.S. were also pioneers in forerunners of public schools and, of course, kindergarten
(a German word). They also produced some of the first bilingual schools.
There was pressure from English leaders of the colony to assimilate the Pennsylvania Germans,
but they resisted, in large part for the sake of maintaining their language. The Reformed Coetus
of 1757 wrote:

Now with regard to the schools, we can do little to promote them, since the directors try to
erect nothing but English schools and care nothing for the German language. Hence, now
as before, the Germans themselves ought to look out for their schools, in which their chil-
dren may be instructed in German.
(Wood 1942, 111)

Wood writes that in 1834 an elementary education in German was available to most Penn-
sylvania German children, primarily under the control of the churches (Wood 1942, 112).

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Education and Language Policy in the 20th Century

While English was always the primary language of government in the United States, it was never
made the official language. Nevertheless, by the turn to the 20th century, strong nationalist feel-
ings brought out by events leading to World War I and the perceived threat of immigration to
jobs and the “American way” made English into the language of patriotism too. The Naturali-
zation Act of 1906 was instrumental in mandating the knowledge of English in America. The
Act required that all immigrants be able to speak English in order to become naturalized citizens
of the United States. As Theodore Roosevelt put it in a letter to the president of the American
Defense Society, which was read at a meeting in New York, January 5, 1919:

There can be no divided allegiance here. We have room but for one flag, the American
flag . . . We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language, for we
intend to see that the crucible turns our people out as Americans, of American nationality,
and not as dwellers in a polyglot boarding-house.
(Dyer 1992, 134)

Teaching English to immigrants and indigenous people can be seen as increasing inclusion of
people who would otherwise not have access to many U.S. American resources and opportuni-
ties; yet policies with the goal of suppressing the heritage language of the student become a case
of forced assimilation. Some of the school policies suppressing English were based on mistaken
assumptions that people are incapable of bilingualism, but much more than that, the policies were
a response to the Roosevelt credo that loyalty to any language other than English constituted
disloyalty to our country. In the early 20th century, many laws were put into place that specifically
forbade the option of teaching in any language but English. One of these was the Siman Act of
Nebraska (107 Neb. 657, 1919), which stated in part, “No person, individually or as a teacher,
shall, in any private, denominational, parochial or public school, teach any subject to any person
in any language other than the English language.” A teacher in a parochial school, Mr. Robert
Meyer, was the reluctant test case. He was fined for reading a German-language bible to a student.
He took his case to the Supreme Court, who decided the law was unconstitutionally restrictive,
basing their decision on the 14th Amendment, covering freedom of religion (U.S. Supreme
Court 262 U.S. 390 (1923)).
Nevertheless, many other state laws still remain on the books, mandating English as the lan-
guage of instruction in all schools. While many laws were developed during the anti-German
hysteria of World War I, they were not the first English-only laws, nor was German the only
colonial language so targeted. Another colonial language was French, or various varieties of
French endemic to North America. Louisiana, which was entirely French speaking before its
acquisition by the young United States, enforced English as the sole language of education start-
ing in 1915, and language advocates today mark that as the beginning of the decline of French
in Louisiana. The outcome is similar to that of American Indian languages:

Speaking French at school was forbidden and sometimes even harshly punished. This assim-
ilation through education was highly effective. Within a few years, an entire generation had
learned English and forgotten its French.
Once they became adults, students from this period, whether out of shame or fear of
marginalisation, taught their children little if any French. They became known as the lost
generations.
(Piccinin n.d.)

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In the late 1880s, Wisconsin and Illinois passed English-only instruction laws for both public
and parochial schools. In 1896, when American businessmen wrested control of Hawai‘i from the
Hawaiian monarchy, English was declared the language of instruction in the schools. After the
Spanish-American War, English was declared “the official language of the school room” in Puerto
Rico (Crawford 2000). Such laws continue to be made even up to the present time. In 2000,
Arizona voters passed an initiative making it a law that all school instruction would take place in
the English language (State of Arizona Proposition 203). The modern thrust is related to the
“Official English” movement in the United States, whereby after Congress failed to make English
the official language of the United States in the 1990s, many states themselves have worked to
officialize English—often including new restrictive laws about school language as part of the bill.

Language Shift Without Laws

English language education can reduce the heritage language capability of students even without
repressive policies. For one thing, without education in their heritage language, they rarely become
literate in their first language or learn how to talk about anything beyond household subjects. For
another, either the parents or the children themselves tend to stop using their language at home
once they enter the English-speaking school. In the 1990s, I collected several hundred linguistic
autobiographies from college students whose families had immigrated to the U.S. from Asian
countries. The vast majority of them report attrition in their heritage language. Two examples:

I can still vaguely remember possessing a stunning comprehension of Mandarin before I

started school, but now, it has mostly left me. Often, since I have such perfect examples of
pronunciation and grammar before me, I can mentally play a wonderful copy of what I want
to say; when it comes out of my mouth, though, I can hear a semi-terrible American accent
distorting my words. Sometimes I put words in the wrong order, which gives my messages
a much different meaning than what I originally intended.
(Hinton 1999)

Despite my parents’ constant efforts in preserving the use of Tagalog in our household, my
older brother, my younger sister, and I still cannot communicate to our parents in “their”
language. However, we can clearly understand every word that is communicated to us in
Tagalog. I have discovered that the same holds true for many of my fellow Filipino-American
friends. Some of them do not even understand a single word spoken to them in Tagalog.
(Hinton 1999, P-4)

The school also affects family language dynamics. The students often report parents shifting to
English in the home, or themselves cultivating English-speaking friends, having English-language
TV going at home, and using other strategies that replace the functions that would otherwise be
done in the heritage language. Many students report that once their older siblings went to school,
they started speaking English at home. Sometimes kindergarten and first-grade teachers sent notes
home saying that the student was not proficient enough in English, and suggesting that the parents
use English at home. However, it is often not the classroom but the playground that causes children
to drop their heritage tongue, due to cruel comments from their Anglo-American peers.

It was two heartless comments, from a group of small boys in my “white” neighborhood for
me to want to deny my language let alone my culture, as well. How was I to react to a racist

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comment of “Ching chong chooey go back home to where you belong. You can’t even speak
English right.” Sixteen small words which possessed so much strength and contained so much
power caused a small, naive child to want to lose her heritage—to lose what made her.
(Hinton 1999)

The majority of students in this study express regret at not being more capable in their her-
itage language. Problems between the students and their relatives are expressed in many of the
autobiographies.

To [people of my parents’ generation] my command of the Korean language showed whether

or not I was a true Korean or just a yellow-skinned boy without a cultural identity or pride.
And did I resent that attitude. Whenever relatives would visit I’d always get the same show;
first the initial looks of surprise, second the question (Don’t you know how to speak
Korean?), and finally reprimands of shame and pity from anyone and everyone, even my
younger, Korean-speaking cousins. The thing that bothered me the most was that I felt I
could do so little about my problem.
(Hinton 1999)

To summarize this section, we see that education promotes language shift very strongly and
effectively, through policies at the national, state and school levels, through school-induced ide-
ologies expressed by teachers and peers, and through the students’ own internal strategies to learn
and use English. But language shift comes at a heavy cost to family and community relations,
cultural continuity, and ultimately to one’s sense of identity.

Education and Reversing Language Shift

Since the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, with the claiming of minority rights and the
concomitant rise of ethnic and cultural pride, we have seen an ever-increasing number of indi-
viduals and communities seeking to regain what they lost through language shift. Language
revitalization has taken place in many venues—in families and communities, language clubs and
friendship groups—but ironically, schools have been the most common venue, and sometimes
been the most effective venue, for reversing the language shift that they themselves have wrought.
Brian Barnett writes:

In the past, Louisiana schools played a large role in the decline of Louisiana French and the
fostering of negative attitudes toward these varieties. In fact, a slogan of the Council for the
Development of French in Louisiana (CODOFIL) is L’école a détruit le français, l’école doit
le restaurer (School destroyed French, school must restore it).
(Barnett 2010, vii)

As for American Indians, who have created some 35 tribal colleges and universities since the
1960s (McCarty 2013) and have also gained local control over some of their elementary and high
schools, the responsibility of the education institutions is described as follows:

Because language and culture are the lifeblood of a people, they must be visible; otherwise, they
will die. It is, therefore, the responsibility of native institutions of education and the commu-
nities they serve to create a safe place for native languages and cultures to survive and thrive.
(Nee-Benham et al. 2003, 168)

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In 1990, the U.S. government officially stated a new policy favoring language maintenance
and revival—the Native American Languages Acts of 1990 and 1992.

It is the policy of the United States to . . . preserve, protect, and promote the rights and
freedom of Native Americans to use, practice, and develop Native American languages; . . .
encourage and support the use of Native American languages as a medium of instruction in
order to encourage and support—(A) Native American language survival, (B) educational
opportunity, (C) increased student success and performance, (D) increased student awareness
and knowledge of their culture and history, and (E) increased student and community
pride; . . . recognize the right of Indian tribes and other Native American governing bodies
to use the Native American languages as a medium of instruction in all schools funded by
the Secretary of the Interior;. . . and encourage all institutions of elementary, secondary and
higher education, where appropriate, to include Native American languages in the curric-
ulum in the same manner as foreign languages and to grant proficiency in Native American
languages the same full academic credit as proficiency in foreign languages.
(Native American Languages Act 1990, section 104)

It is notable that much is said in the act about education, including the encouragement of
Native American languages as the languages of instruction in the schools. The language of this
act is a complete turnaround from the school language policies during the boarding school era.
Native Americans have fought for control over their own affairs, and control over their children’s
education is one of the central issues. As McCarty writes,

Although schooling for Native Americans is complicated and compromised by federal

mandates and purse strings, it remains a crucial arena for the exercise of tribal sovereignty
and linguistic and educational self-determination. As this section suggests, much of this
revolves around the right (and the fight) to teach and maintain Indigenous languages.
(McCarty 2013, 44)

From the Native American Languages Act, we see that current national policy supports lan-
guage revitalization in the schools and elsewhere, and even, after the 1992 act, provides some
funding. More recently additional funding specifically for Native American immersion schools
became available through the Esther Martinez Native American Languages Preservation Act of
2006. (Despite this, the nation also has conflicting policies, such as No Child Left Behind, that
places barriers to the use of languages other than English in the classroom.)
There are programs now to support all of the languages we have discussed in the first section
of this paper—Native American languages, the colonial languages, and immigrant languages. The
role of schools in language maintenance and revitalization ranges from small language classes to
bilingual education to full-on immersion schools where children receive most or all of their
instruction in the target language.
Bilingual education was given government funding with the Bilingual Education Act of 1968
and mandated for schools with large non-English-speaking populations in 1975. Actually, the
government interest in bilingual education was not for purposes of language maintenance, much
less revitalization, but rather for the goal of English acquisition, and the mandate for bilingual
education was a remedy to a lawsuit by a family who wanted their child to be taught English
(U.S. Supreme Court 1979: Lau v. Nichols, 414 U.S. 563 (1974).
A well-executed bilingual education program can do the job of keeping the students up with
their education while learning English. But from the beginning, there has been a debate between

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the “transitional” model, where students only stay in the bilingual program as long as it takes to
master English well enough to learn fully through English, vs. the “maintenance” approach,
where the schools maintain a dual immersion system all the way, even through high school, if
possible. (Crawford 2004; Skutnabb-Kangas 2000). A strong bilingual education program also
supports not just the language but also the culture of the minority language group (Hornberger
1991). Most bilingual programs are of the transitional variety, which means that the whole realm
of literacy and learned speech and vocabulary for the heritage tongue is missed. Nor have gov-
ernment funders and policy makers generally supported such a role for bilingual education. But
many schools, including many privately funded ones, have very serious dual immersion programs
all through elementary school and, in some cases, high school. The families who send their stu-
dents to these dual immersion programs include those who want to keep their heritage language
strong as well as families where English is their main language, but they want their children to
enjoy the benefits of bilingualism. The Center for Applied Linguistics lists 422 dual immersion
programs in the public schools as of December 2012. Many more, including private schools, are
not listed.
In the heyday of bilingual education, many American Indians and Alaska and Hawaiian
Natives developed bilingual programs in their schools, and some of these programs still exist and
thrive. Bringing the languages back into the education system that had excluded them before
was a very important event that allowed some intergenerational healing from the boarding school
era and gave a generation of students renewed pride in their languages and cultures. However,
there were clear indications over time that for most communities, a bilingual education program
was insufficient for language maintenance in cases where the language was disappearing at home
and in the community (Hinton 2011). Thus, another movement began to gather steam: the full
immersion school, or as some communities call them, “language survival schools.” With the
understanding that children are learning English at home and in the community, the immersion
school focuses entirely on the heritage tongue. Hawai‘i has been the most successful, with dozens
of immersion schools and language nests (pre-schools and daycare centers) and the ability for a
student to have the majority of his education take place in Hawaiian all the way through high
school—and even through college if they enroll at the University of Hawai‘i. The schools edu-
cate the children in all the standard subjects, but also have strong components of Hawaiian history,
culture, and traditional values. Courses in English literature and essay writing are given only in
the high school years, so that they can succeed in English-language universities. Altogether these
schools are not only successful in creating a generation of Hawaiian speakers, but also in creating
a generation of self-confident people with a strong sense of identity, in great contrast to the
soul-crushing system of the boarding school era.
The colonial and immigrant languages also have their immersion schools, and in fact represent
the great majority of such schools. The Center for Applied Linguistics (www.cal.org) keeps
statistics on immersion schools in the United States, showing that they have grown over the last
40 years, from just one in 1973 to 450 in 2011. The actual number must be considerably larger,
since I know of several that are not listed. The largest number of immersion schools are for Span-
ish (45%), followed by French (22%), Mandarin (13%), Hawaiian (6%), Japanese (5%), German
(3%), and “Other Languages” (6%). Among the other languages are immersion schools for
American Indian and Inuit languages; those named in the CAL website are Ojibwe,Yup’ik, Diné,
Inupiaq, and Salish.
In summary, we see that education has a powerful effect on language shift. American schools
have been a successful tool to enact language shift to English in students, effecting language shift
even when there is no overt policy. Yet we also see education playing an important role in lan-
guage maintenance and revitalization.

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 Education and Language Shift

Research Approaches
Education has been used as a tool for language shift by government, based not so much on sci-
entific research as on assumptions and political goals. The early educational policies to promote
language shift that are described above for the Native American boarding school era were not
based on research at all, but rather on political thought, and a simple assumption that 24 hours
per day of punishment for speaking any forbidden language will produce language shift. The
actual studies of how language learning and language shift occur and the most successful ways to
promote it were missing. The same is true in the early 20th century, although we see at that time
the beginnings of research on bilingualism in children. These early studies claimed their bilingual
subjects had below-normal intelligence, and the main debate was whether this finding was
“nature” or “nurture.” Much of that research is based on intelligence tests (e.g., Goodenough
1926; Smith 1939), which were poorly administered with no regard for culture and social class,
nor how well the child knew the language the test was being administered in—all of which we
now know skews results. The political climate created by the Civil Rights Movement changed
research on bilingualism drastically; firmer research methods show that, in fact, bilingualism is a
cognitive advantage (Peal and Lambert 1962). It is really in the 1960s and beyond that we begin
to see research affecting language policy in the schools. By the time the American preschool
program Head Start was developed in 1964, research on how to teach English as a second lan-
guage (ESL) had come up with kinder and gentler ways of teaching English to young children
from non-English-speaking homes. The abandonment of the home language has not been a goal
in Head Start, but studies show that it happens anyway (Fillmore 1991). In the researching of
bilingual education theory and methodology, we see language maintenance and language shift
being looked at for the first time (many studies are reviewed in Crawford 2004). Hot on the heels
of this effort came research into language revitalization, which directly focused on ways to
develop bilingualism and prevent or reverse language shift (for example, Grenoble and Whaley
2006; Hinton and Hale 2001).

New Debates
Many of the new debates about education and language shift are still the old policy debates, and
still political in nature, relating to debates about the status and rights of minority groups. Are we
a “melting pot” where all people should aim at being part of a single mainstream culture? Or is
cultural diversity desirable? Should we recognize minority cultural and linguistic rights? As for
language, should we care whether language shift to English (as opposed to the maintenance of
the heritage language in addition to knowing English) occurs in an English-dominant society?
Should the United States promote bilingualism? What are the economic benefits of bilingualism?
Can we afford to spend funds on helping people retain their heritage languages? What’s in it for
the U.S.? Should bilingual education for maintenance play a role, or should it be strictly transi-
tional? Or should bilingual education be abandoned altogether? Many of these debates involve
fears about maintaining the hegemony of English. Is English being overrun by Spanish? They
also revolve around immigration policies. Should illegal immigrants even be allowed to go to
school? Should we spend money on English language classes for immigrants? Should taxpayers
pay for bilingual services? Is there something unpatriotic about allowing people to have bilingual
ballots or make an oath of allegiance in another language? Will maintaining a heritage tongue
reduce loyalty to the United States? There are also issues such as whether language policy should
treat indigenous languages differently from immigrant languages. As the Native languages of the
land, should indigenous languages have a special status?

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Leanne Hinton

While these are not really debates within research, they are addressed frequently within the
writings of researchers, and in many ways stimulate research. For example, one debate is
whether children will receive as good an education and perform as well in immersion schools
as in English-language schools. Will children do better in school when they are educated in a
way that takes into account and even celebrates their heritage culture and language than in
schools that denigrate or ignore it? How much English should there be in a language survival
school? Is dual immersion as effective for language maintenance as full immersion in the her-
itage language? Do full-immersion language revival schools prepare their students sufficiently
for lives within an English-majority society? Can schools actually reverse language shift? Can
language revitalization expand from the school to families and communities? Will children be
able to maintain the use of their language into adulthood after going to a language survival
school? What areas of language use are missing from a language that is used primarily in the
education system? What are the roles of family and community in minority language mainte-
nance and revitalization, and how should the schools relate to the family and community roles?
One area of research that needs enhancing is long-term studies of how school policies and
teaching theories and methods play out in language shift and maintenance/revitalization. What
are the long-term outcomes for heritage language students who attend school programs that
promote heritage languages, compared to schools that focus only on English? And within each
type of program, what conditions, theories, methods, and philosophies appear to affect the out-
comes? Outcomes in student performance in each of these situations need more study—are
there some scenarios that allow students to learn and perform better than others? Do some
scenarios lead to more or less success in higher education, and careers? Do some scenarios lead
to better mental health than others? Long-term outcomes in language maintenance vs. shift are
also important, especially after students leave the school system. What is the difference in the
long run between students who were in language maintenance/revitalization programs vs. stu-
dents whose schooling did not support their heritage languages? Do the students whose lan-
guage was supported still use their language? Do they make family and career choices that are
different from students whose language was not supported? Do they carry on their language to
the next generation, either by using it at home or sending the children to schools that support
the language?

Implications for Education

We know that people are capable of knowing and using more than one language, and we see that
the education system plays a large role in whether people grow up as bilinguals or not. Currently,
we have much better ways to help non-English-speaking students learn English than the blunt-
force approaches of the past (though the resources are not sufficient), but as Skutnabb-Kangas
writes:

ESL [must be seen] as just one part of a necessary holistic language learning goal, namely
bilingualism or multilingualism, where obviously both parts should be discussed and planned
together. There is a practical exclusion of mother tongue or primary language-related
concerns in almost all evaluations of allegedly bilingual education programmes in ‘core
English Countries’ (countries where native speakers of English are a majority). In most
evaluations of minority education results in English and maths dominate and results in the
mother tongues of minorities are footnoted, if they exit at all. Concentrating on one of
the languages is obviously legitimate, but only if it happens with the understanding that the
other languages in the students’ repertoire are equally important and the development of all

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 Education and Language Shift

of them have to be taken properly into consideration for sound pedagogical methods to be
found.
(2000, xxii)

She goes on to say “one of the basic linguistic human rights of persons belonging to
minorities is—or should be—to achieve high levels of bi- or multilingualism through educa-
tion” (2000, 569).
Pockets of the United States have taken enough local control of their education systems to
maintain or revitalize their languages within the schools, but they have to battle to do so, because
the nation as a whole is still divided on minority language rights. The main goal of education
throughout most of the nation is still to promote language shift to English, through policy or
neglect, and to think of bilingualism only as something that some people might achieve through
foreign language education in high school and college. Dual immersion and language survival
schools show us the way to a better approach.

Further Reading
Lily Wong Fillmore’s article, “When Learning a Second Language Means Losing the First,” (Fill-
more 1991) is a study of over 1000 homes in the United States where a language other than
English is spoken. She cites the Head Start preschools as the main place where language shift
begins, and discusses the problems that develop within families as the children cease to speak their
heritage languages. Communication is hampered and the transmission of important values is
interrupted within the families, with the ensuing social problems this situation can bring.
She argues that children should be fully stabilized in their first language before English is
introduced.
The most important book directly relating to education and language shift is Tove Skut-
nabb-Kangas’ blockbuster Linguistic Genocide in Education—or Worldwide Diversity and Human
Rights? (2000) She lays out the situation for minority languages and the ways they are lost within
the usual educational practices, and she discusses and argues against the ideological, political, and
economic reasons nation-states suppress minority languages. She brings out arguments for Lin-
guistic Human Rights and goes on to present strong models of bilingual and multilingual educa-
tion that support the languages of minority groups in English-dominant countries of the west.

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 32
Looking Back, Sideways,
and Forward
Language and Education
in Multilingual Settings

María E. Torres-Guzmán and Ester J. de Jong

Introduction
With more than 6,000 languages distributed over 200 nations, multilingualism continues to be
the norm in the world today. Following Wildsmith-Cromarty (2009), multilingualism needs to
be defined broadly, acknowledging that some situations may call for the oral knowledge of more
than one language, for the knowledge of more than one literacy, and for understanding what
multiple languages mean to others. In this chapter, we will trace the historical developments in
our conceptualizations of multilingualism and education in the United States.
To organize our discussion, we apply a tri-part framework. The macro sociopolitical
(Ricento 2000) refers to “events and processes” at the national and global level that serve as a
backdrop to the role of linguistic and cultural diversity in schools. In particular, by focusing
on the conceptualization of the relationships between language, culture, race, and poverty, we
can understand the flows of local, national, and international events and how they reflect dif-
ferent sociocultural contexts of multilingualism. The onto-epistemological (Barad 2007) refers
to the nature of knowledge and also to knowing as being, as “we know because we are of the
world” (185). We use this lens to show how our collective views of multilingualism have
evolved over time. Lastly, our analysis highlights the images and metaphors the different his-
torical periods embodied in the media, scholarly work, and in everyday language. We begin
each historical period by presenting the localized experiences of the individual bilingual
learner.
Through the vignette and the three lenses, we will explore the flows of understanding of
language, learning, and multilingualism in schools in order to understand the theoretical and
research tasks of the present and the future. We realize that any attempt to distinguish the histor-
ical periods is necessarily arbitrary in nature. Moreover, we do not propose linearity, as there are
traces of each of the periods in the others; oftentimes they co-exist. Acknowledging the different
multilingual threads in United States history, this chapter specifically explores the conceptual
construction and reconstruction of multilingualism in K–12 schools from post-World War II to
the present.

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 Looking Back, Sideways, and Forward

Period I: From ‘Sink or Swim’ to the Dawn of a New Era

Vignette
The child who used multiple languages in his/her everyday life was still in a situation in the world
known as ‘sink or swim,’ which had characterized public education for immigrant children and
adults since the early 1900s (Higham 1955; Berroll 1995; Pavlenko and Blackledge 2004). The
child entered an all-English environment that made little room for the different languages and
cultural experiences that the child brought to school. Educational and social statistics show that
only some children succeeded in American life, while the majority failed schooling, even when
learning the language and assimilating into the dominant culture (Perlmann 1990).
The period immediately following World War II was dominated by the Cold War and the
competition with the then-Soviet Union as well as an internal shift in racial relations. The need
to respond to the USSR military program and the launching of Sputnik into space in 1957 fueled
the idea that the United States needed to effectively develop its own human resources and the
notion that national defense required the development of foreign languages amongst the nation’s
school children. During this era, poverty was put forth as the dominant explanatory variable of
underachievement of certain groups of children as it was tied to patterns of English language use
and parents’ socialization practices that disadvantaged children in school (1953 Puerto Rican
study of New York [Morrison 1958]).
Oscar Lewis’ Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty (1959), Glazer and
Moynihan’s (1963) Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negros, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italian, and Irish of New York
City, and the 1966 Coleman Report (Coleman 1968) firmly reinscribed the culture of the home
and poverty as the main explanatory variables for school achievement. These studies were signif-
icant in shaping federal program responses, such as the Economic Opportunities Act of 1964
and Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, established to provide
compensatory economic and educational services for those living in poverty. By extension, edu-
cational solutions focused on alleviating the deficits in the home through compensatory pro-
grams. While race, ethnicity, and language were integrally interwoven with poverty, these factors
were viewed as subordinate and merely implicated.

