Race and Language Talk in the Preparation of Teachers of English Language

• In Event: 14.043 - Roundtable Session 1
  In Roundtable Session: 14.043-5 - Classroom Talk and Preparing Teachers for Work With Diverse Student Populations

Abstract

Purpose
Schools are social, cultural, and political spaces where race and language are defined and contested in everyday classroom talk (Delpit, 2006; Pollock, 2004, 2008; Norton 2010). This study explores the degree to which one TESOL course engages candidates to support acquisition and use of Standard Academic English in a way that is responsive and inclusive of the varieties of languages that students speak outside of the classroom as well as the students’ racial and cultural identities.
Perspectives
Racial discourse refers to racial ideologies, which are generalized system of beliefs that explain social relations and social practices in racialized language (E. Bonilla-Silva, 2001). Extensive literature explores race talk in teacher education (Pimentel 2010; Cahnmann, Rymes & Souto-Manning 2009) and race talk in the instruction of English Language Learners (Gebhard 2005; Alim 2010; Reyes 2010), while less has been studied about the intersection of race and language talk in the Preparation of Teachers of English Language. This study explores the way that one MA-TESOL program prepares English as a second or other language teachers to navigate racial differences and language variety in their local context in order to better serve diverse English language learning student populations.
Methods
This study was conducted across 5 terms, over two years, across 62 candidates and 3 different instructors, the data in this study include university classroom-talk, candidate-selected excerpts of talk in their own English language classroom, and candidates’ writing on culture and language in their classroom with an approach to understand talk at the system, social and individual levels. The methods employ Rymes’ (2010) framework for classroom discourse analysis that looks closely at communicative repertoires guides the analysis of TESOL MA students’ discourses around race and language difference in one course about language, culture and identity.
Results
One meaningful approach to guiding race and language talk in authentic educational settings is first having students analyze their own as well as their student’s language variety and use in order to push students past deficit assumptions of their students based on race and language. Findings reveal that 41 out of 62 students come into the program with the belief that supporting English language acquisition requires the students to know English better, especially grammar, but upon completion of the course studied results show that 53 of the students view knowledge of students’ language and racial identities as equally important to SLA .
Significance
Teacher race and language talk reflects broader racial and language discourses or ideologies that teachers used to both make sense of racial and linguistic inequity and from which to act in schools. Race and language talk has the power to shape socially mediated use of academic language within our candidates’ classrooms. Teacher and student talk about racial and linguistic identity is framed as a core practice to facilitate English language student’ s investment in language learning and the community of learners (McDonald et al., 2013).

Author

• Jenifer Crawford, University of Southern California