Tolerable Spaces to Negotiate Academic Language: English Language Learners Preparing for and Imagining College

• In Event: 28.089 - MTCC Roundtable Session 10
  In Roundtable Session: 28.089-5 - Space, Identity, and Language: Contexts of Teaching Multilingual Learners

Abstract

Using lenses of imagined communities and identities, this study looked at the academic language practices of middle school English learners in a college preparation program as a community of practice. The program used the imagined community of college as a mechanism to drive practices of language and identity today. Findings discuss the teaching and learning of academic English in a tolerable space, defined as a simultaneous moment, activity, and context of productive linguistic discomfort in the practice of academic English, while using the knowledge that such language practice is binding and done in a mediated and buffered space with other practitioners on the same trajectory.

Author

• Reynaldo Reyes III, The University of Texas - El Paso