Conceptualizing Bi/Multilingualism (Language, Mind, and Society)

Behaviorist conceptualizations of language and language acquisition came under severe critique
during this period and were replaced by cognitive views of language development. Chomsky’s
work stressed the internal, innate mechanisms of language acquisition (Mitchell and Myles 1998).
With his framework (and influenced by earlier work by De Saussure), it was an idealized, native
speaker whose ‘competence’ (idealized grammar) rather than performance (actual use of the
language) stood at the center of linguistic research. Influenced by these cognitive approaches to
language and language acquisition, bilingualism was viewed as a characteristic of the individual.
Bilinguals were individuals acquiring two monolingual systems and bilingual acquisition was
researched as the systematic and separate development of specific linguistic features of each lan-
guage system. Early scholarly works on multilingualism used only one term for both bilingualism
and multilingualism (Haugen 1970; Weinrich 1953).
The centrality of the native-speaker, monolingual norm, as an integral part of the definition of
bilingualism, was particularly evident in the treatment of and attitudes toward code-switching—that
is, the use of both languages within or between sentences. Code-switching was considered an

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María E. Torres-Guzmán and Ester J. de Jong

indicator of immaturity of both linguistic systems. In schools, bilingual children who simultaneously
used both languages were seen as being linguistically confused and, possibly, cognitively delayed.
In a similar vein, cultures were viewed as belonging to unique, bounded groups from exotic
lands whose means of communication was not English. It was assumed that there was a one-to-
one relationship between language choice and national identity. Having one standard or national
language was a precondition for political, social, and economic cohesion and national identity. In
the United States, speaking English and giving up the language of your home country within
three generations continued as a key marker of successful assimilation for immigrants (Hawley
1948; Jaffe 1954; Handlin 1959).

Conceptualizing Diversity Through Assimilation

As the one-way nature of (im)migration shifted, the traditional intergenerational pattern of lan-
guage shift was challenged. Research focus on language use across generations was directly associ-
ated with the need to explain the persistence of Spanish-speaking groups, particularly, as in the
southwest or on the east coast they appeared to retain their mother tongue beyond the third gen-
eration. Lopez and Staton-Salazar (2001) proposed that what was happening was that because a
large number of Mexicano immigrants arrived during the Mexican Revolution of the 1910, by the
1960s a “third generation” was coming of age. In California alone, only 20% of the Latino state
population at the time was foreign-born, and two thirds of the population was school-age children.
Cuban refugees also raised the need for language maintenance in education, giving rise to the
establishment of the first two-way bilingual program, as they had hopes of returning to their home-
land someday. Samora (1962) and Sanchez (1962) proposed that language, race, poverty, and annex-
ation were complicating factors related to assimilation. Another perspective was represented by
Fishman’s Language Loyalty: Its Functions and Concomitants in Two Bilingual Communities (1964), which
proposed that language maintenance was a sign of identity and resistance (Blanton 2012).

Discourses
In the early post-War period, the prevailing view of multilingualism was still enacted within the
construct of the ‘one nation, one language’ ideology and with the expectation of group assimi-
lation. The 1950s and early 1960s challenged these traditional patterns as air travel and the open-
ing of immigration brought new movements into major U.S. cities. Large enclaves of poverty
stressed the schools’ capacity to educate their children. Resistance to annexation, poverty, and race
were perceived as slowing down assimilation and the learning of English among the Spanish-speaking
groups, in particular. The discourses of cultures of poverty, annexation, and the hyphenated construc-
tion of Americans (Mexican-American, Puerto Rican-American, etc.) began to signal race in an era
that was to be dominated by racial strife and resistance.

Historical Period II: Rights to Language and Culture

The second historical period of multilingualism attention shifts to language as an important
mediating factor in school success, and bilingual education emerges as an important educational
intervention.

Vignette
When a child entered school during this period, the child would be more likely to encounter a
teacher who knew his/her language and culture, although sometimes it sounded a little different

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from that of the child’s home. In this classroom, students were also likely to talk about how their
native language facilitated the learning of English. As Rosana and Alicia explain,

Alicia: Porque cuando iba a la otra escuela, alla

por la escuela M. por alla, por las montañas. en el norte-no aprendí
nada, nada de inglés, porque todo era en inglés.
Rosana: Bueno eso es porque no aprendiste nada de inglés porque todo era en inglés. Para
aprender 1os dos idiomas tiene que ser un salón bilingüe
Alicia: !Como éste!
[English Translation]
Alicia: Because when I was going to the other school. that one over . . . M school, the one by
the mountains, in the north—didn’t learn any English at all, because everything was in
English.
Rosana: Well, that’s why you didn’t learn any English is because everything was in English. To
learn two languages you have to be in a bilingual classroom.
Alicia: Like this one!
(Shannon 1995, 189–190)

In the bilingual classroom, some books were in the students’ native language, as was the
language of instruction part of the time. Language use in the classroom was highly bilingual—
teachers switched languages with frequency, sometimes using a preview/review method,
sometimes using books in English while teaching in the native language of the children, and
sometimes separating the two languages by subject matter or group of learners (Legarreta
1979).
The Immigration Act of 1968 abolished the quota system that had privileged Western and
Northern European immigrants since 1924. It opened U.S. borders for entry of people from
around the world, which resulted in a significant increase in immigrants, particularly from Latin
America and Asia. The force of the Civil Rights Movement and the War on Poverty gave impulse
to many community groups organizing at local and national levels for employment rights, for
education, and for recovery of culture and customs. Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales wrote his famous
poem, Yo soy Joaquin (1967), while Cesar Chavez launched the grape and secondary boycotts
nationally. Within the Hispanic community, leaders met to construct a national agenda to reclaim
their rights. Youth, in general, were in the streets, experiencing a world of counter-culture and
joining the growing protests to end the Vietnam War, the riots in Detroit, Watts, and other
neighborhoods. The anti-establishment discourse found expression anywhere from the flower
child to the Young Lords, Black Panthers, and the Weathermen. The 1973 Wounded Knee con-
frontation was an expression of and gave attention to the conditions of the Native American.
National conversations about systemic discrimination and inequalities in U.S. society took
place, and within this context language emerged as a new focus. The vignette above illustrates
what would become a central tenet in the field of bilingual education during this period—that
children speaking a minoritized language at home needed a strong foundation in their native
language in order to support cognitive development and learning of English. These ideas were
supported by the court system and through federal policies.
Many communities constructed legal strategies for securing that their children’s native lan-
guage would be part of the education reforms for their children. Landmark court cases such as
Keyes v. Denver Public School No. 1 (1973), Aspira v. New York City Public Schools (1974), Morgan v.
Hennigan in Boston, MA (1974), Milliken v. Bradley in Detroit (1974), and Lau v. Nichols (1974)

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María E. Torres-Guzmán and Ester J. de Jong

and the subsequent U.S. Office of Civil Rights’ Lau Remedies identified students with limited
English proficiency as a separate group under the law, warranting a special program. In addition,
Title VII of the ESEA (the Bilingual Education Act of 1968) was a federal grant-in-aid program
that supported bilingual educational approaches in order to develop a qualified teaching cadre,
to develop appropriate materials, and for evaluation and research. These legal and federal policy
developments supported a period of innovation in bilingual and English as a second language
approaches (Wiese and García 1988). A proliferation of bilingual models emerged, including
transitional bilingual education (TBE), where the goal was to transition the child as quickly as
possible, as well as maintenance-oriented programs, which had as a goal the use of the child’s
language for academic purposes beyond learning English (Baker 2006).

Conceptualizing Bi/Multilingualism (Language, Mind, and Society)

Scholarship on bilingualism advanced the notion that bilingualism was beneficial and argued for
the central role of the native language for academic achievement and English acquisition for bilin-
gual children (Cummins 1981). The structural view of language was challenged by the notion of
communicative competence, and the ethnography of communication prioritized the social con-
text of language use and the role of individual and social variables on language acquisition (Hymes
1977; Labov 1966; 1972).
Cognitively, the research of this period posited that the bilingual mind is qualitatively different
from the monolingual mind and called for viewing bilinguals as uniquely different from mono-
linguals (Grosjean 1989). Numerous studies conducted during this period demonstrated the cog-
nitive advantages of bilingualism (for reviews, see Adesope, Lavin, Thompson, and Ungerleider
2010; Bialystok 2000; Cook 2008). The bilingualism/intellectual inferiority construct was
replaced with one that stressed the multilingualism/cognitive benefits link. Moreover, following
the functional views of bilingualism, the phenomenon of code-switching, the use of both lan-
guages within (intrasentential) or across (intersentential) sentences, received significant attention
and was reframed from a deficit (or as a sign of linguistic confusion) to a systematic, rule-governed,
and functional system (Gumperz & Hernandez-Chavez, 1971; Poplack 1980).
Jim Cummins is one of the foremost scholars during this period to define bilingualism and
its role in schools. Cummins proposes a tri-part framework to explain school failure for bilingual
children: the BICS/CALP distinction, the Interdependence Hypothesis (or, the Common Under-
lying Proficiency), and the Threshold Hypothesis (see Cummins 2001 for an overview). Briefly,
the interdependence hypothesis posits that skills learned in one language transfer to the other
language. In particular, Cummins argued that features associated with the language of school, or
cognitive academic language proficiency, transferred. The latter was less supported through a
shared context and took longer for students to acquire and demonstrate on traditional standard-
ized reading and math tests used in school to document achievement. Cummins’ theory became
critical in the bilingual debates as it helped explained why bilingual education worked and why
it was necessary to ensure equal educational opportunity: Bilingual children need a strong foun-
dation in their first language in order to be able to perform at the same or better levels than their
English-only counterparts on English tests.
Cummins’ original framework, particularly his distinction between BICS and CALP, has been
extensively criticized (Edelsky et al. 1983; Martin-Jones and Romaine 1986; MacSwan 2000; and
Rolstad 2005), informing important new directions in conceptualizing bilingualism in terms of
identity, power relationships, and ideologies. It is useful to remind ourselves that Cummins’ the-
ory arose out of and is (re)inscribed in “the stigmas of compensatory programs in which the
native language of the student is seen as a deficit to overcome” (Hakuta 1985, 229). It is important

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to acknowledge Cummins’ work as playing a critical role in orienting the field towards more
additive-oriented bilingual education program types that made sure the foundation in the native
language was cultivated.

Conceptualizing Language and Cultural Variation

During this period, we observed the disentanglement of poverty from language and culture and
a more independent treatment of the role of language, language variation within and across
languages, cultures, and cultural identity in schools. Variation in culture and language was asso-
ciated with historical patterns of migration. Torres-Trueba, Guthrie and Au (1981) proposed
the concept of covert/overt cultural forms and cultural repertoires to explain group differences.
Later, Suarez-Orozco (1987) used Ogbu’s original distinction between voluntary immigrants
and involuntary immigrants to differentiate between the success and failure in schooling of
different groups.
Sociolinguistic differences, identities, and proficiencies of the learner became points of depar-
ture for teaching the standard variety of a language. Teaching was also oriented to variation and/
or features of English in Spanish and vice versa (borrowing, calques, and code-switching), which
were initially conceptualized as native/second language interference and associated with less-
than-native standards. In addition to calling for the reconsideration of teaching methodologies in
native, second, and foreign language teaching (Jacobson 1970; Valdes and Garcia-Moya 1976),
there was a call for the integration of community forms of speech—for example, Southwest Spanish
within Mexican Spanish. A flurry of ethnoculturally specific materials from government-funded
centers began to enter the classrooms, facilitated by the increased presence of technology (e.g., VALE
and other computer programs for children).
The discussion of linguistic variation and code-switching advocated a stance that considered
the relative proficiency in the native language and the second language a more valid measure than
the proficiency in either language. This bilingual perspective led to new considerations on how
to measure language proficiency and its associated eligibility and exit criteria for children partic-
ipating in bilingual programs. Despite the criticism of monolingual assessment models for bilin-
gual children, criteria for eligibility and exit continued to rely on language proficiency tests based
on standard varieties of a language.
Summary of discourses: Several metaphors characterized this complex period. On the one hand,
the civil rights discourse emphasized the rights of ethnic communities to use and maintain their
native languages. While the relationship between bilingualism and poverty was confounded in
the major theories taking hold during this period, there were nuanced notions of language var-
iation, cultural differences, and language proficiency. The deficit/difference and nature/nurture
metaphors are stressed by the discourse of equal educational opportunity, particularly specialized
instruction that emphasized the unique contributions of different languages and cultures. More-
over, within this period, studies began to nuance and decouple language from culture as well as
race, granting primacy to language. This led to the creation of multiple communities of multi-
lingual practices (i.e., TESOL, bilingual, second, and foreign language education).

Period III: Language Separation and Academic Rigor

The communities of linguistically minoritized groups began to diversify in significant ways dur-
ing the 80s and the 90s. This period is characterized by a strengthening of maintenance bilingual
education programs (such as two-way immersion), on the one hand, and dominant English
educational policies and ideologies, on the other.

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María E. Torres-Guzmán and Ester J. de Jong

Vignette
As the child looks around the bilingual classroom, s/he looks for cues on the doorway, on the
chalkboard, and in other places to see which language they will be working in today. The child is
not worried because the teachers will most likely understand him/her. Even when they do not
understand, the teachers are likely to be open to different forms of communication—sometimes
the teacher uses gestures or pictures to give the child an entry to the meaning of the sounds coming
out of his/her mouth and sometimes a peer helps by translating. Even when the teacher under-
stands what the child says, s/he is guided by the designated language of the day that is visible in
the color of the markers on the chart paper. If they are red, for example, s/he knows that the
morning will be in the language other than English and the monolinguals in that language as well
as the bilinguals will most likely participate and lead in almost all the activities presented to them.
If the letters are in blue, it is likely that the teacher will have to ask classmates who are bilingual to
help out their monolingual peers in English. If the child wants to do independent reading, the
color of the letters on the tags, in blue or red, will also indicate which language is used within the
book. Sometimes s/he can find the same book in either the red- or blue-tagged shelves, but not
all the books can be found in the two languages. While the teacher is bound to one language or
the other, depending on the structure of the day and/or the week, the students are encouraged to
use all the resources, including language, at their disposal for learning (Perez 2004).
The opening of immigration policies of the 60s gave rise to new diversification. Among the
Latino groups alone, they came from all the 21 countries that speak Spanish, and the total number
of Spanish-speaking rose to a high of 16% of the total population by the first decade of the
21st century. Furthermore, the Chinese community grew exponentially, from 0.6% in the 1980s
to 4.5% in 2000 (U.S. Census Bureau 2010). The racially or culturally mixed population went
from 0.6% in the 80s to 1.5% in 2000. In addition, the 2000 U.S. Census showed that the settle-
ment pattern of new immigrants changed from the previous conglomeration in the metropol-
itan cities to areas that had never before experienced large number of immigrants, like North
Carolina, Georgia, and Nevada.
The world’s understanding of language and, simultaneously, bi/multilingualism, currently
flows from a strong, socially grounded perspective even when, politically, the United States’ pol-
icies are embedded in narrow re-interpretations of the purpose of schooling for bilingual children
and are biased toward English language learning and practices that emphasize discrete, low-level
skills (de Jong, Arias, and Sánchez 2010).
In response to the critiques from the English-only movement and in an effort to distinguish
effective and less effective programs, scholarship tries to identify features of effective bilingual
programs (e.g., Garcia 1988; Mace-Matluck 1990; Miramontes, Nadeau, and Commins 1997;
Brisk 2006). Politics and the perceived controversy surrounding bilingual education programs by
those supporting English-only approaches make the term ‘bilingual education’ unpopular. Within
the silencing of the term ‘bilingual education,’ the umbrella of dual language education (DLE)
emerges to refer to these strong (i.e., maintenance-oriented) forms of bilingual education
(Lindholm-Leary 2005; Torres-Guzman et al. 2005; Garcia and Kliefgen 2010). DLE refers to
programs that aim for bilingualism and biliteracy, academic achievement, and cross-cultural com-
petence and is associated with consistent, positive program outcomes (Howard, Sugarman, and
Christian 2003; Lindholm-Leary 2005; Lindholm-Leary and Howard 2008). The possibility and
desirability of integrating minoritized language group children with mainstream children in the
project of bilingualism and cross-cultural practices has allowed dual language programs, particu-
larly two-way immersion programs, to be viewed as a mainstream educational enterprise with
academic rigor that meets district and state standards.

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Interestingly, DLE has emphasized the importance of keeping the two languages in the
program separate for instruction in response to past ad-hoc code-switching practices, the
inconsistencies of language policies in programs from grade to grade, and in an effort to pro-
tect the status of the minority language for instruction against the societal hegemony of
English—as exemplified in our vignette. Within bilingual programs, particularly dual lan-
guage education programs, languages are separated structurally based on the beliefs that chil-
dren need explicit contexts for using the second language they are learning and that the
presence of the two languages at the same time will permit the students to fall back on their
native languages as a crutch. The separation of the languages permits the development of a
one-language-rich environment in each of the languages, as the range of use of the language
of instruction can be fully expressed by teachers and students (Thomas and Collier 2003;
Rolstad 2005).
A very different strand of research also develops during this period as more English language
learners (ELLs) are placed in English-only classrooms, whether specialized ESL or mainstream. A
re-focusing on effective English teaching has emerged (e.g., through scaffolding practices;
Echevarria, Vogt, and Short 2007) and the role of content as a vehicle for meaningful ways to
improve language learning. This research has been important to both the ESL as well as bilingual
education communities as it has proposed to respond to the needs of improving language learn-
ing in the continua of language education programs—from Sheltered English to Dual Language
Education programs.
Research has particularly focused on vocabulary and literacy development (August et al. 2005,
among others) and the notion of academic English has been appropriated by mainstream schol-
ars. Within this construct, knowledge becomes school text in English, that is, the print associated
with knowledge of the academic register, and the object is to capture and measure what is already
known through tests (Goodman and Goodman 1990; Menken 2008).

Conceptualizing Bi/Multilingualism (Language, Mind, and Society)

The definitions of bilingualism have moved from a set of characteristics of the individual to an
embedded social process where individuals and groups engage interactionally within their socio-
cultural circumstances. Moving away from a strict emphasis on decontextualized cognitive
strategies and processes, language and culture have been increasingly conceptualized as social
constructs (Cole 1996; Lantoff 2000; Moll 1990; Rogoff 2003)—that is, as shared meanings
emerging from and living into norms through language and other social practices. The issues
of power and language status and the role of ideology have been explicitly considered (Herriman
and Burnaby 1996; Galindo and Vigil 2000; King 2000; Ricento 2000; Wiley 2000; Pavlenko
and Blackledge 2004, among others) within a language-reflects-society perspective (Gafaranga
2005). The most innovative studies were those that focused on macro-meso-micro situations.
In these studies, the focus has been not only on how language policies and planning occur
within the political and ideological context, but also on how such policies have been reflected
in school policy and in communities and homes, and, most importantly, in an individual’s
everyday personal experiences and in how the individual has perceived languages opening/
constraining possibilities and choices they have made (Hornberger 2007; Martínez-Roldán and
Malavé 2004).
The sociocultural approach has generated research on the relationship of identity and lan-
guage, and provided a new lens on language and literacy development and its implications for
education. As the realities of the multilingual lives of children and their teachers have received

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greater attention, the emerging narratives have brought a proliferation of topics to the field,
including how teachers have brought their linguistic and cultural experiences to bear on teach-
ing and how the experience of children in classrooms and communities has moved beyond
bilingualism to multilingualism. This has also brought attention to the formal acquisition of
heritage languages and to three or more languages in schools (Cenoz 2003; Hoffman 2001;
Clyne 1997).

Conceptualizing Diversity
Examining language and culture in schools has gone from a deficit construct (i.e., “the culture
and the language (which is limited) of the children does not help them in school”) to a more
positive, holistic perspective in which language is a cultural resource children bring into the
classroom (Mercado 2005). Continuing to build on the notion of languages and cultures as a
resource, Gonzalez, Moll and Amanti (2005), Mercado and Moll (1997), Olmedo (2002, 2005),
and Mercado (2005) have noted that privileging the resources of the home, the family, and the
community in schools creates spaces within educational institutions that can trigger a change in
the relationship of children from linguistically and culturally different communities to school
learning. Concomitantly, the theory of social capital (Portes 1998) has built on the funds of
knowledge to describe the network of resources that families possess within a broader relational
system and to identify how schools can augment and enrich the network minoritized linguistic
children may need to achieve academic success. Beyond the understanding of ways of knowing
associated with particular communities and bringing them into the school, Zentella (2005) has
proposed them as strengths schools can build on.
In the context of sociocultural theory, group identity has been explored as part of the social
community in which an individual participates, thus making it possible to explore differences in
identities associated with the different languages spoken (Norton Pierce 1995; McKay and Wong
1996) and the different cultural practices inherited as well as constructed within the social norms
of the group (Lave and Wenger 1991). Culture has been situated in the agentic construction of
identity. Nieto (1992) has examined culture critically, pushing beyond the celebratory nature of
surface culture and bringing into bilingual education a discussion of what a critical and culturally
relevant pedagogy has meant for children. Culture is seen as fluid and self-constructed while
situated in the traces of collective norms constructed within communities of practice (Lave and
Wenger 1991).

Summary of Discourses
Multiplicities of discourse metaphors have continued during this period. The ‘language and
culture as resource’ metaphor continues in the dual language education movement, acquiring
economic, educational, linguistic, cultural, cognitive, as well as political dimensions (Ricento
2000). This discourse helps decouple the language and culture from poverty, as bilingualism,
particularly in dual language education, is seen as positive for all students—those that are main-
stream and those that are linguistically minoritized. It stresses the social construction of language
and culture and is grounded in the metaphors of equity, quality, and accessibility. The accounta-
bility movement, anti-immigrant sentiments and policies, on the other hand, co-opt the educa-
tional opportunity metaphor from the 1970s and flip it upside down to imply that the way to
economic and educational success is through a homogenized approach (in English) to common
standards.

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 Looking Back, Sideways, and Forward

Period IV: Language and Identities Re-Imagined for the Future

Vignette
The child goes into a classroom in which the language is indicated by the color of the print and,
even when s/he does not know the language of instruction, s/he has friends that help him/her out
as many of the children speak either, or both, languages of instruction. Some children also speak
other languages in their homes and communities, so there is always an opportunity to learn a few
words in other languages that are not the medium of instruction. In other words, the child is in a
learning situation in which they can use all the linguistic and cultural resources at their disposal.
The teacher, at times, helps the child understand how to use language and cultural strategies, such
as code-switching, translanguaging, collaborative structures, and the like. Both English speakers who
are learning the minoritized language as well as children who recently emigrated from another
country are learning peers—sometimes enacting the power and authority in relation to their use of
a language to enact the world of the classroom, sometimes in a less-knowing but participatory way.
There are times when the child even invents new ways, as the tasks s/he must accomplish leave
wiggle room for creativity. The curriculum is designed so that the children, with whatever language
they enact, are cued into which one is appropriate in the moment—sometimes the language in
which s/he feels more confident is privileged, but not always. Thus, the teacher pays attention to
the linguistic proficiencies of the children when partnering. The best thing is that all of this is
constantly negotiated in spite of there being rules within which the negotiation takes place. But
even the rules are pliable at times. Lastly, the child does not have to choose between one and/or
another person’s expressed heritage culture, as some people come from a variety of legacies and they
negotiate the expressions of self in spaces that make the child comfortable in changing positions.
S/he can decide to stand in a hybrid position, for example, embracing both the majority and minor-
itized language and cultural ways, and even propose new ways that embody both.
The world has moved into a new social order, where the revolutions of communication, trans-
portation, and the markets are recognized as constantly changing. Through new means of com-
munication and the ongoing news channels, individuals can know instantly what is happening to
family, friends, and strangers in far-away lands. The functioning of the markets has weakened the
prominence of government within countries. Privatization, new collaborative policies by interna-
tional bodies such as the G8 and G20 summits, and collective responses like the Indignados and the
Occupy Wall Street movements have emerged. Emergent countries, like Brazil and China, grow
exponentially, infringing into and competing with the dominant Western economies. The differ-
ences between the rich and the poor widen worldwide and transnational living increases.
The 9/11 attack gave rise to justify both the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars which, in turn, reflected
the prominence of industries’ reliance on petroleum. A discourse of fear has been constructed at
the broader macro sociopolitical level as a response to 9/11 and has resulted in the demonization
of the Arab, Iranian, and Venezuelan spheres of influence. A strong green movement has spread
the discourse of the impending doom of climate change and global warming while at the same
time giving rise to alternative living and new green economies. The process of internationalization
has implied learning the language and culture of the markets, resulting in the continued spread of
English globally and the creation of a need for multilingual schooling.

