Race and Second Language Acquisition: Who in the World Cares?

• In Event: 68.023 - Do You Hear What I Hear? Raciolinguistic Ideologies Across Educational Contexts

Abstract

This presentation addresses the need to bring the link between race and second language acquisition (SLA) into sharper focus. Historically, this intersectional relationship has been obfuscated in SLA scholarship, mainly due to a predominant orientation toward cognitive aspects of language learning undergirded by raciolinguistic ideologies (Flores and Rosa, 2015). Through a cognitive lens, the object of analysis has been the individual and her internal mental apparatus, in some cases depicted as acting independent of any broader social context. Moreover, when social context is taken into account, ideological underpinnings with regard to race tend to be treated superficially or ignored altogether. Ignoring the ideological basis of language learning does not make the endeavor any less ideological, however. It simply obscures the raciolinguistic ideologies that are enacted daily through covert, systemic processes of standardization.

In the case of English as a second (and foreign) language, these systems of standardization are unquestionably global in their reach. Within them, race circulates implicitly through bias toward White middle-class monolingual speech (Taylor-Mendes, 2009). Particularly troubling in the field of English language teaching and research are the ways in which norms reinforcing White supremacy remain a benchmark for competence (Douglas Fir Group, 2016), and are thus made more difficult to dismantle due to their purported aims of leading students to an objective “true” form of correctness.

Given its importance, I locate the broader macro social context as a factor in international students’ rendering of discourses of race. I address the following question: How have students from different areas of the world - who may or may not have experienced their identities in terms of race - connect discourses of race to their own language learning? To answer this question, I discuss commentary on race shared by a group of international students enrolled in a class I taught at a university intensive English program in the US. I focus on the intersubjective processes through which students chose to invoke my Blackness (as their instructor) and the Blackness of members of the surrounding communities where they live and study. Of equal interest is the absence of race talk in terms of Whiteness or students' own identities. The accounts rely primarily on a narrative of African American (un)intelligibility, which repeatedly served a very particular raciolinguistic ideological function - invoking and constructing sociolinguistic hierarchies of race. To various degrees, students'awareness of these hierarchies enabled their use as a barometer for establishing one’s own desired (and developing) subject position as a speaker of English in America.

I argue that regardless of the solidity or existence of a learner’s own racialized identity, s/he is engaged with raciolinguistic ideologies either overtly or covertly; these ideologies have verifiable import into identity questions such as “What type of speaker do I want to become?” In light of this, I conclude with considerations of how we might continue shifting pedagogical and theoretical frameworks in SLA to recognize intelligibility and (listening) comprehension as intersubjective encounters (i.e. informed by the ability, bias and power of both speaker and hearer).

Author

• Catrice Barrett, University of Pennsylvania