“Without Any Fear”: Adult Multilingual Language Learners Negotiating Raciolinguistic Identity in a Multilingual Book Club

• In Event: Friday Roundtable Session 9:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: Adult Immigrant and Multilingual Education (Table 2)

Abstract

A superdiverse (Vertovec, 2007) group of adult MLLs participated in a multilingual book club that was developed to dismantle racial injustice by honoring the learners’ multilingual and transmigrant identities. A critical narrative analysis (Souto-Manning, 2016) was employed to identify the impact of raciolinguistic positioning on identity construction (Flores & Rosa, 2015). Results revealed that the raciolinguistic chronotopes of anxiety and resistance (Rosa, 2016; Flores et al., 2018) were present, and influenced learners’ linguistic identity construction. The findings of this study set the stage for adult education in the US to move beyond English-only ideologies by incorporating multilingual and multicultural pedagogies and curricula that center adult MLLs’ transmigrant funds of knowledge and identities.

Author

• Lindsay M. McHolme, Georgia State University