Conceptualizing Bi/Multilingualism and Learning: The Post-Turn

In today’s world, postmodernist, poststructuralist, and postcolonialist theoretical frameworks decenter
the concepts of language, identity, and culture and propose a complex, dynamic relationship among

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them (Heller 2007; Lewis, Enciso, and Moje 2007; Mcnamara 2011). The power/knowledge
(Foucault 1984) relationship is viewed as not outside of the individual but of the individual, con-
structed with and through both language and identity.
Multilingualism is viewed within a framework where boundaries within and across languages
become more fluid and less fixed, and in which languages and identities are entangled with situ-
ated moments in time while at the same time encoding their historical trajectories (Baquedano-
López 2004). Multilingualism stresses the multiplicity of language use (García and Beardsmore
2008) across diverse contexts, and the varied ways in which we use multiple languages to “nego-
tiate a sense of self within and across a range of sites [in which more than one language is used]
at different points in time,” and as a “tool through which a person gains access to—or is denied
access to—powerful social networks that give learners the opportunity to speak” (Weedon, cited
in Norton 2010, 350–351).
Research shifts towards multilingualism and plurilingualism, as these concepts reflect more
closely the lived and negotiated lives of individuals today, particularly in urban areas (Pennycook
2010), in transcultural living (Guerra 2007), and in transfonterizo existence (de la Piedra and
Araujo 2012). Furthermore, how we interpret the ways people speak out of and into their realities
begins to question the traditional goal of becoming a native-like speaker and raises more prag-
matic goals for language learning (Franceschini 2011; Hall et al. 2006).
The narratives of multilingual subjects (Pavlenko and Blackledge 2004; Kinginger 2004) lead us
to consider the role of performance. Language conceptualized as discourse also becomes the tool
through which individuals differentiate the self from others through the symbolic uses of multiple
languages (Kramsch 2010) and semiotic processes (Bucholtz and Hall 2004; Mendoza-Denton and
Osborne 2010). Such language use is analyzed beyond their linguistic systematicity and function-
ality to include their use as communicative tools to negotiate meaning in particular contexts. Mul-
tiple labels for this phenomenon have been generated in recent scholarship—translanguaging,
flexible bilingualism, polylingualism, plurilingualism, codemeshing, heterolingualism, and metrolin-
gualism (all cited in Blackledge and Creese 2010).

Variation at the Center

Variation is at the center, not because the individual is the unit of analysis but because each
meaningful segment of communication can be an enactment of agency, of performance, of sym-
bolisms, or all of them, within a precise moment in time and space. According to Bucholtz and
Hall (2004), “among the many resources [an individual has] for the cultural production of iden-
tity, language is the most flexible and pervasive” (369).
Using the concept of identity as social production, the Critical Race and the Latina/feminist
tradition have theorized on the issues of erasure and silence of historically non-mainstream
groups. They connect access and denial to the power of speaking of children in schools to the
reproduction of the status quo. They describe the survival strengths of the communities from
which the children come as resources for negotiating the culture of power in everyday life,
including new hybrid ways (Delgado Bernal 2001), and for the counter purpose of thriving
(Castillo and Torres-Guzman 2013). They see the concepts of hybridity and third space within
learning (Gutierrez 2008) as moving beyond the confinement of space and what actually exists
in an imaginative and creative process in which rigorous, expanded, and transformative learning
occurs while nurturing the child’s multilingual subjectivities (Engestrom and Sanino 2010; Fitts
2009; Gutierrez 2008). The new ideas of this period are in stark contrast with current educational
policy and practices, which are primarily focused on national standardization, testing, and
accountability through No Child Left Behind (Menken 2008) and Common Core Standards.

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Looking Ahead
There are two debates within multilingualism in education that we feel are particularly impor-
tant. They both emerge from how one conceptualizes the presence of more than one language
within one body in real life—and the implications for education (de Jong 2011). The first debate
is centered primarily around whether the language learner’s and the school’s aims ought to be to
increase the individual’s language repertoires for functioning within their environments and for
specific purposes (social interaction, work-related language skills) or to insist that their language
repertoire be developed to be native-like and include formal literacy skills (Larsen-Freeman and
Long 1991; Cenoz and Genesee 1998; Ellis and Larsen-Freeman 2006; Wildsmith-Cromarty
2009; Ortega 2013). This debate particularly challenges research on second language acquisi-
tion grounded in the notion of the ideal, monolingual, ‘native speaker.’ Scholars have begun to
recognize and unmask the long-standing ideological bias embedded in the monolingual con-
struction of multilinguality as it has been framed within second language research (Ortega
2013). Considering the learning of a second language within a multilingual framework raises
questions about how to account for the role of multilingual experiences in our globalized and
ever-changing world. In addition, the more positive and holistic way of understanding multi-
lingualism raises questions about the language teaching/learning programs that are based on
monolingual assumptions.
The second debate is around the issues of the processes of teaching/learning through multiple
languages, acknowledging the diversity in forms, functions, and purposes in the lives of multilin-
gual learners. This debate originated within bilingualism and bilingual education research and,
while still scant, has a growing body of knowledge. Focusing on multilingual teaching and learn-
ing processes, studies have considered multilingual issues in curriculum and pedagogy (de Jong
2011), bilingual assessments (Gotardo and Mueller 2009; Páez and Rinaldi 2006; Shohamy 2006;
Oller et al. 2007), and language flexibility in instruction (Garcia and Beardsmore 2008;
Creese and Blackledge 2010). The conversation about linguistic flexibility is captivating as it
reflects the lived realities of multilingual learners and raises important questions about the role of
multilingual flexibility and subjectivity in largely rigidly fixed and monolingual institutions, such
as schools. From an educational and teacher education perspective, it remains a central question
how to best incorporate the ever-changing language patterns, including those stemming from
bilingual norms of bi/multilingual communities, while ensuring offerings of sophisticated lan-
guage models to expand the students’ audience and access to monolingual resources (Martinez,
Torres-Guzman, and Martinez-Roldan 2013). Given that formal language-in-education policies
move beyond individual patterns and aim at group and community language practices, the
conceptualizations of linguistic policies in relationship to context and flexibility will be important
(Ricento and Hornberger 1996; Garcia, Skutnabb-Kangas, and Torres-Guzman 2006; Torres-
Guzman and Gomez 2009; Mcnamara 2011).
These debates are productive and fruitful in moving the field forward in transdisciplinary
ways with multilingual and contextualized perspectives. They continue to raise unexplored
questions such as the following, and we offer them as an invitation for further research and
scholarship:

• How does desiring the silencing of bilingualism among second language learners function
to keep/maintain/produce smooth social relationships within schools for all children, within
the field, or in society? Answers to such questions might give us better understandings of
what a multilingual perspective in second language acquisition might require and its possible
consequences for research and practice.

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María E. Torres-Guzmán and Ester J. de Jong

• How do power/knowledge relations and practices produce the multilingual subjectivities as

children venture to learn in and through multiple languages and constantly navigate the
process of creating self and new knowings through multiple languages?
• How are multilingual subjectivities created as linguistically and culturally hybrid forms in
the process of producing social performances?
• How do multilingual classrooms reconstruct the discourse-material relationship in the rec-
ognition of homes as resources while moving away from essentializing?
• How do multilingual classrooms reconcile building on the strengths and pedagogies of the
home that turn deficits into strengths when living in a hybrid, third space and reconsidering
the agentic nature of language?
• How is multilingualism itself an almost already third space that frees the individual to “learn a
new definition of language, a new definition of human beings in the world” (Becker 1984, 220)?

Concluding Reflections
In this article, we aimed to understand the multiple levels in which multilingualism was manifest—
from the macro societal circumstances, to the flows of minoritized and immigrant communities,
and to the micro classroom interactive processes across time. As scholars explore more closely
some of the postmodernist, poststructuralist, and postcolonial theoretical constructs, and as they
challenge some of the concepts by giving primacy to their diverse and unique epistemologies
(Delgado Bernal 2001; Calderón et al. 2013), new questions will be raised and old questions will
be reframed. Pragmatically, though, the pushbacks on the ‘post’ theories need to be present in
these explorations as even when we adjust to a more situated, multileveled, dynamic understand-
ing of our everyday practices, we must understand the material consequences on everyday people.
As the saying goes, we must not throw out the baby with the bathwater. We must also understand
that we will encounter the (re)emergence and (re)inscription of resistance, as we engage in the
possibilities of currently unthinkable imagined futures.

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 33
Addressing Dialect Variation
in U.S. K–12 Schools
Julie Sweetland and Rebecca Wheeler

Introduction
Variation is a built-in design feature of language. Individual speakers vary their style to achieve a
diverse set of communicative and interpersonal ends; social groups have distinctive ways of using
language that reflect their history and culture. Just as variation is inherent in language, language
is an inalienable part of the process of schooling. Most teaching and learning happens through
language, and imparting socially valued ways of using language to students has traditionally been
one of the primary objectives of schooling. Yet language variation, especially the nature of
regional and social dialects, is neither well-understood nor productively addressed in school con-
texts. Despite a robust theoretical and descriptive literature on regional and cultural dialect var-
iation, and decades of calls for its application in primary and secondary education, knowledge
about dialect diversity is insufficiently incorporated into existing curriculum, instruction, and
assessment in K–12 settings in U.S. schools.
In broad strokes: The history of scholarship on this topic has moved, in the decades since its
emergence in the late 1960s, from defining and documenting the problems, to describing poten-
tial solutions, to implementing and empirically evaluating those solutions. From this literature
emerge three key themes. First, a research-based view on language variation and linguistic plu-
ralism remains little known by educators and is rarely integrated into pedagogical practice in
schools. Second, predominant approaches lacking a basis in sociolinguistic research have a nega-
tive impact on the schooling experience and outcomes of children who speak a stigmatized
dialect. Third, when pedagogical approaches reflecting a research-based view on language vari-
ation are adopted, student experiences and outcomes are improved.
After a survey of the field’s evolution, and the key findings of the scholarship, this chapter
identifies several promising lines of inquiry that are likely to capture the efforts of educational
linguists interested in dialect variation in years to come, including situated, engaged scholarship in
partnership with students, teachers, and schools. This emerging scholarship suggests that the
‘theory of change’ that has implicitly governed sociolinguistic interventions—that the best way to
catalyze change in schools is for language scholars to provide information on dialect variation—is
inadequate to the task of creating widespread reform. New directions, such as creative community
engagement initiatives; extended, ‘problem-posing’ partnerships with teachers; and ethnographic

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inquiries into language with primary and secondary learners hold great promise for ensuring that
more productive approaches to sociolinguistic diversity are adopted in K–12 settings. An overview
of tried-and-true and innovative research methods is included, and recommendations for further
reading are suggested.

Historical Perspectives
Modern study of the connections between U.S. education and social or regional dialects dates to
the 1960s, when new ways of analyzing language variation grew out of research traditions in
regional dialectology, contact linguistics, and historical linguistics. The emergence of the
educational-linguistic line of inquiry in a decade known for social change is not a coincidence.
Sociolinguistic research programs that were framed and implemented as the Civil Rights and
Voting Rights Acts were passed in the United States reflected a national interest in contributing
to social equity through education, where language plays a key role. Many of the seminal linguis-
tic studies describing the systematic, patterned nature of language variation in African American
communities—such as Labov et al.’s (1968) study of “Non-Standard English of Negro and
Puerto-Rican Speakers in New York City,” and Wolfram’s (1969) Sociolinguistic Description of
Detroit Negro Speech—were funded by the U.S. Department of Education, and the stated objective
of the research was to address racial disparities in reading outcomes. The descriptive nature of
these early works—cataloguing and analyzing the phonological, morphosyntactic, lexical, and
discourse-level features that distinguish African American Vernacular English (AAVE) from
other varieties of American English—were based on the hypothesis that teachers could neither
understand nor help to solve reading failure among Black students until they adequately under-
stood their language. The resulting rich descriptions of the language varieties spoken by adults
in Black communities across the nation also constituted a strong empirical rebuttal to the public
and scholarly discourse of the time, in which widespread reading failure among minorities was
attributed, in linguistic terms, to the ‘verbal deprivation’ assumed to characterize Black family
settings, or to presumed deficiencies, constraints, and limitations of the dialect itself.
The “dialect interference” hypothesis (Wolfram and Whiteman 1971) emerged as an alternative,
linguistic explanation for low literacy attainment among African American children, positing that
the vernacular was so structurally divergent that acquisition of oral and written communication
in Standard English was necessarily hindered to some degree. Proving or disproving the existence
of dialect interference quickly became a hot topic for research, with at least 50 studies published
in the 1970s alone—many of them in journals of psychology or literacy research. Much of this
work was experimental in nature and focused squarely on reading. Studies demonstrated, at first,
a seemingly obvious point—that the phonology of a child’s dialect influences children’s pronun-
ciation of reading materials—and then, a more critical finding: Dialect-related pronunciations in
oral reading do not indicate a failure to decode the printed word (Baratz 1969; K. S. Goodman
1965; Labov 1967). As a result, one of the earliest concrete instructional recommendations result-
ing directly from sociolinguistic research was that reading teachers and reading assessments should
distinguish dialect pronunciations from miscues. Another pedagogical innovation that followed
from the dialect interference hypothesis was what came to be called the ‘contrastive analysis’
approach—essentially, conscripting foreign-language teaching methods into the service of teach-
ing spoken and written Standard English grammatical forms to speakers of stigmatized dialects
(Crowell and Kolba 1974; Feigenbaum 1970; Stewart 1970). Extending this approach to second
dialect acquisition, teachers led students to compare and contrast the grammatical forms of their
heritage dialect with the corresponding structures of Standard English, in support of adding Stand-
ard English features to their linguistic repertoires. More recent work has updated the ‘bidialectal

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approach’ as developed in the 1970s by integrating their key insights with contemporary instruc-
tional approaches—a development to which we return below.
Dialect interference studies had their limits—both methodologically and in terms of their
implications. While the influence of dialect on oral pronunciation was well documented, research
into the role of dialect in reading comprehension led to few clear conclusions (Harber and Bryen
1976). Moreover, the line of inquiry could not account for educational disparities that went well
beyond literacy. Its narrow focus on the transfer of discrete linguistic features from speech to print
ignored a much broader setting: the social context of dialects. By the mid-1970s, these limitations
led most scholars to conclude that the role of dialect in educational inequity had at least two
distinct dimensions: one related to the structural differences between student language varieties
and those used in school settings and printed materials, and one related to the social evaluation
of stigmatized dialects.
Research into language attitudes soon documented that school personnel, like members of
the general public, tend to have negative attitudes towards regional and social vernaculars, and
positive attitudes towards Standard English. Studies also showed that these negative attitudes
have a direct impact on student outcomes by biasing teachers’ assessments of student perfor-
mance in both informal and formal evaluations. Thus, matched-guise studies demonstrated
that negative language attitudes systematically lowered teachers’ ratings of the abilities, poten-
tial, and actual performance of vernacular speakers. In the matched guise technique (Lambert,
Hodgson, Gardner, and Fillenbaum 1960), research subjects rate speakers or writers various
scales of aptitude, achievement, likeability, or intelligence. Because, in fact, apparently different
speakers are the same individual in different ‘guises’ of dialect use (with the best studies care-
fully controlling other types of variability), the resulting ratings reveal the subjects’ associa-
tions with the language variety. Investigating whether teacher expectations formed on the
basis of student dialect in turn affected the teacher’s assessment of student performance,
research found that teachers, like the general public, associate stigmatized dialects with lesser
intelligence and aptitude (O. Taylor 1973; Tucker and Lambert 1969; Williams, Whitehead,
and Miller 1972). And analyses of standardized test instruments demonstrated that instru-
ments designed to diagnose language disorders, measure intelligence or aptitude, and assess
curricular mastery and achievement routinely yielded biased assessments against vernacular
speakers as they inappropriately included dialect features in questions or scoring procedures
(Labov 1976; Wolfram 1983).
The recognition that teachers’ attitudes played a significant, mediating role in the relation of
dialect to school outcomes has supported a long and rich tradition of practitioner-oriented pub-
lications and teacher outreach. Collections of sociolinguistic articles aimed at raising teacher
awareness appeared alongside the first rigorous descriptions of Black language (Baratz and Shuy
1969; Fasold and Shuy 1970). Sociolinguistic research and activism influenced professional
organizations of language arts instructors, with its strongest expression represented by a resolution
affirming “Students’ Right to Their Own Language” (Conference on College Composition and
Communication 1974), and has remained an influence since. Both the National Council of
Teachers of English and the International Reading Association endorse the proposition that stu-
dents’ dialects can and should be respected in the classroom, and the learning standards and
curricula supported by these organizations reveal a sociolinguistic influence in their emphasis on
teaching language as communication. Such recognition of sociolinguistic principles reflects the
efforts of linguists to engage with educators and illustrate the significant impact of sociolinguis-
tics on the ‘state of the art’ of language arts instruction (Smitherman 1999). Through engagement
in professional teaching organizations and publications practitioner-oriented journals, sociolin-
guists have articulated and disseminated a core set of insights relevant to teachers.

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Much of the major research through the 1970s had a decidedly quantitative, experimental
cast—informed, as it was, by variationist linguistics on the one hand, and by reading psychology,
on the other. As the qualitative style of discourse analysis known as ethnography of communication
took hold in sociolinguistics, more naturalistic studies of dialect use in communities and schools
began to appear, following the lead of early work on communicative patterns in vernacular com-
munities (Kernan-Mitchell 1971; Smitherman 1977; Watson-Gegeo and Boggs 1977). Shirley
Brice Heath’s (1983) seminal work Ways with Words inspired further research into cultural ‘mis-
matches’ between home and school contexts (Fordham and Ogbu 1986). For instance, one eth-
nographic study found that the narratives of Black primary students tended to be more ‘topic
associating’ than their white peers’ ‘topic-centered’ stories at sharing time—and that the teacher’s
response to and misunderstanding of this difference led to decreased learning opportunities for
African American students (Michaels 1981).
As scholars developed more detailed questions about the applications of cultural mismatch
research, the emphasis shifted to investigating possibilities for productively incorporating those
differences into academic instruction to make school curricula more congruent with students’
cultures (Au and Kawakami 1985; Delpit 1995). Accordingly, culturally relevant pedagogy studies
emerged as a refinement of the problem space claimed by cultural mismatch studies, shifting the
focus from documenting the challenges that lay in difference to one of finding pedagogical pos-
sibilities in the unique features of vernacular linguistic repertoires. Carol Lee’s (1993 et passim)
insightful work illustrating how the African American discourse practice of signifying, or speaking
with innuendo and double-meanings, could be used in literacy instruction reinvigorated explo-
ration of how to approach the vernacular as a resource rather than a problem. Arnetha Ball (1992;
2000) extended this approach to African American discourse patterns into the realm of
writing.
In 1996, the public controversy surrounding the Oakland Unified School District’s resolution
acknowledging ‘Ebonics’ as the primary language of its African American students renewed and
reinvigorated scholarship on dialects in education, and also, ultimately, served to reorient the field
from rhetorical appeals to practical, evidence-based solutions (Baugh 2000; J. R. Rickford 1999.
The dialect awareness approach (Wolfram 1999) gained renewed urgency and relevance, as it
represented a fully developed curriculum on language variation suitable for use in K–12 schools
and in educational outreach in local museums and libraries. Other scholars turned to existing
scholarship, much of it obscure, published only for local audiences in mimeograph form and
hence forgotten, in order to compile and corral the empirical evidence in favor of pedagogical
approaches that take the vernacular into account (J. R. Rickford and Rickford 1995; J. R.
Rickford, Sweetland, and Rickford 2004). Approaches that updated and extended drill-based con-
trastive analysis methods regained visibility within the field, with model programs such as Academic
English Mastery Program (Los Angeles Unified School District 1999) inspiring the development
and evaluation of similar efforts to address dialect diversity in the classroom by both affirming the
value of the vernacular and teaching Standard English through experiences designed to heighten
students’ metalinguistic awareness (Brown 2009; Sweetland 2006; Wheeler 2005). Scholars inter-
ested in cultural congruence took yet another approach to the issue of ‘Ebonics in the classroom,’
illustrating how skillful African American teachers drew strategically on their own cultural and
linguistic repertoires to build rapport, model academic expectations, and engage students (Bohn
2003; Boone 2003), or how African American rhetorical styles could form the basis of an academ-
ically rigorous curriculum for postsecondary students (Richardson and Jackson 2004).
In short, efforts of academic linguists and scholars in allied fields have yielded 50 years of
academic inquiry, research, and practical applications to address social and regional dialects in
school settings. And yet, on-the-ground application of this work remains incomplete.

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Core Issues and Key Findings

The first finding of note is that a research-based view of language variation and its educational
implications remains confined largely to the academy. One of the most consistent observations
in the scholarly literature is that a research-based view on language variation and linguistic plu-
ralism remains little known by educational practitioners and is rarely integrated into the system
at any level, whether in policy or practice. New teacher preparation programs do not typically
integrate information about sociolinguistic diversity (CCCC Language Policy Committee 2000;
Richardson 2003). The Common Core State Standards, a curricular framework which will rep-
resent a powerful influence on curriculum and instruction nationwide in the years to come, make
even less mention of sociolinguistic diversity than previous iterations of voluntary national stand-
ards for what students should know and be able to do. Curricula centrally focused on sociolin-
guistic awareness have been adopted in other English-speaking nations—such as the United
Kingdom and Australia—but sporadic efforts to introduce more scientific language study into
U.S. primary and secondary curricula have not been successful (Lord and Klein 2010). Within
classrooms, the dominant, status quo response to dialect diversity remains much as it has always
been—an approach characterized by sociolinguists as “eradicationist,” reflecting the public’s
socialized, underlying presumption that stigmatized dialects are academic, and even moral, defi-
cits. Eradicationist responses to vernacular varieties seek to correct, and indeed to expunge, ver-
nacular features from students’ oral and written language.
A second, related theme in the scholarly literature on language variation in education is that
approaches lacking a basis in sociolinguistic research have a negative impact on the schooling
experience and outcomes of children who speak a stigmatized dialect. Concerned linguists have
objected to the status quo of ‘linguistic subordination’ (Lippi-Green 2012) on both theoretical and
empirical grounds. Theoretically, it is indefensible: Research incontrovertibly shows that every
language variety is equal in its structural capacity to meet the communicative needs of its speakers;
in linguistic terms, there are no “lesser tongues.” Practically, it is counterproductive: Principles of
language acquisition suggest that unrelenting correction of learners’ language is likely to hinder,
rather than accelerate, students’ linguistic development (Krashen 1982), a finding also borne out in
studies addressing harsh, haphazard correction of dialect (Fogel and Ehri 2000; Piestrup 1973;
Wheeler 2006). In practice, unfortunately, such correctionist approaches are widespread.
A consonant finding, replicated regularly for more than four decades, is that negative attitudes
toward stigmatized dialects in general and African American English in particular persist. One of
the most recent studies found that 85% of the pre-service teachers surveyed held misconceptions
and negative attitudes toward AAVE (Champion, Cobb-Roberts, and Bland-Stewart 2012). Even
when teachers can explicitly articulate research-based understandings of dialect diversity, linguis-
tic equality, and linguistically informed classroom approaches, dialect prejudice and traditional
deficit assumptions have been shown to persist in classroom practice (Wheeler 2010). Given the
relationship of teacher expectations to student performance, negative attitudes toward student
language are likely to have a negative impact on student achievement—a hypothesis borne out
in the continuing underachievement of speakers of stigmatized dialects.
The third major set of findings is more hopeful: When pedagogical approaches reflecting a
research-based view on language variation are adopted, teacher attitudes as well as student expe-
riences and outcomes are improved. While the development and evaluation of classroom inter-
ventions is not as robust as one might expect given the long and intense interest of linguists in
educational issues, there is a remarkably uniform body of literature documenting the impact of
teacher training and pedagogical approaches that take the vernacular into account. A selection of
these empirical studies of sociolinguistic interventions is presented below.

