“Dad, It’s She, It’s Embarrassing When You Say It Wrong.”: A Critical Autoethnography of Evolving Language Ideologies

• In Event: Racial Justice in Multilingual Education: What Is It and How Do We Realize It?

Abstract

Objectives

Language ideologies, or beliefs that language users have about language use and practice (Kroskrity, 2015; Rosa & Burdick, 2017), play a major role in the racialization of multilingual learners. While much research documents how teachers hold negative views towards multilingual learners (e.g., Lucas et al., 2014; Petit, 2011), especially when it comes to Standard English (Baker-Bell, 2020; Metz & Knight, 2021) or heritage language (e.g., Garrity et al., 2019), much less is known about the language ideologies of racialized multilingual learners, in particular how they may come to learn and unlearn different ideas about language and bilingualism.

Theoretical Perspectives
Building on recent autoethnographic work that has documented relationships and tensions between heritage language maintenance, cultural and ethnic identity, and assimilation with the dominant/official language of power (Barrento, 2023; Cho, 2023; Song & Wu, 2024; Tanemura, 2021), I use LangCrit (Crump, 2014) as a theoretical framework to situate and examine my own language ideologies and relationship to the named languages that have been a major part of life as a language user, specifically Bisaya, Tagalog, English, and Spanish.

Method
Like many second-generation immigrants, I did not have the opportunity to formally learn my parents’ heritage languages (Alba et al., 2002; Portes & Hao, 2002). As a Filipina American, I recognize that my parents’ decisions favoring English assimilation (De Houwer, 2009; Sevinç, 2022) was shaped by larger sociocultural contexts, including colonization in the Philippines, and, in turn, shaped my own internalized ideologies around language. Thus, in this project, I use critical autoethnography (Boylorn & Orbe, 2020; Hughes & Pennington, 2016) to recount and interpret my lived experiences to make sense of this phenomena through a socio- political, cultural, and historical lens.

Data
The data for this project include a series of journal reflections recounting my experiences and key memories related to Bisaya, Tagalog, English, and Spanish across various development points including my childhood, adolescence, and early career experiences as an educator. I also took the Language Attitudes of Teacher Scale (LATS, Byrnes & Kiger, 1994), doing my best to answer as I think I might have during various time periods.

Results
Building off previous work (Author, 2021), I utilized positioning analysis (Kayi-Adar, 2015) and LangCrit tenets to conduct a thematic analysis (Braun & Clark, 2006) of the various ways language had been positioned and repositioned over time. Initial analyses reveal three overarching themes: embarrassment for proximity to “incorrect” English, heritage language loss guilt, and tensions between the idea of “cultural bilingualism” and “learned bilingualism”. Further analyses suggest that feelings of shame and guilt are rooted in internalization of the model minority myth, where ideas of different “kinds” of bilingualism are informed by larger sociopolitical language ideologies and expectations.

Significance
This study adds nuance to the discourse on language ideologies, highlighting how racial justice for multilingual education includes addressing how some racialized multilingual learners need the space to grapple with and unlearn internalized whiteness and what it might mean to be bilingual in a larger system that continues to prioritize (Standard) English assimilation.

Author

• Christine Montecillo Leider, University of Massachusetts - Lowell