The Making of English Learners and Their Teachers: Othering Through Language Policy and Practice

• In Event: Interrogating Othering Processes and the Hidden Racialization of Minoritized Students Through Good Intentions

Abstract

As the number of English Learners (ELs) has risen in the U.S., so have the number of English as a Second Language (ESL) certified teachers (United States Department of Education [USED], 2017). They are trained according to a set of teacher preparation standards that outline who an ESL teacher is and, more specifically, what they are expected to know and do. Therefore, I employed a critical discourse document analysis (Gee, 2004; Babbie, 2020) of ESL Teacher Preparation standards from the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (WI DPI) (2021) to uncover the “situated meanings” embedded in the standards about who ESL teachers are in relation to their students and how the positioning of ESL teachers within the standards contributes to the cyclical creation and reification of ELs as Others in schools.

Drawing from Alim’s (2016) and Rosa and Flores’ (2017) work on raciolinguistics and Kibler and Valdes’ (2016) work on the construction of ESL teachers and ELs through curricularization of language, I analyzed the language in the standards that positioned ESL teachers as a “specialized” type of teacher for a “different” type of student. This included interrogating phrases such as “high degree of fluency” in light of how second language acquisition theory (Kramsch & Whiteside, 2007) and “Native speakerism” have informed policies and practices in ESL. Additional phrases like “effective instruction in English” point to improving Academic English as the target mode of communication denoted by particular skills and ways of using language that reflect a white, mainstream, middle-class orientation to literacy and language. Similarly, Pennycook and Makoni (2020) warn of the risks of linguistics reflecting a particular hierarchy of knowledge and epistemology, one with ties between colonial and language teaching and the Othering effects of seeking difference.

A discourse analysis of the ESL teacher standards revealed underlying assumptions about what it means to be fluent in English, how language is composed and acquired, and what effective instruction looks like. The standards dictate that ESL teachers must understand the varied contexts of ELs, implicitly marked as different from their own. Embedded in the descriptions of the ESL teacher are categorizations regarding ELs. ELs are described by their need to acquire English, their contexts as different from that of the school and their teacher, and their need for support to achieve academic success.

This analysis concludes that the WI DPI positions ELs as “Others” in schools, requiring specialized support and a specialized teacher to achieve academically. These positionalities are reinforced by policies and practices that further marginalize the already-marginalized EL in schools. The localized example featured in this paper connects to the growing discourse around the creation of language policies and practices in new im/migrant destinations. It is imperative that schools in these growing communities interrogate and respond to potentially harmful effects of the categorization of multilingual learners.

Author

• Kaycee Rogers, University of Wisconsin - Madison
  Presenting Author