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Impact of language awareness experiences on teacher attitudes. There have been a number of notable
efforts to implement and evaluate efforts to ameliorate the attitudes of educators and others
toward student language. Such studies, which typically use a pre- and post-test design to assess
the impact of sociolinguistic training for teachers, have demonstrated that uninformed and neg-
ative attitudes toward stigmatized dialects are at once difficult to change, and yet amenable to
change (Pietras and Lamb 1978; Sweetland 2010)
Impact of sociolinguistic approaches to reading instruction. Several interventions (Leaverton 1973;
J. R. Rickford and Rickford 1995) tested the impact of beginning reading materials written in
the vernacular and found such materials to be effective, if politically tricky to implement. These
studies built on the pioneering work of William Labov, who first addressed the relationship of
AAVE to reading achievement almost forty years ago (Labov 1967) and continues to make a
contribution to the teaching of reading by integrating variationist methods with error analysis,
pinpointing specific areas where a young reader’s phonological system may give rise to difficulty
in decoding (Labov 2003). Research has also demonstrated that building on vernacular discourse
styles or speech acts can be a highly effective technique for supporting reading comprehension
(Au and Kawakami 1985; Champion 2003; Lee 1993; 2007; Meier 2008; A. E. Rickford and
Rickford 2007).
Impact of contrastive analysis exercises to teaching spoken and written Standard English. Contrastive
analysis has emerged as a highly effective technique for improving Standard English mastery
among AAVE speakers. Taylor (1989) contrasted the student learning outcomes of traditional
teaching practices and contrastive analysis in two freshman English classrooms. After 11 weeks,
students taught with traditional methods used 8.5% more vernacular features in writing. The
class using contrastive analysis used 59.3% fewer African American vernacular features. In a study
with elementary aged learners, Fogel and Ehri (2000) found that children taught with traditional
methods showed at best a 1% increase in their command of Standard English forms, while stu-
dents taught with explicit examples of grammatical differences nearly doubled their Standard
English performance. Sweetland (2006) evaluated the outcomes of a ten-week elementary lan-
guage arts curriculum which integrated sociolinguistic research with contemporary language arts
pedagogy, using multicultural children’s literature to teach about regional and social language
variation, and incorporating contrastive analysis exercises into the writing process. Among the
findings: Elementary students who were taught grammar using contrastive analysis as an editing
technique demonstrated greater skill in Standard English than counterparts taught using tradi-
tional methods of writing instruction, and also demonstrated growth in several traits of effective
writing, including content quality, organization, author’s voice, sentence fluency, and conventions.
Wheeler and Swords (2010) developed a contrastive analysis and code-switching curriculum to
address the serious and persistent racial disparities in literacy outcomes that Swords had observed
in her elementary classroom—with the result that according to statewide standardized tests,
African American students soon equaled or outperformed their white peers in academic achieve-
ment (Wheeler 2005; 2008; Wheeler and Swords 2006). With such consistent results from small-
scale studies, the U.S. Department of Education recently awarded major funding for a formal
codification and validation of contrastive analysis instructional methods (Craig 2010).

Current Discussion
In partnership with teachers, sociolinguists continue to develop classroom materials to respond to
dialectal diversity in U.S. classrooms. Increasingly, concerned linguists have begun to engage stu-
dents directly—perhaps representing an awareness of the exciting possibilities inherent in involving
learners in the construction of linguistic knowledge. Engaging school-age learners in exploring

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language as an object of study is a lively and innovative area of research. Some projects maintain a
distinct “linguistics is for kids” feel, involving students in data collection and analysis and focusing
on intriguing language puzzles or phenomena (Denham 2010; Denham and Lobeck 2005;
Y. Goodman 2003; Reaser 2006). Others adopt more critical approaches—encouraging students to
grapple with issues of language and power, and approaching work with students with an explicit
goal of achieving greater equity and social justice (Alim 2004; Chisolm and Godley 2011;
Christensen 2011; Godley and Minnici 2008). Both approaches also reflect a shifting emphasis in
applied language variation research, from “linguist observing” or “linguist prescribing” to “linguist
partnering.” Existing studies have uniformly found that students are keenly interested in language
phenomena, can conduct fairly sophisticated analyses with appropriate guidance and support, and
demonstrate measurable shifts in their ways of thinking and talking about language after even lim-
ited exposure to linguistic methods and research. More engaged research is needed to further build
the field’s knowledge base in how best to approach language study with K–12 learners.
A related strand of research that is emerging is a newly refined and focused attention to the
language varieties spoken by young children. This line of work is a necessary and welcome cor-
rective to the previously unquestioned practice of directly applying descriptive work based on
research with adolescents and adults to assessment and application with young children. Exam-
ples of recent, in-depth studies of child language include studies of the development of African
American English in young children (Craig and Washington 2006; Green 2011) and comprehen-
sive studies of the use of narratives among African American children (Champion 2003). Mean-
while, research on language variation among diverse adolescents has evolved to more closely
consider how language use intersects with the development of identity and school engagement.
Increasingly, ethnographic techniques are being applied to document a fuller picture of young
people’s ways with words, following adolescents beyond the school walls into their communities
in order to learn how language is used to create, maintain, and contest individual and group
identities (Alim 2004; Hill 2009; Paris 2011).

Research Approaches
In keeping with the largely descriptive nature of linguistics in general and variationist sociolin-
guistics in particular, much of the research on language variation in classroom contexts has con-
cerned itself with systematically describing the divergent dialect features that appear in student
speech or writing. For instance, researchers have investigated the extent to which divergent dia-
lect features found in speech transfer systematically to writing (Cronnell 1979; Terry 2006). In
such research, analysts are careful to apply the principle of accountability (Labov 1970), noting
all occurrences and non-occurrences of a given variable—that is, noting both the standard and
vernacular variants, not only the vernacular forms. This type of coding yields frequency rates of
variable vernacular usage, and can also lend itself toward more powerful statistical analysis of the
linguistic and social influences on variation. An unintended consequence of this method is that
it tempts researchers to focus on the linguistic features most amenable to frequency counts—
typically phonological and morphosyntactic features—leaving discourse-level linguistic resources
such as speech acts or organization of text underanalyzed in comparison.
Some work has extended descriptive accounts of variation by correlating vernacular usage
with school outcomes of interest. This type of correlational study dates back to the earliest forays
of variation studies in education (Labov 1972) and has been productively extended more recently
by scholars interested in determining predictive measures to identify students who would benefit
from early interventions (Craig, Connor, and Washington 2003). Research in this vein first builds
a quantitative index of vernacular usage (known as a Dialect Density Measure) for individual

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children, and then follows cohorts of young vernacular speakers longitudinally, correlating dialect
density with outcomes in language and literacy development.
Along with documenting linguistic features, linguists have documented language attitudes
toward diverse dialects in educational contexts. Language attitude surveys have been commonly
used, but these have the limitations of all self-reported methods. The matched guise technique has
been extended to the evaluation of student work, such as writing samples, in educational linguis-
tic studies, and in some studies, the single speaker/multiple guises protocol has been abandoned
in favor of designs in which listeners are randomly assigned to experimental conditions. Quan-
titative techniques of eliciting and analyzing language attitudes are complemented by a variety of
qualitative techniques, which are less frequently employed but have the virtue of focusing on
language use in context. Discourse analysis methods, in which spontaneously occurring talk in
classroom settings is analyzed with particular attention to metalinguistic commentary, have also
been used to investigate language attitudes and related practices in schools. Ethnographic techniques
have been applied to document a fuller picture of young people’s ways with words, following
children and adolescents throughout the course of their daily lives to better understand their
linguistic practices and their implications for education (e.g., Lucas and Borders 1994).
Researchers have become aware of the need for building greater support or the incorporation
of language variation research into curriculum, instruction, and assessment. Quasi-experimental
curriculum studies—in which a sociolinguistic intervention is implemented with students and
evaluated on one or more areas of impact—is a research approach critical to building greater
support for the incorporation of language variation research into curriculum, instruction, and
assessment. Studies in this vein have ranged from experimental designs that test the effects of
simple treatments administered in brief instructional periods of an hour or less, to fully-developed
curricula implemented in school settings over a period of weeks, months, or even years (Fogel
and Ehri 2000; Simpkins and Simpkins 1981; Taylor 1989).

New Debates
The most pressing issue related to language variation in educational contexts is the limited uptake
and application of research findings. Despite vibrant scholarly contributions illustrating the
power of sociolinguistic approaches to transform diverse classrooms, dialect variation is not rou-
tinely recognized as a key issue in mainstream educational reform considerations. This ‘blind spot’
is all the more visible to linguists given the education sector’s pervasive and increasing attention
to the racial disparities in academic performance—an area of concern that, ostensibly, language
variation research can illuminate.
A shared, sustained, and purposeful research agenda is required to move the state of the art past
lamentation and into implementation. Many fields—such as engineering and public health—
have devoted considerable energy of late to elaborating a theory and practice of knowledge
translation. This turn in the applied and social sciences has not kept apace in sociolinguistics.
Given that translation theory originated in applied linguistics, this is an oversight all the more
striking, and we hope, all the more readily remedied with respect to scholarship on language
variation in educational contexts. While concerned sociolinguists have maintained an active and
impressive agenda of traditional dissemination activities, a more careful consideration of the pro-
cess and conditions by which research is integrated into practice are urgently necessary for soci-
olinguistic research to be applied at scale, with fidelity, in diverse classrooms. In developing such
a framework, the role of learning standards (Reaser 2010) and the nature of effective teacher pro-
fessional development (Charity Hudley and Mallinson 2011; Mallinson and Hudley 2010) are ideal
starting places. Additionally, in order to make a compelling case to educators in the contemporary

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climate of school accountability, studies that demonstrate the link between sociolinguistic
approaches and student achievement are much needed.

Implications for Education

With metronomic regularity, report after report alerts us anew to persistence of the racial dispar-
ities in educational outcomes, disparities that in the 1960s motivated the U.S. Department of
Education to support pioneering studies on the educational implications of language variation.
As these disparities remain entrenched in our nation’s classrooms, so do the associated human and
societal costs of schooling experiences that fail to allow learners to fulfill their academic potential.
Research into the nexus of dialect variation and schooling has amply illustrated that rethinking
the approach to dialect in assessment and instruction offers a promising direction in the search
for practical, evidence-based solutions.
The reasons for inequities in educational outcomes are multiple and complex, and are cer-
tainly not limited to sociolinguistic factors. We do know, however, that educators’ responses to
student language variation play an important role in perpetuating persistent educational gaps.
Accordingly, teacher preparation and professional development should include not only basic
facts about language variation, but also significant preparation for applying knowledge about
dialect diversity to classroom instruction. Positive dispositions toward student dialect should be
among the major goals of teacher preparation for sociolinguistic diversity. However, such
improved attitudes should not be the ultimate goal, and might not even be the best first goal.
Some evidence suggests that changes in practice may precede, and accelerate, improvements in
teachers’ attitudes and beliefs (Blake and Cutler 2003; Mallinson and Charity Hudley 2010;
Sweetland 2010; Wheeler 2010). For this reason, adopting curricula and instructional frameworks
that integrate sociolinguistic research is an important next step for school systems seeking to align
classroom practice with evidence-based responses to dialect diversity.
It is also important for educational decision-makers at multiple levels to consider whether and
how current assessment practices allow for systematic bias against speakers of stigmatized dialects—
an issue first raised by sociolinguists in the 1970s (O. L. Taylor and Payne 1983; Wolfram 1986).
Historically, misdiagnosis of dialect differences as language disorders has contributed to unnecessary
assignment of African American children to special education services (Seymour, Bland-Stewart,
and Green 1998; Stockman 2000). At the level of classroom assessment, teachers who are unfamiliar
with AAVE grammatical patterns conflate and confuse dialect influence with other sources of
derivations from print, with at least two undesirable consequences: Student performance is assessed
below actual level of accomplishment, and opportunities to adjust instruction to include systematic
attention to the differences between the vernacular and the standard are missed (Wheeler, Cartwright,
and Swords 2012). Recently, valid and reliable assessments of language development that take
research on language variation into account have become commercially available (Seymour, Roeper,
and de Villiers 2003). While this advance is significant, there is still much room for improvement
in terms of the adoption and implementation of dialect-fair assessment.

Further Reading
Language in the Inner City, by William Labov, compiles the major pieces of foundational variation-
ist research into ‘Black English Vernacular’ emerging from the federally funded projects alluded
to at the outset of this article. It includes ‘The Logic of Nonstandard English,’ a seminal essay that
forcefully articulates the sociolinguistic response to the deficit perspective on dialect and was a
tremendously influential call to action at the time of its publication.

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For years, the classic introduction to the ‘language of Black America,’ Geneva Smitherman’s
Talkin and Testifyin first appeared in 1977 as a richly written, highly accessible presentation of
language variation concepts that, as one commentator has observed, “took sociolinguistic theory
to the people.”
Dialects in Schools and Communities, now in its second edition (Adger, Wolfram, and Christian
2007), offers a thorough overview of sociolinguistic research and recommendations regarding
dialect diversity in classroom context.
Malik Goes to School: Examining the Language Skills of African American Students from Preschool to
Fifth Grade (Craig and Washington 2006) synthesizes and summarizes a decade of highly technical
descriptive and experimental work, much of it emerging from the questions and methods of speech
language pathology—yet it is written in a fairly accessible style that makes it a resource suitable for
both researchers and practitioners in language disorders, education, and related professions.
Black Communications (Meier 2008) illustrates how skillful literacy teachers might build on the
linguistic assets of AAVE speaking children, through specific reading comprehension strategies
and other practical teaching techniques for children in the primary grades.
African American, Creole, and Other Vernacular Englishes in Education: A Bibliographic Resource
(Rickford, Sweetland, Rickford, and Grano 2013). Compiling most of the relevant research from
the past half century, this volume includes more than 1600 references on education in relation to
vernacular varieties of English, with accompanying abstracts for more than one third of them.

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458
 Name Index

Abb, E. F. 172, 183 Anderson, L. W. 357, 366

Abdi, K. 214, 220 Angelova, M. 316, 317, 320, 321, 323
Abedi, J. 347, 348 Anh, D. T. K. 294, 298
Aboshiha, P. 110, 114 Anikina, Y. 359, 367
Ackerman, K. 341, 348 Anna Kirova, A. 409
Adams, S. B. 206 Antonek, J. L. 290, 294, 295, 297, 298
Adesope, O. O. 432, 440 Antón, M. 328, 329, 330, 332, 335, 336, 341, 348
Adger, C. T. 455 Anzaldúa, G. 75, 76, 425
Adler, A. 289, 300 Ao, X. 277, 285
Adorno, T. W. 252 Apple, M. 193, 194
Agger, B. 252, 258 Araujo, B. 438, 441
Agha, A. 241, 247 Arciuli, J. 399, 401, 409, 411
Agnihotri, R. K. 88, 90 Arias, M. B. 434, 441
Aguilera, D. 163, 169 Arnett, K. 329, 338
Ahearn, L. 168, 169 Arnot, M. 246, 250
Aikman, S. 28, 34 Aronin, L. 89
Ajayi, L. 294, 296, 298 Aronowitz, S. 92, 102
Alarcón, F. 220 Artigal, J. M. 123, 125, 129
Alatis, J. E. 2, 4 Artiles, A. J. 145–56
Alba, R. 239, 245, 247, 248, 372, 375, 380 Ashton-Warner, S. 256, 258
Alderson, J. C. 340, 341, 348 Athanases, S. Z. 75, 76
Alexander, M. 191, 194 Atkinson, P. 56, 59
Alexander, R. J. 358, 360, 366 Attinasi, J. 67, 78
Alfaro, E. C. 200, 206 Auerbach, E. 96, 102, 254, 255, 258
Alim, H. S. 452, 455 August, D. 139, 142, 155, 244, 245, 247, 435
Allan, R. 303, 305, 309 Au, K. (also K. H.) 25, 37, 433, 445, 449, 451, 455
Allen, E. 416, 425 Au, T. K. F. 214, 220
Allen, J. R. 281, 285 Avenia-Tapper, B. 343, 350
Allen, L. 182, 269, 273 Avgerinou, M. 171, 173, 181
Allwright, D. 318, 319, 320, 322, 323
Allwright, R. L. 319, 320, 322, 323, 356, 366 Bachman, L. (also L. F.) 125, 129, 339, 340, 348,
Al-Mamly, M. 347, 349 355, 366
Aloni, N. 198, 206 Bachmeier, R. J. 153, 156
Althusser, L. 178 Backhaus, S. 220
Altwerger, B. 441 Badger, R. 266, 274, 314, 324
Alvarez, D. 245, 247 Badstübner-Kizik, C. 179, 181
Alvine, L. 53, 59 Bae, S. 241, 249
Alwasilah, C. 235 Baetens-Beardsmore, H. 354, 366, 367
Amanti, C. 27, 34, 69, 77, 96, 97, 102, 436, 442 Bagno, M. 92, 93, 98, 99, 101, 102
Ambrosio, A. L. 198, 206 Bailey, B. 241, 247
Amin, N. 107, 113, 290, 292, 298 Baird, M. B. 400, 402, 409, 411
Anast Seguin, C. 198, 206 Baker, A. 271, 273
Anderson, J. N. 346, 348 Baker, C. 83, 90, 140, 142, 143, 432, 440

459
Name Index

Baker, K. A. 440 Bellassen, J. 280, 285

Balcazar, F. E. 206 Bell, J. S. 399, 409, 411
Baldauf, R. B. 38, 48 Beltramo, A. 442
Balderrama, M. V. 198, 206 Belz, J. 329, 335
Bale, J. 213, 221 Benjamin, W. 252
Ball, A. (also A. F.) 449, 455 Benke, E. 107, 113
Ball, S. J. 44, 47 Benson, P. 175
Balser, J. 175, 182 Benson, C. 31, 34
Baltodano, M. 258, 259 Benson, P. 110, 113
Bámaca, M. Y. 200, 206 Bering, K. 173, 182
Bamberg, M. 51, 54, 56, 57, 59 Berkley, A. 247
Bamford, A. 172, 182 Berk, R. 259
Bamgbose, A. 84, 85, 90 Bernardini, S. 307, 309
Banerjee, J. 339–48 Bernat, E. 106, 108, 113
Bang, M. 158–69 Bernstein, B. 51, 59, 239, 243, 247
Baquedano-López, P. 239, 241, 242, 243, 247, Berrol, S. C. 440
438, 440 Berry, A. 207
Barad, K. 428, 440 Berryman, M. 163, 169
Baratz, J. 447, 448, 455 Bertenshaw, N. 13, 19
Barber, H. 18, 20 Betto, F. 199, 207
Barbules, N. 258, 259 Bhabha, H. (also H. K.) 69, 76, 99, 102, 138, 142
Barbules, N. C. 259 Bialystok, E. 123, 129, 440, 432
Bard, E. 12, 18 Biber, D. 301, 310
Barkhuizen, G. 58, 59, 383, 388, 392, 393 Bigelow, M. 1–4, 245, 251
Barkin, F. 441 Bigge, M. 357, 366
Barlett, L. 101 Billmayer, F. 172, 182
Barletta, L. M. 156 Bishop R. 163, 169
Barlow, M. 302, 310 Björklund, S. 119–29
Barnard, R. 273 Blackledge, A. 76, 138, 139, 140, 142, 143, 429,
Barnett, C. B. 420, 425 435, 438, 439, 440, 441, 444
Barratt, L. 108, 113 Black, P. 341, 346, 349
Barry, A. M. 172, 182 Black, R. (also R. W.) 54, 59, 410, 411
Barry, B. 72, 76 Blake, R. 454, 455
Bartlett, L. 99, 101, 102, 139, 142, 237–47, 361, Bland-Stewart, L. 450, 455
367 Blanton, C. K. 430, 440
Bartolomé, L. I. 199–200, 206 Blell, G. 175, 182
Barton, D. 99, 102 Bley-Vroman, R. 374, 380, 384, 392
Basham, C. 214, 215, 221 Blommaert, J. 23, 24, 29, 31, 34, 137, 142, 241, 247
Bastürkmen, H. 270, 273 Bloome, D. 96–7, 99, 102, 103
Batalova, J. 237, 250 Bland-Stewart, L. 454, 457
Bauckus, S. 221, 370, 380 Blumenfeld, H. K. 13, 18
Baugh, J. 449, 455 Blyth, C. 329, 334, 335
Bauman, R. 59 Boediono, W. 233, 235
Bauman, Z. 93, 102 Boers, F. 13, 20
Bax, S. 13, 18 Boggs, S. T. 449, 458
Bayley, R. 11, 22, 371, 380 Bohn, A. 449, 455
Bean, F. 239, 247 Bok, Derek 233
Bean, F. D. 379 Bonacina, F. 43, 47
Bear, C. 417, 425 Bond, J. T. 34
Beardsmore, H. B. 438, 439, 442 Bonfiglio, T. P. 140, 142
Beaudrie, S. 214, 220, 221 Bonnet, A. 361, 362, 365, 366
Becker, A. L. 132, 136, 142, 440 Boone, P. 449, 455
Becker, F. 318, 319, 320, 321, 324 Borders, D. G. 453, 457
Beckett, G. 360, 368 Borg, C. 93, 102
Behney, J. 16, 20 Borg, M. 266, 270, 273
Behney J. 13, 22 Borg, S. 263–7, 269–74, 292, 296, 298, 305, 310,
Bekerman, Z. 45, 47, 87, 90 333, 335

460
 Name Index

Bornat, J. 50, 59 Burnard, L. 307, 310

Bortoni, S. M. 97, 98, 102 Burns, A. 269, 270, 273
Boticki, I. 283, 287 Burt, M. 384, 393
Bott, E. 405, 410, 411 Busch, D. 266, 269, 273, 315, 320, 324
Bougie, E. 373, 380 Butler, Y. G. 107, 114
Boulton, A. 301–10 Butzkamm, W. 334, 335
Bourdieu, P. 2, 4
Bourque, J. 338 Cabaroglu, N. 266, 273
Bové, P. A. 399, 411 Caffery, J. 83, 91
Bowker, L. 310 Calderhead, J. 264, 273
Bowker, N. 403, 404, 410, 411 Calderón, C. 440, 441
Bowles, M. 11, 15, 19 Caldwell, J. A. W. 334, 335
Brady, B. 108, 115 Callahan, L. 106, 114
Braine, G. 107, 111–14 Callahan, R. 148, 156
Brandt, D. 100, 102 Cameron, D. 397, 411
Bransford, J. D. 179, 182 Cameron, L. 137, 143, 246, 249, 304, 311
Braun, S. 307, 310 Cammarata, L. 290, 292, 294, 295, 298
Brecht, R. D. 370, 373, 380 Canagarajah, S. (also S. A.) 24, 34, 54, 59, 69, 76,
Breen, M. P. 265, 273 77, 140, 142, 226, 229, 234, 235, 246, 247, 253,
Breyer, Y. 308–10 255, 259
Briggs, S. L. 394 Canale, M. 125, 129, 340, 349, 355, 366
Brindley, G. 339, 349, 394 Candlin, C. 305, 311
Brinkmann, S. 397, 411 Capps, L. 51, 61, 145, 154, 156
Brinton, D. (also D. M.) 220, 221, 370, 380 Carless, D. 348, 349
Brisk, M. E. 434, 441 Carlsen, C. 345, 350
Brittain, C. M. 199, 207 Carlson, M. T. 442
Britzman, D. 297, 298 Carney, R. N. 175, 177, 179, 182
Broadfoot, P. (also P. M.) 341, 342, 343, 349 Carreira, M. 214, 215, 221
Bronfenbrenner, U. 207 Carreiras, M. 18, 20
Brooks, F. B. 356, 366 Carrell, P. L. 245, 247
Brown, D. D. 252, 259 Carr, S. C. 346, 349
Brown, D. W. 449, 455 Carson, J. E. 245, 247
Brown, E. 207 Carspecken, F. 257, 259
Brown, J. 292, 298 Carter, J. B. 180, 182
Brown, J. D. 11, 14, 19 Carter, R. 311
Brown, S. 346, 347, 351 Cartwright, K. 454, 458
Brown, S. K. 239, 247, 379 Casanave, C. P. 229, 235
Brownlie, S. 332, 338 Castellotti, V. 329, 332, 330, 335
Brubaker, B. 283, 286 Castilho, A. T. De. 99, 102
Brumbaugh, M. G. 417, 426 Castillo, M. 438, 441
Brumfit, C. 2, 4 Castro, D. 150, 156
Bruner, J. 52, 59, 153, 155 Catalan R. M. J. 362, 366, 368
Brunni, S. 383–93 Cazden, C. B. 25, 34, 52, 59, 240, 247
Brutt-Griffler, J. 59, 109, 114, 210, 218, 221 Celic, C. 141, 142
Bryen, D. N. 448, 456 Celik, M. 328, 336
Brysbaert, M. 13, 22 Cenoz, J. 86, 90, 126, 127, 129, 363, 366, 436,
Buchmann, M. 291, 298 439, 441
Bucholtz, M. 52–3, 59, 438, 441 Cervatiuc, A. 41, 49
Buchori, M. 230 Chacón, C. 107, 114
Buehl, M. 266, 273 Chalhoub-Deville, M. 14, 16, 18, 19, 343, 349
Bullock, A. 357, 366 Chamberlayne, P. 50, 59
Bullough, R. V. 321, 323 Chambers, A. 302, 310
Burdine, S. 302, 310 Chambers, G. 336
Burgess, J. 268, 273 Champion, T. 450, 451, 452, 455
Burgess, S. 279, 287 Chan, D. H. L. 281, 286
Burmark, L. 179, 182 Chan, M. K. M. 279, 285
Burnaby, B. J. 435, 442 Chang, I. 375, 376, 380

