The Raciolinguistic Underpinnings of Academic Language and the Marginalization of Latino Students

• In Event: Roundtable Session 37
  In Roundtable Session: Conceptualizing Latino Academic Language: Interdisciplinary Views on Equity, Constructs, and Assessment

Abstract

A common explanation for the academic challenges of Latino students is their failure to master academic language. However, the focus on academic language offers a linguistic solution to challenges that have their origins in complex structural inequalities embedded within white supremacist frameworks. This presentation seeks to critically examine the ways that academic language has been conceptualized in mainstream educational research and explore the ways that these dominant conceptualizations have contributed to the marginalization of Latino students by obscuring structural racial inequalities.

The presentation begins by offering a theoretical critique of current conceptualizations of academic language. Specifically, it examines the ways that academic language reproduces a language-as-entity paradigm (Park & Wee, 2012) that abstracts the complex language practices that exist in schools into a static language of schooling and develops rigid borders between “academic” and “non-academic” language. These rigid borders are embedded within raciolinguistic ideologies that overdetermine the home language practices of White students to be “academic” and Latino students to be “non-academic” in ways that are unrelated to empirical linguistic practices (Author 3, 2015). That is, White students are “heard” to be speaking in academic language simply because of their Whiteness while Latino students are “heard” to be speaking in non-academic language simply because of their Latinidad.

To illustrate the workings of these raciolinguistic ideologies, the presentation will examine several spontaneous language interactions observed as part of a longitudinal linguistic ethnography (Blackledge & Creese, 2010) of Latino students in a dual language charter school in a low-income and hypersegregated neighborhood of Philadelphia. It will explore the complex linguistic negotiations that occur during these spontaneous language interactions and the ways that these interactions do not conform to the rigid dichotomy of academic and non-academic language. It will argue that were these children to be White and engaged in these language practices, question related to their mastery of academic language would never be raised. It is their racialized position in US society that allows for their language practices to be positioned through this deficit framing.

The presentation ends by exploring implications of these findings. It argues that the solution is not to, as has traditionally been the case, argue that the home language practices of Latino students can be used as a stepping-stone to developing academic language (Cummins, 2000). It is impossible to create stepping-stones to language practices that you have been overdetermined to not be able to engage in. Instead, the solution is to develop a new conceptualization of language that is situated within a larger critique of racial inequalities that current conceptualizations of academic language normalize.

Author

• Nelson Flores, University of Pennsylvania