Beyond the Lesson: Making Sense of Instructors' Talk in Community College Writing Classes

• In Event: What's in a Name? Notions of L2 Instruction Across Languages

Abstract

While the enrollment of students born outside the US continues to increase in community colleges, research on serving the needs of linguistic minority (LM) learners in higher education is decidedly scarce (Bunch & Endris, 2012; Flores & Drake, 2014; Harklau, 1999; Kanno & Harklau, 2012; Kanno & Varghese, 2010). Responding to community college students’ wide range of language and literacy skills warrants urgent consideration, particularly in light of graduation requirements, and the potential for students’ subsequent enrollment in bachelor’s degree-granting schools (Bunch, 2019). Yet within mainstream community college classrooms, it is unclear how faculty perceive differences in their students’ language and literacy skills, much less how they go about addressing the complexities of bi/multilingualism in LM learners’ written work. Bearing in mind the impact of monoglossic language ideologies (Nelson & Flores, 2015) on students’ experiences with schooling, this study considers instructors’ ideological perceptions toward language usage, as demonstrated through classroom talk.

English instructors (n=4) were recruited at a large, urban community college in the northeastern US. Student participants included both LM learners and native English learners enrolled in basic writing coursework. Utilizing a combination of ethnographic (Spradley, 1980) and discourse analysis (Fairclough, 2015) methodologies, this study’s findings reveal inconsistencies in the ways that instructors responded to differences across their students’ language and literacy skills, which in turn impacted their methods of content delivery in the classroom.

Author

• Alexis McBride, Mount Saint Mary College