461
Name Index

Chao, T. H. 377, 380 Coffin, C. 357, 361, 369

Chao, Y. R. 279, 285 Cohen, A. D. 80, 90, 442
Chapelle, C. 11, 14, 16, 18, 19, 339, 342, 349 Cohen, L. 344, 349
Chapin, J. R. 207 Cohen, P. 456
Chapman, K. 290, 293–6, 298 Coia, L. 207
Chappell, S. 68, 77 Colello, S. M. G. 99, 102
Charity Hudley, A. 454, 456, 457 Cole, M. 99, 103, 153, 155, 192, 194, 435, 441
Charles, M. 305, 310 Coleman, H. 84, 89, 90
Chaudron, C. 11, 14, 19 Coleman, J. 429, 441
Chavez, C. 431 Coleman, M. C. 425
Chávez, L. 379 Collier, V. (also V. P.) 42, 49, 83, 87, 91, 144,
Chavez, M. 329, 331, 336 243–4, 250, 435, 445
Chen, H. 337 Collins, J. 33, 36
Chen, H.-C. 285 Collins, S. 207
Chen, L. 288 Colombi, M. C. 220, 409, 413
Chen, X. 279, 285 Comenius, J. A. 174, 182
Cheng, A. 442 Commins, N. 434, 444
Cheng, L. 340, 341, 346, 349 Connelly, F. M. 202, 207
Cheung, A. 139, 144, 244, 250 Connelly, M. 207
Cheung, H. 284, 285 Connor, C. M. 452, 456
Cheung, Y. L. 107, 114 Conrad, S. 307, 308, 310
Chimbutane, F. 31, 34, 44, 47 Conroy, M. 306, 310
Chinen, G. K. 217, 221 Considine, D. M. 172, 182
Chisolm, J. S. 452, 456 Cook, V. 11, 19, 328, 329, 336, 390, 392,
Chiu-Ching, R. T. 207 432, 441
Cho, H. 292, 295, 300 Coombe, C. 347, 349
Chomsky, N. 429 Cooper, R.L. 38, 46, 47
Chow, B. W.-Y. 279, 287 Copeland, S. R. 152, 155
Christensen, C. 152, 155 Corcorran, T. 409, 411
Christensen, L. 452, 456 Corder, S. P. 10, 19, 383, 384, 392, 393
Christensen, P. 404–6, 410, 411 Cormier, M. 338
Christian, D. 83, 90, 123, 130, 139, 143, 248, Correa, M. 215, 221
434, 442, 455 Corson, D. 42, 46, 47
Christians, C. G. 397, 408, 411 Cosentino de Cohen, C. 70, 77
Chung, K. K. H. 283, 285 Coulter, C. 66, 67, 71, 77
Cincotta-Segi, A. 41, 43, 47 Coulthard, M. 97, 103
Cirino, P. 153, 156 Coupland, D. B. 275
Clachar, A. 228, 235 Cowan, J. 340, 349
Clahsen, H. 18, 20 Cowell, A. 165, 169
Clandinin, D. J. 202, 207 Cowie, N. 296, 298
Clark, C. 264, 273 Cox, M. I. P. 257, 259
Clark, E. 108, 114 Coyle, D. 353–67
Clark, I. 347, 349 Crago, M. 160, 169
Clark, R. 311 Craig, H. K. 451, 452, 455, 456
Clarke, A. 207 Crawford, J. 141, 142, 212, 221, 415, 419, 422,
Clarke, M. 290, 291, 294, 295, 298, 299 423, 425
Clarke, M. A. 314, 324 Crawford, M. 357, 369
Clewell, B. 70, 77 Creese, A. 76, 139, 140, 142, 438, 439, 440, 441
Candlin, C. 308, 312 Creswell, J. 15, 19
Clinton, K. 100, 102 Crockett, M. D. 272, 273
Clouse, H. H. 230, 236 Cronnell, B. 452, 456
Clyne, M. G. 436, 441 Crookes, G. 11, 19, 255, 260, 314, 324, 385, 387,
Cobarrubias, J. 39, 47 393
Cobb-Roberts, D. 450, 455 Crowell, S. 447, 456
Cobb, T. 303, 310 Cruz, M. E. A. 99, 102
Cobo-Lewis, A. B. 444 Crystal, D. 426
Cochran-Smith, M. 198, 201, 207, 208 Csépes, I. 345, 348, 351

462
 Name Index

Cuadrado, J. 157 De Villiers, J. 454, 457

Cuellar, D. 149, 156 Dewantara, Ki Hajar 230, 233
Cummings, V. 245, 251 Diab, R. L. 271, 273
Cummins, J. 74, 77, 83, 90, 123–5, 129, 130, 137, DiCamilla, F. J. 328, 329, 330, 332, 335, 336
141, 142, 220, 221, 243–5, 247, 357, 367, 370, Dickson, P. 329, 336
380, 432, 441 Diependaele, K. 13, 22
Curtin, M. 214, 221 Diffley, F. 10, 21
Curtiss, D. C. 172, 182 Dijkstra, B. 272, 274
Cutler, C. 454, 455 Djiwandono, I. 231, 235
Cycowicz, Y. M. 176, 182 Dochy, F. 346, 350, 351
Dock, C. 417, 426
Dahlan, K. H. A. 230 Doelker, C. 172, 182
Dailey-O’Cain, J. 3, 327–8, 368 Dogancay-Aktuna, S. 108, 115
Dale, E. 174, 182 Doná, G. 404, 405, 406, 410, 411
Dale, J. A. 199, 207 Donato, R. 290, 298, 356, 366, 368
Dallow, P. 171, 172, 175, 179, 182 Donitsa-Schmidt, S. 345, 350
Dalton-Puffer, C. 353, 354, 359, 361, 363–7 Dorian, N. (also N. C.) 71, 77, 415, 426
Dance, J. 166, 169 Dorman, J. P. 346, 349
Darder, A. 258, 259 Dorn, S. 152, 155
Dardjowidjojo, S. 225, 234, 235 Dorner, L. 249
Darling-Hammond, L. 152, 155 Dörnyei, Z. 11, 12, 15, 18, 19
Das Gupta, J. 39, 47 Dostert, S. 414, 426
Davies, A. 109, 112, 114 Draper, J. B. 212, 221
Davies, B. 51, 59 Dressler. R. 217, 221
Davis, A. 191, 194, 267, 273 Drieghe, D. 13, 19, 22
Davis, B. 308, 310 Drury, J. E. 18, 22
Davis, K. A. 28, 34, 35, 40, 47 Ducar, C. 214, 215, 218, 221
Day, E. M. 123, 130 Duda, R. 303, 310
Dean, R. 176, 182 Duff, P. (also P. A.) 11, 14, 16, 18, 19, 54, 59, 242,
De Assis-Peterson, A. A. 257, 259 248, 290, 291, 293, 294, 298, 327, 332, 336, 337
Debes, J. L. 171, 172, 182 Duffy, J. 192, 194
Debose, C. 189–91, 194 Dulay, H. 384, 393
De Bot, K. 210, 221, 387, 391, 392, 414, 427 Duranti, A. 168, 169, 239, 240, 248
De Cock, S. 393 Durkheim, E. 252
Decoo, W. 306, 310 Dussias, E. 12, 13, 19
DeFrancis, J. 276, 285 Dussias, P. 13, 19
De Graaff, R. 359, 367 Duyck, W. 13, 19, 22
De Jong, E. J. 428–41 Dyer, T. G. 418, 426
De Kanter, A. A. 440 Dyson, A. 152, 155
De la Campa, J. C. 329, 336
Delamont, S. 56, 59 Early, M. 54, 61
De la Piedra, M. T. 438, 441 Eastman, L. 255, 257, 259
Delgado-Bernal, D. 438, 440, 441 Eberlein, J. K. 178, 182
Delgado-Gaitan, C. 93, 102 Echevarria, J. J. 435, 441
Deloria, V. Jr. 167, 169 Edelenbos, P. 345, 349
De los Heros, S. 45, 47 Edelsky, C. 432, 441
Delpit, L. 449, 456 Eden, G. 281, 287
DeLuca, C. 346, 349 Ediger, A. 11, 14, 20
Demas, E. 76 Edstrom, A. 329, 336
De Mejía, A. 121, 130 Edwards, J. (also J. R.) 66, 76, 77, 92–3, 102
Denham, K. 452, 456 Edwards, P. 153, 156
Denzin, N. K. 397, 408, 409, 411 Ehri, L. 450, 451, 453, 456
De Oliveira, L. C. 75, 76, 107, 108, 114, 115 Eisdorfer, C. 207
Derwing, T. M. 107, 114 Eisenstein-Ebsworth, M. 268, 273
DeSipio, L. 379 Ekbatani, G. V. 346, 349
De Valenzuela, J. S. 152, 155 Elkins, J. 171, 173, 180–2
Deville, C. 343, 349 Ellert, M. 13, 19

463
Name Index

Ellis, N. (also N. C.) 11, 13, 19, 21, 330, 336, Figueroa, A. M. 239, 241, 242, 243, 247
439, 441 Filippatou, D. 177, 182
Ellis, R. 163, 170, 270, 273, 313, 314, 322–4, 328, Fillenbaum, S. 448, 456
336, 383–8, 392–4 Fillmore, L. W. 423, 425, 426
Ellsworth, E. 256, 258, 259 Finch, A. 346, 350
Ellwood, C. 329, 336 Finegan E. 310
Ely, C. M. 328, 336 Fisher, D. (also D. L.) 175, 180, 181, 183, 346, 349
Emme, M. 403, 405, 409, 412 Fisher, L. 294, 299
Enciso, P. 257, 259, 438, 441, 443 Fishman, J. A. 67, 77, 89, 138, 142, 162, 163, 164,
Enemoh, P. A. C. 176, 182 168, 169, 210, 221, 370, 372–4, 378, 380, 414,
Engestrom, Y. 438, 441 426, 441
Ennemoser, M. 173, 182 Fitts, S. 438, 441
Ennser-Kananen, J. 1–4, 291, 293, 298 Fitzgerald, L. M. 208
Enright, M. K. 342, 349 Fitzsimons, P. 402, 409, 411
Epstein, A. S. 34 Fives, H. 266, 273
Epstein, I. 82, 90 Fleck, C. 9, 20
Erickson, F. 27, 34, 97, 102 Flecken, M. 13, 19
Erickson, G. 207, 346, 349 Flores, B. 441
Ericson, J. 171, 173, 181 Flores d’ Arcais, G. B. 281, 285
Eriks-Brophy, A. 160, 169 Flores, N. 69, 77, 140, 141, 143
Erikson, E. 289 Flory, M. 426
Erstad, O. 100, 102 Flowerdew, L. 309
Espinosa, P. 381 Fogel, H. 450, 451, 453, 456
Esposito, J. 191, 194 Foley, D. 26, 34
Etherington, S. 268, 273 Folke, C. 200, 208
Evans, M. A. 179, 182 Folkes, A. 256, 260
Everson, M. E. 276, 278, 279, 285, 287 Fordham, S. 449, 456
Extra, G. 83, 90 Fortune, T. W. 121, 124, 125, 129, 130
Foster, P. 322, 323, 324, 387, 394
Fabricio, B. 200, 208 Foucault, M. 411, 438, 441
Faez, F. 108, 109, 114 Fozdar, F. 401, 409, 413
Fairclough, M. 218, 220, 221 Franceschini, R. 333, 336, 438, 441
Fairclough, N. 194, 234, 235, 406, 411 Franchetto, B. 99, 102
Falchikov, N. 346, 349 Francis, D. J. 343, 350
Falchi, L. 156 Frankenberg, E. 146, 157
Faltis, C. 3, 65–77 Frankenberg-Garcia, A. 307, 308, 310
Fan, K. 277, 285 Franquiz, M. 198, 207
Fan, M. H.-M. 285 Frazer, E. 411
Faraco, C. A. 98, 101, 102 Freebody, P. 255, 259
Farhady, H. 10, 20 Freed, B. F. 414, 426
Farley, R. 239, 248 Freeman, D. 2, 4, 265, 273, 289, 290, 298, 313–16,
Farquhar, S. 402, 409, 411 321, 323, 324
Farrell, T. S. C. 269–71, 273, 274 Freeman, M. 57, 59
Farr, F. 308, 310 Freeman, R. 28, 34, 42, 45, 47, 48
Fasold, R. 448, 456 Freire, P. 2, 4, 93, 102, 198, 199, 202, 207, 252, 253,
Fathman, A. (also A. K.) 214, 215, 221, 313, 324 256, 258, 259
Fauziah bte Yaakub, N. 310 Frenck-Mestre, C. 13, 19
Feigenbaum, I. 447, 456 Frey, B. B. 346
Feiman-Nemser, S. 291, 298, 316, 324 Frey, N. 175, 180, 181, 183
Feistritzer, C. E. 70, 77 Frey, W. 155
Felser, C. 13, 19 Friederici, A. D. 18, 21
Feng, Z. 281, 285 Friedman, D. 14, 19, 182, 380
Ferguson, C. 67, 77 Frost, L. 160, 162, 166, 169
Ferguson, G. 243, 248, 328, 332, 333, 334, 336 Fuchs, C. 413
Ferreira, A. T. B. 99, 104 Fukuda, T. 81, 90
Feurle, G. 180, 182 Fulcher, G. 345, 350
Fichtner, F. 290, 293–6, 298 Fuller, J. 329, 332, 336

464
 Name Index

Furman, N. 276, 285 Gilmore, P. 25, 34, 36

Gilquin, G. 301, 310, 389, 393
Gabrielatos, C. 308, 309, 310 Giorgis, C. 53, 60
Gabriele, A. 245, 248 Girard, B. J. 342, 348, 350
Gadsden, V. 56, 61, 96, 101, 102 Giroux, H. A. 92, 93, 102, 252, 256, 258, 259
Gafaranga, J. 435, 441 Glanz, C. 84, 85, 87, 88, 91
Gajo, L. 354, 359, 360, 367 Glas, A. 177, 183
Galindo, R. 435, 441 Glass, G. V. 46, 49, 244, 250
Gal, S. 138, 143, 248 Glass, R. D. 199, 207
Gándara, P. 147, 155, 211, 221 Glatthorn, A. A. 25, 34
Gan, S.-L. 308, 310 Glazer, N. 429, 442
Gao D.-G. 279, 285 Gleason, J. B. 414, 426
Gao, J. 277, 285 Godfroid, A. 12, 13, 20
Gao, X. 271, 273 Godley, A. J. 452, 456
Garcia, A. L. 406, 410, 411 Goffman, E. 51, 60, 406, 412
Garcia, D. L. 217, 223 Gogolin, I. 80, 90
García, E. (also E. E.) 149, 156, 381, 432, 442, 445 Golan, S. E. 207
García, O. 3, 28, 32, 33, 34, 36, 40–3, 48, 67, 69, 75, Goldberg, D. 276, 285
77, 78, 83, 88, 90, 132–43, 156, 211, 218, 221, Goldenberg, C. 139, 143
245, 246, 247, 248, 358, 361, 367, 426, 434, 438, Goldman, S. 154
439, 442, 444 Golombek, P. 58, 60, 108, 114, 265, 290, 292, 294,
García-Moya, R. 433, 445 295, 299
García-Ramírez, M. 200, 206, 208 Golombek, R. 274
García Sánchez, I. M. 243, 246, 248 Gomez, J. 439, 445
Gardner, D. 147, 156 Gómez, M. C. 155
Gardner, M. F. 279, 285 Gonzalez, N. 24, 27, 34, 69, 77, 96, 97, 102, 242,
Gardner, R. (also R. C.) 16, 21, 448, 456 248, 436, 442
Gardner, S. 341, 351 Gonzalez, R. C. 431, 442
Garrett, B. 243, 248 Gonzalez, S. V. 217, 223
Garrett, P. (also P. B.) 414, 426 Gonzalez, T. 145–55
Gaskell, D. 303, 310 Goodenough, F. 423, 426
Gass, S. M. 1, 2, 9–22 Goodman, K. S. 435, 442, 447, 456
Gaudelli, W. 296, 298 Goodman, Y. 435, 442, 452, 456
Gavioli, L. 308, 310 Goo, J. 16, 21
Gee, J. (also J. P.) 52, 59, 60, 92, 93, 95, 99, 102, Gorter, D. 83, 86, 90, 210, 221
151, 156, 192, 194, 253, 259, 409, 410, 412 Gotardo, A. 439, 442
Geeraerts, D. 79, 90 Goto Butler, Y. 244, 248
Geertz, C. 24, 34 Götz, S. 307, 310
Genesee, F. 120, 122–5, 127, 130, 139, 244, 248, Gougenheim, G. 301, 311
250, 292, 298, 339, 350, 356, 367, 439, 441 Gounari, P. 283, 286
Georgakopoulou, A. 54–7, 59, 60 Graff, H. (also H. J.) 95, 102, 192, 194
George, H. 383, 393 Granath, S. 305, 311
Gerber, M. 153, 156 Granger, S. 384, 389, 392, 393
Gerfen, C. 13, 19 Grant, N. 69, 77
Gessner, I. 180, 183 Grasso, S. 329, 336
Ghahremani-Ghajar, S. 254–5, 259 Graue, M. E. 350
Ghia, E. 17, 20 Gray, J. 294, 295, 299
Gianelli, M. C. 124, 130 Green, A. 342, 350
Giauque, G. S. 328, 336 Green, J. 25, 34
Gibb, A. C. 157 Green, L. 452, 454, 456, 457
Gibbons, P. 360, 367 Greeno, J. 153, 156
Gibson, M. A. 237, 238, 245, 248 Grefenstette, G. 306, 311
Gijbels, D. 346, 350, 351 Gregersen, T. S. 412
Gildersleeve, R. E. 398, 410, 412 Grenfell, M. 99, 100, 103
Gillam, L. 398, 408–12 Grenoble L. A. 415, 423, 426
Gill, D. 231 Gries, S. 301, 310
Gillon Dowens, M. 18, 20 Grinberg, J. 70, 77

465
Name Index

Grin, F. 42, 47 Hayes, E. B. 278, 286

Grogger, J. 238, 248 Hayward, W. G. 279, 287
Grosjean, F. 218, 221, 432, 442 He, A. (also A. W.) 248, 370, 380
Grossman, L. 321, 324 He, B. 279, 285
Guan, C. Q. 281, 286 He, X. 328, 336
Guerra, J. 438, 442 Heath, B. 449
Gugler, M. F. 18, 21 Heath, S. B. 24, 25, 26, 29, 34, 35, 92, 94, 95, 96,
Guillemin, M. 398, 408–12 99, 103, 192, 194, 242, 248, 456
Gullberg, M. 13, 21 Hecke, C. 3, 171–81, 183
Gumperz, J. (also J. J.) 25, 34, 240, 248, 432, 442 Heger, H. K. 207
Guo, T. 337 Heller, M. 28, 35, 73, 74, 77, 138, 143, 241, 248,
Gustafsson, J. 346, 349 438, 442
Guthrie, G. 25, 37, 433, 445 Hellwig, K. 175, 182, 183
Gutiérrez, K. 99, 103, 150, 151, 156, 438, 442 Helness, H. 345, 350
Gutierrez, R. 166, 169 Hemmer, L. 148, 156
Guzzardo Tamargo, R. 13, 19 Hemphill, F. C. 197, 207
Hendry, H. 368
Habermas, J. 253, 254, 259 Hendryx, J. D. 371, 380
Haertel, G. D. 200, 208 Hennessy, S. 257, 259
Hafner, C. 305, 311 Henning, G. 11, 20
Hahne, A. 18, 20, 21 Henze, R. 28, 35
Hahn, T. 200, 208 Herder, J. G. 137–8
Hajjaj, A. H. 332, 336 Herdina, P. 137, 143
Hakuta, K. 244, 248, 414, 426, 432, 442 Hermes, M. 158–69
Hale, K. L. 168, 415, 423, 426 Hernandez-Chavez, E. 432, 442
Hallet, W. 180, 183 Hernández-León, R. 237, 248
Halliday, M. A. K. 98, 103, 355, 361, 367, 410, 412 Herriman, M. 435, 442
Hall, J. K. 438, 442 Heston, M. L. 208
Hall, K. 438, 441 Heugh, K. 79–90
Hall, L. A. 299 Hickey, M. 163, 169
Hamilton, M. 99, 102 Hicks, J. H. 212, 221
Han, A. 445 Hidalgo, N. 245, 248
Han, Z. 314, 324 Higareda, I. 154
Handlin, O. 430, 442 Higgins, C. 50–60
Haneda, M. 360, 367 Higham, J. 429, 442
Haniford, L. C. 342, 348, 350 Hiles, D. 410, 413
Hanse, P. 354, 360, 367 Hill, J. 73, 77, 248
Haque, E. 41, 47 Hill, K. 345, 348, 350
Harber, J. R. 448, 456 Hill, K. D. 452, 456
Hardy, C. 99, 103 Hill, R. 32, 35, 44, 45, 47, 48, 126, 130
Harré, R. 51, 59 Hills, M. 285
Harris, R. 75 77, 409, 412 Hinton, L. 4, 159, 160, 163, 165, 167–9, 414–26
Harrison, B. 164, 169 Hird, B. 265, 273
Harrison, C. 349 Hirvela, A. 305, 307, 312
Harry, B. 150, 156 Hodgson, C. M. 416, 426
Hartford, B. S. 108, 115 Hodgson, R. 448, 456
Hartiala, A. 368 Hoeftel, E. M. 370, 375
Hartsuiker, R. J. 13, 19, 22 Hoey, M. 303, 311, 390, 392, 393
Harvey, J. 317, 320, 321, 324 Hoffman, C. 436, 442
Harvey, P. 411 Hoffman, C. M. 212, 222
Hasselgreen, A. 345, 350 Hoffman, G. 67, 78
Hatch, E. 10, 11, 20, 313, 314, 323, 324 Hofman, J. E. 380
Hatta, M. 230 Hofman, R. 272, 274
Hattie, J. 341, 350 Holdaway, J. 245, 247, 249
Haugen, E. 38, 47, 429, 442 Holland, D. 289, 290, 298, 299
Hawley, F. 430, 442 Holliday, A. 107, 110, 114
Hayes, D. 107, 110, 111, 114 Holmes, B. 362, 367

