Examining Language Ideologies Through Teacher Repair Narratives

• In Event: Connecting the Dots: Language Ideologies, Educational (In)Equities, and Multilingual Realities in North America

Abstract

Objectives
NARATE (Narrative Analysis of Repair and Teacher English Learner Expertise) is a research project that examines corrective feedback and repair practices in classroom environments with multilingual learners. Drawing on sociocultural theories of learning, narrative analysis, and language ideologies (Author, 2012), this comparative study aims to critically examine how language ideologies mediate corrective practices of teachers by examining their personal and in-class narratives of being corrected and/or correcting learners.

Data Source & Methods
Our data corpus consists of two groups of teachers. The first is a cohort of teachers who participated in university based professional development program for more than 2 years with an explicit orientation towards sociocultural principles of language and learning as well as an explicit focus on developing critical language awareness and/or ideologies. They worked as a cohort and conducted action research in their own classrooms. The second group (control) did not have such a professional development experience. In a mixed method format, narratives were analyzed to synthesize how educators make in the moment decisions about corrective feedback and repairs. Current research shows varying trends and best practices about when is the appropriate and most applicable time to offer corrective feedback and repair. Subjects in the study included veteran general education teachers, future bilingual educators, and undergraduate pre-service teachers across a variety of urban and suburban schools.

Results & Scholarly Significance
Emergent findings demonstrate that control group educators have little to no awareness of how language ideologies mediate learning, classroom activities, and instruction; whereas teachers from the professional development program have a clearer understanding between language ideologies and their pedagogical practice. Furthermore, teachers relied on their past, personal educational experiences as how to mediate corrective feedback and repair within their classroom. In addition, they tended to focus on narrow and reductive conceptions of language, literacy, and learning. In contrast, teachers who participated in the university school partnership made clear connections to research and displayed more egalitarian and expansive language ideologies when it came to how to support multilingual learners in the classroom.

Authors

• Aria Razfar, University of Illinois at Chicago
  Presenting Author

• Rebecca Ziegler Rupnick, University of Illinois at Chicago
  Presenting Author