466
 Name Index

Holmes, H. M. 409, 412 Janssens, S. 346, 351

Holowinsky, I. Z. 200–2, 208 Jantunen, J. H. 383–93
Hong, W. 283, 288 Janusch, S. 399, 409, 412
Hood, P. 366, 367 Järvikivi J. 13, 19
Hopkins, M. 155, 243, 248 Jarvis, S. 386, 388, 390, 392, 393
Hopson, R. K. 33, 36 Jazadi, I. 225, 235
Horii, S. Y. 313–23 Jefferson, G. 240, 250
Horkheimer, M. 252 Jegerski, J. 217, 222
Hornberger, N. (also N. H.) 1, 2, 4, 25, 26, 28, 30, Jenkins, J. 109, 114, 234, 235
31, 33, 35, 36, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 45–7, 49, 75, Jennings, L. 199, 207
76, 77, 89, 140, 143, 211, 215, 219, 221, 240, Jensen, L. 215, 217, 222
244, 248, 249, 357, 367, 373, 374, 380, 422, 426, Jernudd, B. 39, 47
435, 439, 442, 444 Jessner, U. 137, 143
Horwitz, E. K. 267, 269, 274, 315, 324 Jia, G. 371, 380
Houghton, S. 107, 114 Jia, L. 371, 380
Housen, A. 13, 20 Jiang, N. 11, 20
Howard, E. (also E. R.) 83, 90, 434, 434, 442, 443 Jiang, P. 307, 311
Howe, K. R. 397, 412 Jiang, X. 282, 283, 284, 286, 288
Hu, H. 346, 349 Jie, D. 23, 24, 29, 34
Huang, B. 276, 286 Jilbert, K. 441
Huang, H. 282, 286 Jin, H.-G. 283, 286
Huang, S. Y. 255, 259 Johansson, S. 307, 310, 311
Huang Chi-Ling, 337 John, T. A. 405, 410, 413
Huber, R. 177, 183 John, V. P. 25, 34, 240, 247
Hudelson, S. 441 Johns, T. 302, 303, 305, 308, 309, 311
Hudley, C. 453, 454, 457 Johnson, A. S. 299
Huerta, T. M. 199, 207 Johnson, D. (also D. C.) 20, 30, 33, 35, 38–48
Huettig, F. 13, 20 Johnson, E. (also E. J.) 41, 48
Huguet, A. 109, 115 Johnson, J. 146, 157, 176, 183
Hull, G. 12, 96, 99, 100, 103 Johnson, K. 58, 60
Hulstijn, J. 14, 20, 387, 393 Johnson, K. A. 292, 294, 295, 299, 300
Hult, F. M. 1, 2, 4, 5, 42, 43, 47, 367 Johnson, K. E. 263, 264, 265, 270, 274, 313–16,
Hyltenstam, K. 10, 20 321, 323, 324
Hymes, D. 1, 23–6, 28, 29, 33–5, 97, 98, 99, 103, Johnson, M. K. 179, 182
240, 247, 249, 355, 367, 432, 442 Johnson, R. K. 119, 120, 122, 123, 125, 130
Hyslop-Margison, E. J. 199, 207 Johnston, B. 163, 169, 294, 300
Johnston, M. 394
Ilieva, R. 107, 108, 111, 114 Jones, B. 140, 143
Inbar-Lourie, O. 108, 114, 115, 290, 292, 299, 345, Jones, G. 308, 312
347, 350 Jones, K. 89, 361, 368
Indefrey, P. 13, 21 Jones, W. R. 81, 90
Ingold, C. W. 370, 373, 380 Jordan, C. 27, 37
Ingram, E. 11, 20 Jordan, S. R. 108, 114, 290, 292, 294, 295, 299
Irvine, J. (also J. T.) 138, 143, 248 Jørgensen, J. N. 76, 140, 143
Ives, D. 53, 60 Joseph, M. 31, 35
Izadinia, M. 289, 291, 293, 294, 295, 297, 299 Juzwik, M. (also M. M.) 53, 55, 59, 60, 61, 299
Izumi, S. 356, 367
Kachru, B. B. 106, 112, 114, 226
Jackson, A. Y. 442 Kagan, D. 263, 264, 269, 270, 274
Jackson, P. 264, 274 Kagan, O. 214, 220 221, 221, 370, 371, 380, 381
Jackson, R. L. 449, 457 Kalyuga, S. 278, 286
Jacobson, R. 433, 443 Kamanā, K. 159–60, 163, 164, 168–70
Jacquemet, M. 140, 143 Kamhi-Stein, L. 113
Jaffe, A. (also A. J.) 28, 35, 430, 433 Kane, M. 342, 350
James, C. 384, 393 Kang, J. (also J. Y.) 409, 412
Jamieson, J. 342, 349 Kang, O. 386, 393
Jang, E. E. 341, 350 Kanno, Y. 242, 249, 291, 293, 294, 296, 299

467
Name Index

Kao, H. S. R. 279, 285 Kozleski, E. B. 148, 152–5

Kaplan, R. B. 38, 48 Kramsch, C. 140, 143, 246, 249, 328, 329, 335, 336,
Kasinitz, M. J. H. 239, 249 399, 438, 443
Kattan, S. 242, 247 Krashen, S. (also S. D.) 83, 88, 90, 123, 124, 130,
Kauffman, J. M. 153, 156 139, 143, 224, 234–6, 244, 249, 328, 336, 356,
Kavale, K. A. 153, 156 367, 373, 379, 381, 384, 393, 450, 456
Kawakami, A. 449, 451, 455 Krathwold, R. 357, 366
Ke, C. 276, 281, 284, 286 Krauss, M. 159, 168, 169
Keijzer, M. 414, 426 Kress, G. 96, 103, 172, 178, 183
Kelly, G. A. 344, 350 Kroll, B. 245, 247
Kelly, J. G. 200, 208 Kroskrity, V. 138, 143, 250
Kemmis, S. 46, 48 Kubanek-German, A. 345, 349
Kernan-Mitchell, C. 449, 456 Kubanyiova, M. 272, 274, 398, 408, 412
Kern, R. G. 227, 267, 269, 274 Kubota, R. 107, 114
Kettemann, B. 305, 311 Kuehn, P. A. 245, 247
Keys, C. B. 206 Kuhl, J. 173, 182
Kharma, N. N. 332, 336 Kulm, G. 197, 207
Kibler, A. 332, 336 Kumaravadivelu, B. 112, 114, 267, 274
Kieffer, M. J. 343, 350 Kurihara, Y. 267, 274
Kilgarriff, A. 306, 311 Kushner, M. I. 155
Kim, M. O. 380 Kyratzis, A. 243, 249
King, K. (also K. A.) 1, 2, 5, 28, 35, 210–20, 246,
249, 435, 443 LaBoskey, V. (also V. K.) 198, 207, 208
King, L. 362, 367 Labov, W. 51, 54, 60, 67, 77, 98, 103, 185–8, 190, 192,
King, P. 309 194, 249, 432, 443, 447, 448, 451, 452, 454, 456
Kinginger, C. 54, 55, 60, 438, 443 Lachicotte, W. Jr. 289, 290, 298, 299
Kirkpatrick, A. 332, 333, 338 Lado, R. 328, 336
Kirova, A. 403, 405, 412 Ladson-Billings, G. 97, 103
Kirschner, P. J. 303, 311 Lahman, M. K. E. 405, 406, 410, 412
Kleifgen, J. (also J. A.) 77, 136, 143, 156, 361, 367, Lai, C.-Y. 284, 285, 286
434, 442 Lakoff, R. 410, 412
Kleiman, A. B. 92, 93, 94, 95, 97, 103 Lamb, C. 328, 337
Klein, R. 146, 157 Lamb, P. 451, 457
Klein, S. 450, 457 Lambert, R. D. 414, 426
Klingner, J. (also J. K.) 149, 150, 151, 153, 156 Lambert, W. (also W. E.) 11, 20, 74, 77, 120, 130,
Kloss, H. 38, 39, 48 133, 134, 143, 246, 249, 423, 426, 448, 456, 458
Kluth, P. 176–7, 183 Lamie, M. J. 267, 272, 274
Klyen, T. 445 Lange, D. L. 293, 299
Knight, B. A. 269, 275 Langellier, K. M. 52, 61
Knox, J. 269, 270, 273 Lan, S.-W. 107, 114
Koda, K. 284, 286, 371, 380 Lantoff, J. 435, 443
Kolba, E. 447, 456 Lantolf, J. (also J. P.) 14, 20, 53, 61, 329, 336
Ko, M. 255, 259 Lapkin, S. 119, 120, 126, 131, 329, 332, 333, 338,
Kominski, R. A. 370, 381 356, 369
Kondo-Brown, K. 214, 220, 222 Larsen-Freeman, D. 137, 143, 246, 249, 304, 311,
Kontra, E. H. 347, 350 387, 391, 393, 439, 441, 443
Koopman, G. J. 359, 367 Lasagabaster, D. 107, 114, 354, 367
Köpke, B. 414, 426 Lau, L. 346, 352
Kormos, J. 347, 350 Laurén, C. 123, 130
Korthagen, F. A. J. 199, 207 Lave, J. 291, 299, 436, 443
Kotenbeutel, C. 276, 286 Lavin, T. 432, 440
Koulouriotis, J. 397, 398, 400, 405, 407, 408, 409, Lazaraton, A. 11, 14, 17, 20
411, 412 Leaverton, L. 451, 457
Kowal, M. 356, 367 LeCompte, M. D. 16, 23, 24, 29, 30, 35, 36, 163,
Kowalski, K. 176, 183 169, 208
Koyama, J. (also J. P.) 237–46, 248 Leder, N. 9, 20
Koymen, S. B. 243, 249 Lee, C. 32, 108, 112, 278, 286, 346, 349, 449, 451, 457

468
 Name Index

Lee, E. 51, 54, 60 Littlemore, J. 305, 311

Lee, H. 368 Littleton, K. 358, 368
Lee, H.-C. 311 Littlewood, W. 329, 337, 355, 368
Lee, I. 114 Liu, D. 307, 311
Lee, J. 237, 239, 251 Liu, J. 108, 109, 115
Lee, J. S. 213, 215, 222, 379, 381 Liu, N. 376, 381
Lee, J. F. K. 350 Liu, W.-R. 288
Lee, O.-S. 381 Liu, Y. 280–3, 286, 291, 294, 295, 298, 299
Lee, T. S. 35 Liu, Y.-B. 281, 286
Leech, G. 310 Liu, Y. J. 155
Leeman, J. 210–20, 222 Livingstone, D. W. 252, 259
LeFever, G. B. 153, 156 Llinares, A. 16, 354, 356–61, 363, 364, 366, 368, 369
Legarreta, D. 431, 443 Llosa, L. 215, 217, 222, 343, 350
Leggett, E. L. 25, 34 Llurda, E. 3, 105–13, 115, 292
Lemke, J. L. 363, 368 Lobeck, A. 452, 456
Lenz, P. 345, 351 Lo Bianco, J. 370, 373, 374, 375, 381
Leonard, W. 32, 35, 166, 169 Lockard, L. 161, 170
Leong, C.-K. 279, 286 Loewen, S. 11, 20, 270, 273, 356, 368
Le Page, R. B. 138, 143 Logan J. 380
Lesaux, N. K. 148, 156, 343, 350 Lomawaima, K. T. 149, 156
Leung, C. 344, 350 Lonergan, J. 174, 183
Levine, G. S. 329, 330, 331, 332, 334, 335, 337, 368 Long, M. H. 329, 337, 356, 368, 439, 443
Levine, M. 200, 208 Long, M. I. 386, 393
Levin, J. R. 175, 177, 179, 182 Looi, C.-K. 283, 287
Lewis, C. 257, 259, 438, 443 Lopez, D. E. 430, 443
Lewis, G. 140, 143 López-Reyna, N. A. 150, 156
Lewis, J. 456 Lord, C. 450, 457
Lewis, M. 392, 393 Lorge, I. 312
Lewis, O. 443 Lortie, D. 265, 266, 274
Li, D. 210, 221 Losen, D. 155
Li, G. 373, 381 Loughran, J. 208
Li, J.-L. 288 Love, K. 357, 368
Li, S. 16, 20 Low, F. 310
Li, T. 279, 286 Lowenthal, L. 252
Li, W. 288, 335, 443 Lowie, W. 392
Li, Y. 284 Lu, J. 279, 286
Li, Yi 412 Lucas, C. 453, 457
Liang, X. 329, 337 Lucas, T. 70, 77
Liao, J. 338 Luce, T. 146, 156
Liao, X. 276, 286 Luchesi, D. 98, 103
Liddicoat, A. J. 79–91 Lucko, J. 246, 249
Liebscher, G. 3, 327–37, 368 Luebbers, J. B. 290–2, 294, 295, 297, 299
Lightbown, M. 46, 48, 266, 269, 274, 314, 324, Luke, A. 199, 200, 208, 255, 259
315, 324 Luning, R. J. 164, 169
Lim, H.-W. 107, 108, 110, 114, 293, 294, 299 Luo, M. 280, 287
Lim, P. C. P. 269–71, 273 Lusin, N. 276, 285
Lin, A. 48, 107, 114 Lutz A. 380
Linan-Thompson, S. 153, 156 Lynch, A. 215, 222, 370, 381
Lincoln, Y. S. 397, 412 Lyster, R. 123, 126, 130, 292, 299, 317, 324, 356,
Lindholm-Leary, K. J. 121, 123, 130, 139, 143, 244, 360, 368
248, 249, 434, 443 Lytle, S. 198, 208
Link, H. 75, 76, 77, 140, 143
Linn, D. 148, 156 Ma, L. P. F. 109, 115
Liou, I. 111, 114 Ma, Q. 271, 273
Lipovsky, C. 107, 115 Macaro, E. 328, 329, 330, 332, 333, 335, 337, 338,
Lippi-Green, R. 109, 112, 115, 188, 194, 450, 457 356, 368
Little, M. E. R. 218, 222 MacDonald, M. 266, 269, 274, 314, 320, 324

469
Name Index

Macedo, D. 192, 194 Matz, R.D. 34

Mace-Matluck, B. J. 434, 443 Mauranen, A. 307, 311
Macharey, P. 178 Mawhinney, H. 292, 299
Mackey, A. 1, 11, 12, 15, 16, 18, 20, 21, 356, 368 Mayo, P. 93, 102
Macnamara, J. 443 May, S. 28, 32, 35, 36, 41, 42, 44, 45, 47, 48, 72, 78,
MacSwan, J. 432, 443 126, 130, 163, 169
MacWhinney, B. 283, 286 Mazur, J. 409, 412
Madison, D. S. 44, 48 Mazzei, L. A. 401, 402, 409, 412, 442
Mäenpää, T. 127, 129 McAdoo, H. 381
Maffi, L. 161, 162, 169 McAlpine, L. 160, 169
Mahboob, A. 107, 108, 111, 113, 115 Mcbridge-Chang, C. 279, 287
Mahoney, K. 46, 49, 244, 250 McCabe, K. 375, 381
Maillat, D. 359, 368 McCarten, J. 311
Majer, J. 329, 332, 337 McCarthy, M. 302, 305, 307, 309, 311
Major, R. C. 277, 287 McCarty, T. L. 23–37, 40–2, 46, 48, 68, 78, 83, 91,
Makoni, S. 69, 76, 77, 140, 143, 210, 218, 119, 130, 149, 156, 159, 163, 164, 168, 169, 170,
221, 235 218, 222, 415, 420, 421, 426
Malagon, M. C. 441 McConvell, P. 83, 91, 426
Malavé, G. 435, 443 McCormick, D. E. 290, 298
Malherbe, E. G. 81, 91 McDermott, R. 154
Maljers, A. 368 McDonough, K. 11, 21, 318–24
Mallard, D. 399, 401, 409, 411 McDowell, L. 346, 347, 351
Mallinson, C. 453, 454, 456, 457 McGhee, B. D. 155
Mallozzi, C. A. 397–408 McGinnis, S. 220, 284, 287, 370, 374, 379, 381
Malone, M. 347, 350 McGraw, I. 283, 287
Mangunwijaya, Y. B. 230 McGroarty, M. 241, 249
Manion, L. 344, 349 McGuiness, C. 357, 368
Mann, H. 426 McKay, S. (also S. L.) 46, 47, 236, 436, 443
Mantero, M. 294, 299 McKinney, M. 53, 60
Marcuse, H. 252 McLaren, P. 252, 253, 256, 258, 259
Mård-Miettinen, K. 3, 119–29 McMillan, B. 328, 333, 337
Marian, V. 13, 18 McNamara, T. 345, 348, 350, 438, 439, 443
Marin, A. 164, 169 McNeill, A. 108, 115
Mariotti, C. 360, 368 McSwan, J. 139, 143, 244, 249
Markee, N. 11, 21, 314, 324 McTaggart, R. 46, 48
Marks, H. M. 200–1, 208 McTighe, J. 202, 209
Marquez, P. 217, 223 McWhorter, J. 161, 170
Marshall, B. 349 Mead, M. 36
Marsh, D. 366, 367, 368 Medgyes, P. 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 113, 115, 116
Marsh, J. 99, 103, 354 Medoza-Denton, N. 444
Martel, J. 289–99, 321, 324 Meek, B. 28, 29, 36
Martínez, G. 212, 213, 215–17, 218, 222 Meek, B. A. 166, 170
Martínez, P. 439, 443 Mehan, H. 150, 156, 245, 247
Martínez-Roldán, C. 435, 439, 443 Meier, T. 451, 455, 457
Martin-Jones, M. 28, 30, 35, 36, 89, 240, 241, 248, Menard-Warwick, J. 55, 58, 60, 290, 292, 293,
249, 361, 368, 432, 443 294, 299
Martin, J. R. 361, 367 Mendoza, B. M. 405, 410, 412
Martin, P. 335, 443 Mendoza-Denton, N. 241, 249
Martohardjono, G. 245, 248 Menke, M. R. 129, 130
Marx, Karl 252 Menken, K. 33, 36, 40–3, 46, 48, 69, 78, 343, 350,
Masgoret, A.-M. 16, 21 435, 438, 444
Matsuda, A. 229, 236 Mercado, C. 436, 444
Matsuda, K. 229, 236 Mercer, N. 257, 259, 358, 368
Matsumura, S. 11, 21 Merriam, S. B. 208
Mattheoudakis, M. 271, 274 Mertens, D. M. 409, 412
Maturana, H. 132, 143 Messing, J. 32, 36

470
 Name Index

Mesthrie, R. 249 Mosselson, J. 403, 405, 409, 412

Met, M. 122, 123, 124, 125, 130 Moss, P. A. 342, 344, 348, 350
Meunier, F. 392, 393 Motha, S. 107, 115, 292, 294, 299
Meyer, A. S. 13, 20 Mousavi, E. S. 296, 299
Meyer, O. 364, 368 Moussu, L. 107, 108, 109–13, 115
Meyer, R. 418 Moynihan, D. 429, 442
Meza, M. 249 Mueller, J. (also J. L.) 439, 442
Michaels, S. 52, 60, 449, 457 Mueller, J. L. 18, 20
Mignolo, W. 139, 143 Muhammad, K. G. 66, 78
Mikos, L. 177, 183 Mukherjee, J. 307, 308, 310, 311
Miller, E. R. 58, 60 Mulder, K. 387, 393
Miller, I. K. 322, 324 Muller, C. 148, 156
Miller, J. 289, 290, 292, 297, 298, 299 Mullock, B. 107, 115, 265, 274
Miller, L. 448, 458 Munro, M. J. 107, 114
Mills, S. 412 Myers-Scotton, C. 426
Milton, M. 265, 273 Myford, C. 15, 22
Minett, J. W. 279, 287 Myles, F. 429, 444
Ming, T. 371, 381
Minnici, A. 452, 456 Nadeau, A. 434, 444
Miramontes, O. 434, 444 Nariman-Jahan, R. 387, 394
Mirhosseini, S.A. 254–5, 259 Nassaji, H. 315, 320, 324, 329, 336
Mishler, E. G. 56, 57, 60 Neal, R. 147, 155
Mistar, J. 225, 236 Nee-Benham, M. K. A. 420, 426
Mitchell, R. 429, 444 Nelson, C. 58, 60
Mitchell, W. J. T. 173, 179, 180, 183 Nelson, G. 208
Mittlmeier, J. 176, 183 Nemtchinova, E. 108, 112, 115
Mohan, B. 360, 368 Nespor, J. 264, 274
Mohanty, A. 43, 48, 83, 84, 91 Nesselhauf, N. 390, 392, 393
Mohapatra, S. 250 Newman, K. 108, 115
Mohatt, G. 27, 34 Ng, J. 269, 274
Moje, E. 257, 259, 438, 443 Nicholas, S. (also S. E.) 29, 31, 32, 36, 37
Moline, S. 175, 183 Nichols, J. 165, 169
Mollaei, F. 284, 287 Niederhaus, C. 176, 183
Mollenkopf, J. H. 249 Nieto, S. 198, 208, 436, 444
Moll, L. (also L. C.) 27, 34, 69, 77, 96, 97, 102, 248, Nijakowska, J. 347, 351
435, 436, 442, 444 Nikula, T. 359, 366, 368
Montrul, S. 216, 222 Niu, R. 271, 274
Moore, D. 329, 330, 335, 337 Nolan, C. 246, 249
Moore, E. 52, 60 Norman, J. 279, 287
Moore, R. 31, 36 Norris, J. 12, 16, 17, 21
Morales, S. 445 Norton, B. 53, 54, 58, 60, 61, 242, 249, 290, 294,
Morgan, B. 33, 36, 173, 183, 290, 291, 293, 294, 299, 438, 444
299, 300 Norton Peirce, B. 53, 61, 436, 444
Morgan, M. 188, 194 Numrich, C. 265, 270, 274
Morgan-Short, K. 13, 14, 18, 21, 217, 222 Nunan, D. 11, 21, 225, 236, 328, 337
Morrison, J. C. 429, 444
Morrison, K. 344, 349 Ochs, E. 51, 61, 145, 154, 156, 240, 385, 393
Morrison, T. 168, 170 Odlin, T. 386, 388, 390, 392, 393, 394
Morrow, R. A. 252, 259 Ogbu, J. 193, 194, 238, 249, 449, 456
Mortatti, M. R. L. 93, 94, 103 O’Grady, W. 370, 379, 381
Mortimer, E. F. 358, 363, 368 Oguro, S. G. J. 329, 334, 337
Mortimer, K. 42, 43, 48 Ojan, L. 394
Morton, T. 294, 295, 299, 357, 361, 364, Okazaki, T. 283, 287
366, 368 O’Keeffe, A. 301, 308, 309, 311
Moses, M. S. 397, 412 ÓLaoire, M. 89
Mosley, M. 256, 260, 299 Oliver, R. 265, 273

471
Name Index

Oller, J. W. 340, 351 Pavlenko, A. 52, 53, 54, 56, 57, 59, 61, 138, 143,
Oller, K. D. 439, 444 290, 292, 294, 295, 300, 386, 390, 392, 393, 429,
Olmedo, I. M. 436, 444 435, 438, 444
Olsson, P. 200, 208 Payne, K. T. 454, 458
O’Malley, M. 348 Peacock, M. 265, 269, 274
Ong-Dean, C. 148, 156 Peal, E. 423, 426
Orellana, M. F. 243, 248, 249 Pearson, B. Z. 444
Orfield, M. 146, 156 Pease-Alvarez, L. 242, 249, 373, 381
Ormsby-Teki, T. 163, 170 Pease-Alvarez, P. 242, 251
Ortega, L. 12, 14, 16, 17, 20, 21, 313, 314, 323, 324, Pedraza, P. 67, 78
439, 444 Peirce, B. N. 253, 259
Ortiz, A. A. 150, 155 Penfield, S. D. 165, 170
Osborne, D. 444 Peng, G. 279, 287
Ostler, N. 231, 236 Peng, Z. 280, 287
O’Sullivan, Í. 309, 311 Pennington, M. C. 139, 143
Ota Wang, V. 200, 208 Pennycook, A. 9, 69, 73, 76, 77, 78, 81, 91, 137,
Otcu, B. 141, 143 140, 143, 190, 192, 194, 233, 234, 235, 236, 253,
Otheguy, R. 245, 248 259, 260, 438, 444
Otsuji, E. 140, 143 Penuel, W. 300
Ouane, A. 84, 85, 87, 88, 91 Perez, B. 434, 444
Ousley, D. 296, 298 Perez Huber, L. 441
Ou, Y.-S. 381 Perfetti, C. A. 277, 281, 283, 286, 287
Ovens, J. 394 Perkins, D. D. 200, 208
Perkins, D. V. 200, 208
Pacek, D. 107, 116 Perlmann, J. 239, 250, 429, 444
Packard, J. L. 278, 287 Perry, K. H. 397–408, 410, 411, 413
Páez, M. 439, 444 Pessoa, S. 361, 368
Pahl, K. 99, 101, 103 Peter, L. 160, 170
Paige, R. M. 293, 299 Peterson, E. E. 52, 61
Paikeday, T. M. 387, 394 Peterson, P. L. 264, 273
Pajares, F. 263, 264, 266, 274 Peterson, R. E. 256, 260
Palmer, A. 125, 129 Petrovic, J. E. 73, 78
Palmer, D. 398, 400, 405, 409, 412 Pettersson, R. 172, 183
Palmer, J. 150, 155 Peyton, J. K. 220, 370, 381
Paloma, V. 206 Phelan, A. 207
Pal, R. 43, 48 Phillips, S. (also S. U.) 25–7, 36, 97, 103, 242, 250
Pan, B. A. 414, 426 Phillipson, R. 40, 44, 48, 68, 73, 78, 107, 116,
Pan, W. 280, 287 224, 225, 226, 227, 228, 236, 253, 258, 260,
Panda, M. 43, 48 403, 413
Panofsky, E. 178, 183 Phipps, S. 265, 267, 269, 270, 271, 274
Papa, R. 164, 169 Pica, T. 1
Papageorgiou, S. 341, 348 Piccinin, H. 418, 427
Paquette, J. 80, 91 Pienemann, M. 387, 391, 394
Paran, A. 108, 114 Pierson, H. D. 346, 349
Parekh, B. 72, 73, 78 Piestrup, A. M. 450, 457
Paris, D. 31, 36, 452, 457 Pietras, T. 451, 457
Parker, A. 162, 170 Pike, K. 24, 36
Parker Webster, J. 413 Pinnegar, S. 321, 323
Park, G. 110, 111, 116, 200, 290, 291, 292, 294, 300 Pinson, H. 246, 250
Park, J. S-Y. 241, 249 Placier, P. 270, 274
Park, M. 152, 155 Plonsky, L. 15, 16, 17, 20, 21
Pascual-Leone, J. 176, 183 Poehner, M. E. 341, 351
Pascual y Cabo, D. 219, 222 Pojanapunya, P. 107, 111, 116
Pash, D. 242, 250 Polinsky, M. 219, 222, 370, 371, 381
Passeron, J. C. 2, 4 Polio, C. 10, 11, 16, 19, 21
Patrick, D. 28, 36 Polio, C. G. 332, 336
Patton, M. Q. 208 Polio, C. P. 327, 332, 337

472
 Name Index

Pollatsek, A. 13, 21 Reynolds, J. F. 249

Pollock, F. 252 Rhoten, D. 162, 170
Poplack, S. 432, 444 Riasati, M. J. 284, 287
Porte, G. 16, 18, 21 Ribeiro, V. M. 101
Porter, J. 76 Rice, J. 255, 260
Portes, A. 69, 78, 238, 239, 250, 436, 444 Ricento, T. 17, 30, 33, 36, 38–46, 48, 49, 73, 78,
Potowski, K. 217, 218, 222 213, 222, 361, 428, 435, 436, 439, 444
Potter, J. 409, 413 Richards, J. (also J. C.) 46, 49, 105, 116, 233, 265,
Pou, A. 179, 183 273, 274, 383, 384, 394
Poveda, D. 52 Richardson, C. 163, 169
Pratt, C. R. 415 Richardson, E. 185–93, 266, 267, 272, 449, 450,
Pratt, R. H. 427 457
Preston, D. 386, 394 Richardson, K. 411
Prilleltensky, I. 208 Richardson, V. 264, 270, 271, 274
Prior, M. T. 410, 413 Riches, C. 244, 250
Probyn, M. 333, 337 Rickford, A. E. 449, 451, 455, 457
Prout, A. 404–6, 410, 411 Rickford, J. (also J. R.) 42, 49, 188, 189, 194, 449,
Prucha, F. P. 415, 427 451, 455, 457
Prusak, A. 295, 297, 300 Riessman, C. K. 52, 57, 58, 59, 61, 145, 156
Puk, T. 205, 208 Rieu, E. V. 208
Pumfrey, P. D. 177, 182 Riggenbach, H. 11, 14, 20
Punti, G. 246, 249 Rinaldi, C. 439, 444
Py, B. 329, 337 Rios-Aguilar, C. 211, 221
Pynte, J. 13, 19 Ritter, S. 157
Rivera, M. 343, 350
Qi, H. C. 152, 155 Rivers, D. 107, 114
Quadros, S. 252–8 Roach, K. 165, 169
Robbins, C. 456
Rabin, L. 215, 216, 222 Roberts, J. 266, 273
Rahimpour, M. 387, 394 Roberts, L. 12, 13, 19, 21
Ramanathan, V. 28, 29, 33, 36, 87, 91 Robertson, D. 12, 18
Ramani, E. 31, 35 Robertson, M. 155
Ramírez, J. D. 138, 144 Roberts, P. 199, 208
Rampton, B. 31, 36, 44, 48, 93, 103, 241, 250, 411 Rocha-Schmid, E. 3, 92–101, 103, 256, 258, 260
Ranard, D. A. 220, 370, 381 Roche, M. 257, 260
Rankin, J. 318, 319, 320, 321, 324 Rodgers, T. (also T. S.) 46, 49, 105, 116, 233
Ranta, L. 317, 324 Rodriguez, K. L. 405, 410, 412
Raschka, C. 333, 337 Rodriguez, T. L. 292, 295, 300
Rastogi, S. 380 Roeper, T. 454, 457
Ratha, D. 237, 250 Rogers, R. 256–8, 260
Rausch, M. K. 157 Rogers, T. 346, 349
Ravitch, D. 343, 351 Rogoff, B. 150, 156, 435, 444
Rayner, K. 13, 21 Rohsenow, J. (also J. S.) 281, 287, 333, 337
Razfar, A. 260 Rolin-Ianziti, J. 332, 338
Rea-Dickins, P. 341, 351 Rolstad, K. 46, 49, 139, 143, 244, 249, 250, 432,
Reagan, T. G. 73, 78 435, 444
Reaser, J. 452, 453, 457 Romaine, S. 432, 443
Redden, E. 269, 275 Roman, L. G. 44, 49
Reichle, E. D. 13, 21 Román-Mendoza, E. 215, 216, 222
Reinharz, S. 410, 411, 413 Romero-Little, M. E. 30, 36
Reis, D. S. 107, 108, 109, 111, 116, 292, 294, Römer, U. 305, 307, 311
295, 300 Rommers, J. 13, 20
Rennut, M. 68, 78 Roosevelt, T. 418
Reppen, R. 309 Rosaldo, R. 24, 36
Reves, T. 106, 109, 116 Rossi, S. 18, 21
Rex, L. 59, 61 Rothman, J. 219, 222
Reyhner, J. (also J. A.) 158, 161, 166, 170 Rothstein, M. 182

473
Name Index

Rowsell, J. 99, 101, 103 Schmidt, R. 355, 369

Roy-Charland, A. 182 Schneck, P. 172, 183
Rubin, D. L. 386, 393 Schneider, E. W. 231, 232, 236
Rubin, J. 231, 236 Schneider, G. 345, 351
Rueda, R. 148, 154, 155 Schoorman, D. 255–6, 260
Ruiz de Zarobe, Y. 362, 366, 368 Schuckall, H. F. 176, 183
Ruiz, N. T. 150, 156 Schugurensky, D. 93, 103, 199, 208
Ruiz, R. 39, 49, 78, 156 Schultz, J. 97, 102
Rumbaut, R. (also R. G.) 69, 78, 238, 239, 247, 250, Schultz, K. 12, 96, 99, 100, 103
372, 379, 381 Schulz, M. 178, 184
Rumenapp, J. C. 260 Schulz, R. (also R. A.) 268, 274, 355, 369
Russell-Pinson. L. 308, 310 Schumann, J. 384, 394
Rymes, B. 240, 241, 242, 243, 247, 250, 251 Schutz, P. 295, 296, 300
Schwan, S. 173, 184
Saavadra, C. 76 Schwartz, A. 216, 222
Sacks, H. 240, 250 Schwartz, J. L. 405, 410, 412
Sadeghi, S. 254, 255, 260 Schweers, C. 268, 273
Saer, D. J. 81, 91 Schwerdtfeger, I. C. 173, 174, 180, 184
Sagarra, N. 13, 19, 21 Scott, P. 358, 363, 368
Said, S. B. 235 Scribner, S. 99, 103, 192, 194
Saint-Aubin, J. 182 Sealey, A. 305, 311
Saito, H. 11, 21 Seedhouse, P. 329, 332, 338, 356, 369
Salazar, J. J. 148, 154, 155 Seidlhofer, B. 106, 112, 116, 307, 311
Salazar, M. C. 197–208 Seidl, M. 178, 180, 181, 184
Saleebey, D. 201, 208 Seliger, H. W. 11, 22
Salomon, G. 177, 183 Selinker, L. 10, 22, 383, 386, 388, 392, 394
Sambell, K. 346, 347, 351 Seltzer, K. 141, 142
Samimy, K. (also K. K.) 59, 106, 109, 114, 116, 267, Selvi, A. F. 108, 111, 116
271, 274, 275 Seneff, S. 283, 287
Samora, J. 430, 444 Sercombe, P. 337
Samson, J. F. 148, 156 Sercu, L. 300
Sanchez, G. I. 430, 444 Sergent, W. K. 279, 287
Sánchez, M. T. 434, 441 Serra, C. 354, 359, 367
Sandhu, P. 50–9, 61 Sexton, D. M. 297, 300
Sanino, A. 438, 441 Seymour, H. 454, 457
San Miguel, G. 66, 78 Sfard, A. 295, 297, 300
Sanz, C. 14, 21 Shahid, H. 380
Sarason, S. B. 201, 208 Shanahan, T. 139, 142, 244, 245, 247
Sarroub, L. K. 252–8 Shannon, S. M. 242, 251, 431, 445
Sato, M. 13, 19 Shapson, S. M. 123, 130
Saunders, W. M. . 123, 130, 139, 143, 244, 248 Sharifian, F. 112, 116
Savignon, S. J. 34, 354, 355, 356, 368 Shei, C. 306, 312
Saxena, M. 240, 249 Shen, H. H. 276–85, 287
Schachter, J. 10, 11, 21 Shen, X.-N. S. 277, 287
Schapiro, S. 199, 208 Shepard, L. 348
Scheffler, P. 309, 311 Shermis, S. 357, 366
Schegloff, E. A. 240, 250 Shifrer, D. 148, 156
Schensul, J. J. 16, 23, 24, 29, 30, 35, 36, 208 Shimahara, N. K. 200–2, 208
Scherling, T. 176, 183 Shin, H. 255, 260, 370, 381
Schieffelin, B. (also B. B.) 25, 36, 240, 250 Shin, S. (also S. J.) 213, 215, 222, 268, 274, 373,
Schiffman, H. F. 38, 49 381
Schilder, H. 174, 183 Shohamy, E. 11, 22, 40, 42, 43, 45, 48, 49, 88, 91,
Schleppegrell, M. (also M. J.) 258, 260, 343, 351, 439, 445
357, 361, 368, 369, 409, 413 Short, D. J. 435, 441
Schlesinger, A. 72, 76, 78 Showalter, D. 146, 157
Schmid, C. L. 42, 49 Showstack, R. E. 217, 222
Schmid, M. S. 414, 426 Shuy, R. (also R. G.) 26, 36, 448, 455, 456

474
 Name Index

Shuy, R. G. Sritikus, T. 36
Siegel, A. 11, 22 Stafford, T. 175, 184
Siegel, J. 256, 257, 260 Stake, R. E. 344, 351
Siegel-Hawley, G. 146, 157 Staton-Salazar, R. D. 430, 443
Sierra, J. (also J. M.) 107, 114, 354, 367 Steele, F. 206, 209
Siford, H. 311 Steele, N. 168
Silberstein, S. 245, 247 Steinberg, S. 188, 194
Silva-Corvalán, C. 214, 222 Steinhauer, K. 14, 18, 21, 22
Silva, R. V. M. 99, 103 Stein, S. J. 25, 36
Silverstein, M. 250 Stein, W. J. 426
Silwal, A. 250 Stern, H. H. 230, 234, 236
Silzer, P. J. 230, 236 Stewart, W. 447, 457
Simmons, A. B. 157 Stibbards, A. 205, 208
Simon-Maeda, A. 51, 54, 60, 295, 300 Stiggins, R. 346, 351
Simons, H. 193, 194 Stocker, K. 250
Simons, J. 173, 179, 184 Stockman, I. 454, 458
Simpkins, C. 453, 457 Stoker, K. 54, 60
Simpkins, G. 453, 457 Stokes, S. 172, 184
Simpson, J. 83, 87, 91 Strange, M. 146, 157
Simpson, R. C. 389, 394 Street, B. (also B. V.) 24, 28, 35, 36, 45, 92–4, 96,
Şimsek, M. R. 332, 338 99, 100, 103, 192, 194, 242, 250, 254, 260
Sinclair, J. 97, 103, 301, 302, 306, 308, 309, 312 Stritikus, T. 30, 36
Singleton, D. 89, 244, 250 Stroud, C. 72, 78
Siok, W. T. 281, 287 Struyven, K. 346, 351
Siyanova-Chanturia, A. 12, 21 Stuart, C. 291, 293, 294, 296, 299
Skehan, P. 387, 394 Stubbs, M. 5
Skiba, R. J. 148, 157 Stults, B. 380
Skutnabb-Kangas, T. 28, 34, 45, 49, 68, 73, 78, 82, Suarez-Balcazar, Y. 200, 201, 206, 208
83, 90, 91, 119, 130, 161, 162, 168, 170, 415, Suárez-Orozco, M. 238, 250, 433, 445
422, 424, 425, 427, 439, 442 Sugarman, J. 83, 90, 434, 442
Slavin, R. 139, 144, 244, 250 Sugiharto, S. 3, 224–36
Smit, U. 359, 366, 369 Sullivan, A. L. 148, 152, 157
Smith, A. M. 347, 350 Sullivan, M. 165, 169
Smith, C. P. 199, 207 Sumardi, M. 225, 235, 236
Smith, L. 163, 164, 170 Sun, J. 283, 287
Smith, M. 423, 427 Sun, V. 288
Smith, V. J. 410, 413 Suryaningrat, S. 233
Smitherman, G. 189, 194, 448, 449, 455, 457 Svetics, I. 9, 20
Sneddon, J. 232, 236 Swain, M. 80, 90, 119, 120, 122, 123, 125, 126, 129,
Snodgrass, J. G. 182 130, 131, 313, 324, 329, 332, 333, 338, 340, 349,
Snow, M. A. 123, 125, 128, 130 355, 356, 366, 367, 369
Snyder, T. D. 212, 222 Swales, J. M. 394
Soares, M. 93, 101, 103 Sweetland, J. 446–55, 457, 458
Solano-Flores, G. 155 Sweller, J. 311
Song, S. 271, 275, 280, 282, 286 Swierzbin, B. 320, 324, 357, 369
Song, S. Y. 263–72 Swords, R. 451, 454, 458
Sorace, A. 12, 18 Sydorenko, T. 15, 17, 22
Souza, A. L. S. 99, 103 Sylvan, C. E. 136, 140
Spack, R. 229, 236 Szustak, A. 338
Spada, N. 46, 48, 266, 269, 274, 314, 315, 324
Spanoudis, G. 347, 351 Tabachnick, B. R. 291, 300, 321, 324
Spindler, G. 25, 36 Tabouret-Keller, A. 138, 143
Spinks, J. A. 281, 287 Tadmor, U. 231
Spinner, P. 13, 22 Takeuchi, S. 284
Spolsky, B. 1, 2, 5, 26, 36, 38, 39, 49, 166, 170, Takeuchi, T. 288
358, 369 Tan, A. G. 212, 222
Spradley, J. 29, 36 Tang, Y. 243, 249

475
Name Index

Tan, L. H. 281, 287 Trueba, H. T. 25, 37

Tan, M. 271, 275, 292, 300 Tsagari, D. 339–48, 351
Tao, H. 371, 381 Tsai, C. 277, 287
Tarone, E. 11, 22, 313, 314, 320, 324, 357, 369, Tsui, A. B. M. 61, 289, 290, 294, 300
386, 394 Tuck, E. 16, 170
Tatto, M. T. 275 Tucker, B. V. 165, 170
Tauli, V. 39, 49 Tucker, G. R. 448, 458
Tavakoli, P. 387, 394 Tucker, R. (also R. G.) 120, 130, 217, 221, 368
Tavares, A. C. R. 99, 104 Tuffin, K. 403, 404, 410, 411
Taylor, D. M. 380 Turnbull, M. 328, 329, 330, 332, 333, 335, 337, 338
Taylor, H. 451, 453, 458 Turner, C. E. 341, 351
Taylor, J. 303, 312 Turner, M. 401, 409, 413
Taylor, L. 347, 351 Tyne, H. 301–10, 312
Taylor, M. 207 Tyson, A. 10, 21
Taylor, O. L. 448, 454, 458
Taylor-Ritzler, T. 200, 208 Uchida, Y. 290, 291, 293, 294, 298
Teasdale, A. 344, 350 Uggen, M. 13, 20
Tedick, D. (also D. J.) 121, 124, 125, 130, 198, 290, Uhrig, K. 108, 115
292, 294, 295, 298 Ullman, M. 13, 14, 18, 21
Tefera, A. 145–55, 157 Umaña-Taylor, A. J. 200, 206
Terrazas, A. 237, 250 Unamuno, V. 332, 338
Terry, N. 452, 458 Ungerleider, C. 432, 440
Terzi, S. B. 95, 96, 104 Uriarte, M. 155
Tharp, R. 27, 37 Urmston, A. 266, 275
Thijs, A. 272, 275 Üstünel, E. 329, 332, 338
Thomas, J. 309
Thomas, M. 22 Valdés, G. 67, 74, 78, 210, 212, 215, 217–19, 222,
Thomas, W. (also W. P.) 42, 49, 83, 87, 91, 144, 223, 370, 371, 381, 433, 445
243–4, 250, 435, 445 Valdés-Fallis, G. 67, 78
Thompson, G. 304, 312 Valdés Kroff, J. 13, 19
Thompson. P. 305, 311 Valdez Pierce, L. 348
Thompson, T. 432, 440 Valdman, A. 11, 22
Thoms, J. 332, 338 Valencia, R. 68, 78
Thorndike, E. 312 Valenzuela, A. 73, 78, 80, 91, 238, 250
Thurstun, J. 308, 312 Van Assche, E. 13, 19, 22
Thwaite, A. 265, 273 Van den Berg, E. 272, 275
Tian, L. 329, 330, 332, 333, 337, 338 van der Meij, H. 329, 338
Tidwell, D. L. 208 Van der Rijt, J. 346, 351
Tilaar, H. A. R. 229, 233 Van Deusen-Scholl, N. 213, 223
Timperley, H. 341, 350 Van de Watering, G. 346, 351
Timutimu, N. 163, 170 Van Els, T. 414, 427
Todd, D. M. 200, 208 Van Leeuwen, T. 172, 178, 183
Tollefson, J. W. 40, 42, 43, 46, 49 Van Lier, L. 2, 5, 125, 130, 246, 250, 329, 338, 356,
Tomlinson-Clarke, S. 200–2, 208 359, 363, 366, 369
Toohey, K. 29, 37, 240, 250 Vanneman, A. 197, 207
Torres, R. D. 258, 259 VanPatten, B. 217, 223
Torres-Guzmán, M. E. 28, 34, 428–40, 442, Varela, F. 132, 143
443, 445 Varenne, H. 154
Torres-Trueba, H. 433, 445 Varghese, M. 294, 295, 300
Trejo, S. 238, 248 Vásquez, C. 317, 320, 321, 324
Trent, S. C. 150, 155 Vásquez, O. A. 242, 249, 251
Tribble, C. 308, 312 Vaughn, S. 153, 156
Trickett, E. J. 200, 208 Veel, R. 357, 361, 369
Trillo, J. R. 406, 410, 411 Vélez-Rendón, G. 290, 292, 294, 295, 296, 300
Trofimovich, P. 11, 21 Velez, V. N. A. 441
Troseth, E. 245, 248 Veracini, L. 160, 170
Troudi, S. 347, 349 Vera, M. 168

476
 Name Index

Vergara, M. 18, 20 Weise, A.-M. 30, 36

Vandergriff, I. 413 Weis, L. 193, 194
Verity, D. 296, 300 Wells, G. 358, 360, 367, 369
Verspoos, M. 392 Weltens, B. 414, 427
Vigil, J. 435, 441 Welvaert, M. 13, 22
Villa, D. 215, 218, 223 Wenden, A. L. 346, 351
Villar, G. 399, 401, 409, 411 Wenger, E. 289, 291, 299, 300, 436, 443
Villegas, A. M. 198, 208 Wengraf, T. 50, 59
Vinogradov, P. 245, 251 Wen, X. 286
Vitanova, G. 53, 61 Wertheim, M. 162, 170
Vogt, K. 345, 351 Wertsch, J. 55, 61, 300
Vogt, L. A. 27, 37 Wertsch, J. V. 356, 358, 369
Vogt, M. E. 435, 441 Westhoff, G. 359, 367
Vryan, K. D. 289, 300 Westwood, P. 269, 275
Vygotsky, L. S. 99, 104, 330, 338 Wette, R. 58, 59
Whaley, L. 415, 423, 426
Wade-Woolley, L. 284, 287 Wheeler, R. 446–54, 458
Waitoller, F. 147, 155 White, E. J. 18, 22
Walberg, H. J. 200, 208 White, G. 266, 274, 314, 324
Waldinger, R. 239, 250 Whitehead, J. 209, 458
Waldrip, B. G. 346, 349 Whiteman, M. F. 447, 458
Waletzky, J. 51, 54, 60 Whittaker, R. 354, 361, 363, 364, 366, 368, 369
Walker, C. L. 124, 125, 130, 198 Widdowson, H. G. 106, 116
Walker, G. L. R. 276, 278, 281, 288 Wiese, A. M. 432, 445
Wallat, C. 25, 34 Wiggins, G. 202, 209
Wall, D. 340, 346, 348, 351 Wildcat, D. R. 167, 169
Walsh, S. 109, 116 Wildsmith-Cromarty, R. 428, 439, 445
Walters, F. S. 346, 351 Wileman, R. E. 173, 184
Wang, D. 332, 333, 338 Wiley, T. (also T. G.) 42, 49, 210, 213, 218, 219,
Wang, F. 289–98 223, 374, 381, 435, 445
Wang, J. 284, 286, 287 Wiliam, D. 349
Wang, L. 287, 311 Wilkinson, C. Y. 155
Wang, M. 283, 286 Willett, J. 242, 251
Wang, M. C. 200, 208 Williams, C. 75, 78, 140, 144
Wang, R. 280, 287 Williams, F. 448, 458
Wang, S. C. 215, 221, 370, 373, 377, 381 Williams, J. 346, 352
Wang, T. 255, 259 Willis, J. 306, 312
Wang, W. S.-Y. 279, 287 Wilson, F. 13, 22, 190
Wang, X. 341, 349 Wilson, W. H. 159–60, 163, 164, 168–70
Wang, Y. 282, 286 Wilson, W. J. 194
Wang, Z. 394 Winke, P. 12, 15, 17, 20, 22
Wannagat, U. 356, 369 Winters-Evans, V. 191, 194
Warhol, L. 30, 36 Witt, D. 244, 248
Warriner, D. S. 31, 37, 241, 251 Wode, H. 277, 288
Warwick, P. 257, 259 Wolcott, H. F. 23, 29, 37
Washington, J. A. 452, 455, 456 Wolfe, P. 160, 170
Waterhouse, M. 256, 257, 260 Wolff, D. 354, 369
Waters, M. C. 249 Wolfram, W. 447, 448, 449, 454, 455, 458
Watkins-Goffman, L. 245, 251 Wolfson, N. 1
Watson-Gegeo, K. A. 449, 458 Wong-Fillmore, L. 370, 373, 381, 384, 394
Watson, K. 206, 209 Wong, K. F. 215, 217, 223
Watson Todd, R. 107, 111, 116 Wong, L. H. 283, 287
Weber, Max 252 Wong, O. C. 285
Webster, J. P. 405, 410 Wong, S. C. 436, 443
Weidenmann, B. 173–5, 181, 184 Woodley, H. H. 3, 69, 77, 132–43, 211
Weinrich, U. 429, 445 Wood, R. 417, 427
Weir, C. 13, 18 Woods, D. 265, 273, 275

477
Name Index

Woolard, K. A. 241, 250, 251 Yin, M. 352

Wortham, S. (also S.E.F.) 31, 33, 37, 54, 56, 57, 59, Yitzhaki, D. 43, 49
61, 145, 240, 241, 247, 251, 299 Yoon, H. 305, 307, 312
Worthman, C. 257, 260 Yoshimoto, B. 283, 287
Wright, B. 417 Yoshioka, J. G. 82, 91
Wright, S. C. 380 Young, R. 11, 14, 20, 22, 254, 260
Wright, W. E. 42, 49, 211, 218, 223 Young, T. J. 109, 116
Wu, S. 283, 286 Yu, B. 329, 337
Wu, Y. 283, 288 Yuan, F. 284, 288, 387, 393, 394
Wyman, L. T. 28, 31, 32, 34, 37 Yule, G. 11, 22
Yun, X. 283, 288
Xiao, X. 279, 288
Xiao, Y. 215, 217, 223, 276, 285, 370–80, 382 Zainuddin, H. 255–6, 260
Xiaoyue, B. 394 Zakharia, Z. 141, 143
Xie, Q. 346, 352 Zeichner, K. 209, 291, 300, 321, 324
Xu, F. 292, 299 Zembylas, M. 295, 296, 300
Xu, H. 374, 382 Zentella, A. C. 240, 242, 251, 436, 445
Xu, L. 277, 287 Zepeda, M. 150, 156
Xu, P. 280, 281, 288 Zepeda, O. 30, 36, 415, 426
Xu, T. 279, 288 Zhang, H. 280, 288
Xu, Y. 291, 294, 295, 298, 299 Zhang, J. 277, 279, 282, 288
Zhang, P. 279, 288
Yamauchi, L. A. 164, 169 Zhang, T. 288
Yang, A. 346, 352 Zhang, Y. 380
Yang, C. 380 Zhao, G. 282, 284, 286, 288
Yanow, D. 42, 49 Zhao, X. 329, 338
Yates, S. 410, 413 Zhao, Y. 284, 286
Yavuz, F. 332, 338 Zhong, Y. 279, 287
Yearwood, R. R. 197, 206, 209 Zhou, J. 279, 288
Ye, F. 281, 286 Zhou, M. 237, 238, 239, 250, 251, 379
Yeh, S.-L. 288 Zhu, S. 277, 287
Yandell, B. 11, 22 Zhu, Y. 283, 288
Yi, L. 291, 295, 300, 409 Zimiles, H. 176, 183
Yim-mei Chan, E. 207 Zuengler, J. 385, 394
Yin, B. 281, 285 Zúñiga, V. 237, 248
Yin, J.-H. 276, 284, 288, 345 Zwiers, J. 357, 369

478
 Index

Page numbers in italic format indicate figures and tables.

academic discourse 229, 242, 364 British National Corpus 307

Academic English Mastery Program 449 Brown v. Topeka, Kansas Board of Education 25, 148
academic language: CLIL and 357–8; literacy and
244–5 character/word acquisition 282
action research projects 318–19 Children In and Out of School (Gilmore and
African American Language (AAL) 189, 193 Glatthorn) 25
African American Vernacular English (AAVE) 185, Children of Immigrants in Schools (CIS) study 245
187–9, 191, 447, 450, 451 Chinese characters: by handwriting 280–2; learning
American Council on the Teaching of Foreign to read and write 277–9; types of 277
Languages 212, 371, 375 Chinese community education 376–7
American Indian education 415–17 Chinese grammar system 279–80
anti-immigration discourse 68–9, 71 Chinese L2 education: Chinese writing system and
apprenticeship of observation 265, 266 276–82; conclusion about 285; future directions
Aspira v. New York City Public Schools (1974) 431 for 283–4; introduction to 276; problems in 282–3
assessment literacy 345–7 Chinese language education 375, 376
CHL learners 371–2
basic interpersonal communication skills (BICS) chronosystem 201, 204
137, 243, 357, 364, 432 Civil Rights: language in the era of 66–7; language
beliefs, assumptions, and knowledge (BAK) 265, 314 revitalization since 420
bilingual education: as advocacy for language classroom-based assessment 341, 345
diversity 73–5; case study of 27–8; core issues classroom discourse 253, 257, 355, 361
136–8; description of 132; ethnographic classroom language: in CLIL 355–8; core
analysis of 31; history of 133–6; implications issues 359–62; current debates about 364–5;
for education and 141–2; language educational linguistics and 358–9, 365–6;
handicap and 81; language shift and 421–2; introduction to 353; research approaches 362–3
marginalized students and 83; multilingual classroom observations 111, 343, 344, 345
education and 41–2; nature of language and classroom practices: beliefs about 268–9; SLA
67–8; new debates about 139–41; one-way research and 313, 318, 320, 322
and two-way 135; other types of 135; poly- code-switching: CLIL and 362; defined 67–8;
directional 136; research approaches 138–9; patterns of 97; primary language use and
support for 25–6 328–33; studies related to 240; teacher and
Bilingual Education Act (BEA) 25, 67, 421 learner 331; see also bilingualism
bilingualism: circumstantial 69, 71; conceptualizing cognitive academic language proficiency (CALP)
429–30, 432–3, 435–8; dualities in 140–1; 137, 243, 357, 432
dynamic 246; elective and transitional 74; elite cognitive processing 330, 359, 360
and folk 82, 83; language separation and 433–5; collective remembering 55
societal 120; subtractive and additive 74, 134 Common Core State Standards 450
bilingual students 67, 70, 81–2 Common European Framework of Reference for
Black students 186, 187, 193, 447 Languages: Learning, teaching, assessment 390
Brazil: language theorists in 101; literacy and language communicative competence 340, 355, 356
issues in 94–7; school curriculum issues 98–9 community language schools 378, 379

479
Index

computer assisted language learning (CALL) 283 digraphia 281, 283

computer-mediated communication (CMC) 403, 404 discourse analysis 397–403, 406–8, 449, 453
Conference on College Composition and disruptive experience 202, 205, 206
Communication (CCCC) 186 diversity, conceptualizing 430, 436
content and language integrated learning (CLIL): dominant language 67, 73, 80, 82–3, 86–7, 374
classroom language in 355–8; core issues 359–62; dual immersion programs 74, 121, 422, 424, 425
current debates about 364–5; educational dual language education (DLE) 434, 435
linguistics and 358–9, 365–6; evolution of 353–5; dynamic bilingualism 135, 141, 246
immersion programs and 127; introduction to
353; purpose of 353; research approaches 362–3 ecological theory: curriculum map and 202–6;
content-based language teaching (CBLT) 271 elements of 200–1; humanizing pedagogy and
context, teacher identity and 291, 295 201–2
contextualized language 243 Economic Opportunities Act of 1964 429
contrastive analysis approach 447, 451 education: classroom language and 365–6; corpora
corpora 302–9, 389 and 307–9; critical pedagogy and 258; English
corpus planning 38, 39 education in Indonesia and 234–5; ethnography
corrective feedback 317, 318, 320 and 33–4; heritage languages 219–20, 370–9;
Covarrubias v. San Diego Unified School District 147 immigrants and 245–6; Indigenous languages
critical analysis 93, 110, 388 and 166–8; language assessment and 347–8;
Critical Language-Policy (CLP) 40 language in society and 136–7; language shift
critical learning 282, 284 and 420–2, 424–5; language variation and
critical pedagogy 254–6, 257–8, 283–4 454; learner language and 391–2; learning
critical thinking 257, 258 disabilities and 154; linguistic marginalization
cultural ecological theory 238 and 89; literacy and language and 100; LPP and
cultural educational landscape, evolution of 146 44–6, 418–19; narrative approaches and 58–9;
cultural identity 216–17, 293, 420, 433 NNEST and 112–13; primary language use and
cultural implications, CLIL and 364 333–5; second language and 168, 323; teacher
Culturally Responsive Education: A Discussion of Lau beliefs and 272; teacher identity and 296–7; see
Remedies II (Cazden and Leggett) 25 also bilingual education
cultural mismatch research 449 educational inequity 79, 201, 343, 448, 454
culture: discourse and 436; language and 433 educational outcomes 84, 89, 138, 148, 454
Culture and the Bilingual Classroom (Trueba, Guthrie, educational policies: exosystem and 201, 204;
and Au) 25 heritage languages and 211, 218, 373; learning
curriculum: critical pedagogy integration in 255; disabilities and 147
immersion and non-immersion 122; literacy and ’effect sizes 11, 16, 17
language concept in 94–9; need for balanced Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA)
282–3; vernacular language and 98–9 25, 429
curriculum mapping 198, 202–6 emergent bilinguals: with disabilities 152;
disproportionality of 147–9; instructional
data analysis 9–10, 403 interventions for 151–2; research approaches on
data collection: in dominant language 87; language 149–52
teachers 316; language used in 400; language emergent outcomes 205, 206
variation 452; learner language 388–90; “emic” perspective 24, 55, 344
narrative 54–5; ownership issues 402–4; primary English as a foreign language 253, 267, 290
language use 332–3; for teacher beliefs 269–70; English as an additional language (EAL) 87, 344, 354
teacher identity 294 English education in Indonesia: 224–36
“data driven learning” learning (DDL) 302, 303, 307 English language: cultural awareness and 254–5; as
decontextualized language 243, 244 imposed foreign language 253
deficit thinking 68–9 English language learners (ELLs) 202, 205, 206,
developmental bilingual education 135, 138, 139 343, 435
development phases of learning 384 error analysis 383–4, 386
dialect awareness approach 449 Ester Martinez Act 160
dialect interference studies 447–8 Esther Martinez Native American Languages
dialect variation see language variation Preservation Act of 2006 421
Diana v. State Board of Education 147 ethical and methodological issues: data ownership
digital learning 283 issues and 402–4; discourse analysis and 399–402;
digital literacies 100 introduction to 397–8; macro-microethics
diglossia 67, 74 continuum and 398, 407–8; participants’

480
 Index

vulnerability and 406–7; researchers and Iconology technique 178–9

researched populations and 404–5 identities, language and 437
Ethiopia, multilingual system in 85 identity formation: emotions’ role in 295–6;
ethnographic analysis 30, 31 language practices and 137–8
ethnographic interviews 29–30 identity shaping practice 291–2
ethnographic techniques 452, 453 images: effects of 177; use of 174
ethnography 23–43; of literacy 242 immersion education: defined 120; effects of 127;
Ethnography and Language in Educational Settings features and aims 120–2; history of 119–20;
(Green and Wallat) 25 implementation of 129; implications for
event-related potentials (ERP) 12, 13 education and 128–9; Indigenous languages and
exosystem 201, 204 167; introduction to 119; models of 163; new
exploratory practice 319, 320, 322 debates about 126–7; one-way and two-way
eye-tracking, benefit of 12–13, 17 121; research approaches 122–6, 163–4; students
with special needs in 123; see also bilingual
family literacy programs 93, 96, 101, 255 education
first languages, new debates about 139–40 Immersion Teacher Handbook, The (Snow) 125
Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of immigrants: Chinese 375; desire and dilemma of
Poverty (Lewis) 429 378; heritage language students as 213, 214;
focus on form and meaning 356–7 language abilities of 66
foreign language: English language as imposed immigrants and education 243–5
253; immersion program 121, 167; learning and Immigration Act of 1968 431
teaching 129, 173, 179, 180, 181, 316; primary inclusive education movement 152
language use and 327–35 Index of Irian Jaya Languages: A Special Bulletin of
formative assessments 341, 348 Irian Jaya (Silzer and Clouse) 230
functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) India, bilingual education in 84
12, 13, 14 Indian Rights Association 415
Functions of Language in Classroom (Cazden, John, Indigenous languages: core issues 161–2; decline in
and Hymes) 25 use of 231; history of 158–61
Funds of Knowledge for Teaching project 27 Indigenous peoples 31, 132, 159, 161, 167, 370
Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA)
German Foreign Language Teaching Methodology 147, 148
174 initiation-response feedback (IRF) 359–60
globalization: bilingual education and 134; inner-city children 185, 186
Indonesia educational system and 233; input hypothesis 124, 356
non-English HL proficiency and 378 in-service teachers: beliefs of 267–8; certificate
grammar teaching, beliefs about 268–9 program for 128; training for 308
Guadalupe Organization Inc. v. Tempe School District Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) 397, 404, 406
No. 3 147 interdependence hypothesis 432
International Corpus of Learner English (Granger) 389
handwriting of Chinese characters 280–2 international language classrooms, critical
heritage language education: Chinese case 374–7; pedagogy in 254–5
description of 210; implications for education International Reading Association 448
and 219–20, 378–9; No Child Left Behind Act Internet as a surrogate corpus 306–7
and 373–4; pedagogical needs and 215–16; see interpretative analyses 388
also bilingual education Invisible Culture, The (Philips) 25
heritage languages: defined 210, 218, 371; HL
initiative and 370–1; importance of 370; job discrimination 108, 112
language diversity and 74; language policy
and 40; reading materials in immigrant K–12 schools 428, 449
families 374; speakers classification of 371; Keyes v. Denver Public School No. 1 (1973) 431
students 213–16; youth language practices
and 32 L2 teaching see second language acquisition (SLA)
home literacy environment 99, 374 language: of Black America 189; communicative
humanizing pedagogy: conclusion about 206; competence 340; conceptualizing 433; discourse
curriculum map and 202–6; ecological theory and 436; identities and 437; negative attitudes
and 201–2; elements of 199–200; introduction toward 448; rights to culture and 430–2; shift
to 197–8 and attrition 372–3; in society and education
human rights 68, 73, 425 136–7; verbal and visual 176

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Index

language advocacy: around human rights 68; as a introduction to 446–7; new debates about
critical issue 70–5; dimensions of 70–1; history 453–4; research approaches 452–3
of 65–70; introduction to 65; in the new era Lau v. Nichols 25, 147, 431
69–70; orientation in 71–5; teacher education learner language: core issues 386–8; history of
and 75–6 383–6; implications for education and 391–2;
language and literacy policy 28, 39–46 language development process and 386–7; new
language assessment: core issues 341–3; history of debates about 389–91; research approaches
340–1; implications for education and 347–8; 388–9; variation in 384–5
introduction to 339; new debates about 345–7; learners: academic language proficiency and 357–8;
purpose of 339; research approaches 343–4 corpus use and 304–5, 307; discourse analysis
language attitude surveys 453 with 397–403, 407; ethical considerations
language awareness experiences 451 and 408; involvement in assessment 346;
language deficit 66, 106 multilingualism and 439; participants’
language discrimination 98, 101, 211 vulnerability and 406; with special needs 346–7;
language diversity: heritage languages and 74; see also students
language socialization and 26–7; marginalized learning disabilities (LD): disproportionality
students and 84; monolingual views about 69; issue and 147–9; educational policies and 147;
weak and strong orientation and 73–5 evolving educational landscape and 146; visual
language education: description of 132–3; material and 176–7
ethnographers’ role in 33–4; language policies learning outcomes: corpus use and 304; primary
and 41 language use and 331, 332; teacher identity and 296
language endangerment 31, 32, 33 learning phraseology 390
Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black lexical priming theory 303, 390
English Vernacular (Labov) 185, 454 life history narratives 55
language learning and teaching: classroom Life in Classrooms (Jackson) 264
interaction for 359–60; CLIL and 357; content Likert-scale survey 269
learning and 360–1; corpora and 301–9; linguistic anthropology, immigrants and education
ethnography of 42–3; identity research in and 240–2
53–4; language policy’s role in 39; relationship “linguistic genocide” process 415, 417
between SLA and 315; teacher beliefs about linguistic imperialism 44–5, 224, 226–9, 231, 234
263–4; use of imagery for 176; see also learner literacy: academic language and 244–5; assessment
language 345–7; digital 100; ethnography of 242;
language learning outcomes see learning outcomes linguistic demands of 361–2; programs 93, 94,
Language Loyalty: Its Functions and Concomitants in 96, 101, 255, 256
Two Bilingual Communities (Fishman) 430 literacy and language: core issues 94–9; history
language planning and policy (LPP): core issues of 92–3; implications for education and
40–2; education practitioners and 33; history 100; introduction to 92; new debates about
of 38–40; ideology and theory and 166; 99–100; parental involvement and 101; research
implications for education and 44–6, 418–19; approaches 99
language shift and 415; new debates about literacy instruction 271, 283–4, 449
43–4; reactionary or liberatory 253; research literate culture, resistance to 95–7
approaches 42–3; unitary 69–70 local languages, preservation of 230–2
language revitalization: documentation theory and LOCIT process 363
165–6; growth in 160; research approaches 164; Logic of Non-Standard English, The (Labov) 67
schools’ role in 32
language shift: core issues 415–20; defined 414; macroethics 398
history of 414–15; implications for education maintenance bilingual education 133, 141, 415
and 424–5; new debates about 423–4; research marginalized students: bilingual education and 83;
approaches 423; reversing 420–2; without laws debates about 88; language diversity and 84
419–20 matched guise technique 448, 453
language socialization: immigrants and education maximal position 329–30
and 242–3; linguistic diversity and 26–7 mental corpus theory 303
language teachers: beliefs of 263–72; identity issues mesosystem 200–1, 203
289–97; language assessment and 347; second meta analyses 16–17, 139
language acquisition and 313–23 Mexican immigrants, studies related to 238–9
Language Triptych 360, 363 microethics 398
language variation: core issues 450–2; history of microsystem 200, 203
447–9; implications for education and 454; Migrant Education Program 245

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 Index

Milliken v, Bradley in Detroit (1974) 431 orality and writing 94

minority groups and students: language advocacy output hypothesis 124, 356
and 68; language and diversity and 70; language
shift and 415, 423; narrative style 52 participant observation 27, 29, 30, 55, 344
minority languages: language policy and 41–2; participants’ vulnerability 406–7
marginalization of 40, 43; promotion of 45 pedagogical corpora 307–8
“mirroring” technique 334 personal biographies 291
Monographs on Research Methodology 11 pictures: research on 176–7; role of 174
monolingual education 80, 81, 84, 86, 128 pinyin system 276, 278, 281, 283
monolingual habitus 82, 87 PISA survey 176
Morgan v. Hennigan in Boston, MA (1974) 431 plurilingualism 140, 438
mother tongue education 85, 211, 212 positioning theory 51
multilingual education: language policy and 41–2; power relationships 27, 254, 258, 403, 405
linguistic marginalization and 89; monolingual practice shaping identity 291–2
habitus and 82; multiple 136 pragmatic success 385–6
multilingualism: conceptualizing 428–30, 432–3, pre-service teachers: beliefs of 265–7; learning
435–8; functional 126; language and culture experiences for 198, 201, 202, 205, 206; SLA
and 430–2; language and identities and 437; and 315; training for 308–9
language policies and 45; sink or swim era 429 prestigious bilingual education 133, 134
primary language use: core issues 328–9; history of
narrative approaches: core issues 52–4; history of 327–8; implications for education and 333–5;
50–1; implications for education and 58–9; introduction to 327; new debates about 329–32;
introduction to 50; new debates about 56–8; research approaches 332–3
research approaches 54–6 pronouns, use of 406–7
National Assessment of Educational Progress psycholinguistically oriented research 216
(NAEP) 197
National Council of Associations of Chinese qualitative research 14–15, 87, 397, 398
Language Schools (NCACLS) 376, 377 quality education 82, 191, 229, 230
National Council of Teachers of English 448 quantitative research 14, 86, 87, 110, 138
national education 224, 229–30, 233
national language policies: English hegemonic racism 187, 188, 190, 191, 193
force and 225, 226, 234; language education and reading and writing 95, 96, 186, 277–9
41; multilingualism and 45; see also language reading failure 187, 190, 447
planning and policy (LPP) reading materials 282, 374, 451
National Security Language Initiative recruiting process 108
(NSLI) 376 recursive dynamic bilingualism 135
Native American Languages Act 421 reflective writing 270, 316, 321
native languages 139–40, 231, 433 reliability, language assessment and 341, 342
native speakerism 107 replication and reporting 16
native speaker/non-native speaker (NS/NNS) researched populations 404–5
status 292–3 researcher reflexivity 56, 58, 405
native teachers (NESTs) 106, 107 Research Ethics Boards (REBs) 397
Naturalization Act of 1906 418 Response to Intervention (RTI) 152–3
nature of language, questions about 67–8 Rintisan Sekolah Berstandar International (RSBI)
New Language Policy Studies 33 224, 229, 230
New Literacy Studies 99, 100, 192, 244
No Child Left Behind Act 67, 141, 147, 163, 342, “sandwich technique” 334
373–4 Scaffolded Teacher Speech Model 334
non-dominant language 73, 80, 82, 132 school curriculum see curriculum
non-native English teachers (NNESTs): attitudes schools: family language dynamics in 419–20;
of 109; implications for education and 112–13; language and diversity in 32, 70; language shift
invisibility of 105; new debates about 111–12; issues in 415, 424; linguistic imperialism in
self-esteem issues 112 228–9; structure vs. agency in 43–4
normative research 388 script simplification 279
NS/NNS dichotomy 292–3 second language acquisition (SLA): growth in
211, 213; history of 9–11, 313–14; immersion
Official Bilingualism 41 education and 123, 124; implications for
one nation-one language ideology 79–80, 430 education and 323; ongoing issues 14–17;

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Index

recommendations for practice 17–18; teachers’ teachers: cognition research 264; language policy
beliefs and 266 action research and 45–6; language policy power
segmented-assimilation theory 238–9 and 41; visual material use by 176–8; see also
self-study methodology 321 humanizing pedagogy
settler-Indigenous dialectical structure 160 Teachers of English to Speakers of Other
“Sisyphean Challenge” 197, 206 Languages (TESOL) 290, 314
small stories 55, 56, 57 teaching material 128
social capital theory 436 TESL program 265, 266
sociocultural theory 330, 436 test use, language assessment and 342–3
sociolinguistic approaches 216–17, 451 threshold hypothesis 125, 432
sociolinguistics, immigrants and education and top-down language policies 30, 33, 43, 397
239–40 traditional language education see language
South Africa, bilingual education in 85 education
special education: developments in 152–4; training: pre-service and in-service 266, 308;
emergent bilinguals and 148–9 teacher 266, 267, 347, 378, 391, 392; visual
speech events 97, 240 literacy 173–8, 180–1
Standard English 447, 449, 451 transitional bilingual education 133, 134
STARTALK program 376 translanguaging 32, 75, 140–1, 437, 438
statistical power, effect sizes and 17 translators, use of 400–3
student learning: chronosystem and 204; exosystem Triptych links 360
and 204; language assessment and 342; two-writing system 281
mesosystem and 203; microsystem and 203
students: grammar teaching and 268–9; unitary language 69–72
heritage language 213–16; language United States: evolving educational landscape in
variation issues 446–54; literate culture 146; heritage language education in 218–19,
and 95–7; native and non-native teachers 370–9; Indigenous revitalization in 159–61, 163;
and 107–8; with special needs 123; visual multilingual 417
literacy training for 177; see also learning University of Denver’s Teacher Education Program
disabilities (LD) (TEP) 201
students of color 197–8, 201, 206
Students’ Right To Their Own Language validity, language assessment and 341–2
(SRTOL) 186 vehicular language 354, 362
subject genres 361–2 verbal reporting 12, 15
submersion experience 202, 205, 206 vernacular language 98–9, 185, 188
vernacular speakers 448, 453
task-based learning 284, 354 virtual position 328, 329, 330, 333
teacher beliefs: about classroom practices 268–9; about visual literacy: core aspects of 172–3; defined
grammar teaching 268–9; assumptions about 264; 171–2; development of 177; educational
future directions about 270–2; history of 264–5; linguistics and 173–9; impact of 180, 181
implications for education and 272; introduction visual skills 278, 279
to 263; nature of 263–4, 272; primary language use visual-world paradigm 13
and 332; in-service and pre-service 266, 267 Vocabulary Guideline for the Chinese Proficiency Test,
teacher education and teaching: corpora and The (Liu and Song) 282
301–9; implications for 272; language advocacy vulnerability, participants’ 406–7
and 75–6; narratives’ role in 58–9
Teacher Education Research Initiative (TERI) 297 washback studies 340–1
teacher identity: core issues 290–3; cultural Ways With Words (Heath) 25, 26, 449
dimension of 293; history of 289–90;
implications for education and 296–7; youth, academic language and literacy among
introduction to 289; new debates about 295–6; 244–5
research approaches 53, 293–5 youth language practices 31, 32, 193

484