In Search of Standard English: Accent and Prescriptivism as Linguistic Tools for Immigrant Mothers and Family Futurity

• In Event: Linguistic M(other)work as Pedagogy, Resistance, and Disruption: Language and Immigrant Futurity in Education Research

Abstract

Purpose
This paper examines stances toward language learning of immigrant Latina mothers who are students in a Southern California ESL class for adults. We explore how the mothers connected language learning with their futures in the U.S through a desire to learn Standard American English (SAE) to index a social persona of “a model citizen” (participant quote), as a response to pressurized positions (Abrego & Schmalzbauer, 2018) amidst intensifying state violence and surveillance of U.S. immigrants (De Genova, 2002; Rosa, 2019). While the teachers’ pedagogical approach attempted to move away from prescriptivist language education, the mothers in the class pushed back, asking for more grammar drills, pronunciation corrections, and prescriptivist testing. We explore these agentic moves by the mothers, built in care for each other, as they worked to build a collective future in the U.S.

Theoretical Framework
We build on language ideology scholarship (e.g. Kroskrity, 2000; Gal & Irvine, 2019; Martínez, 2013) to understand beliefs about language held by the mothers and teachers, as well as macro discourses around language and English-language instruction. This is put in conversation with scholarship in educational anthropology on how immigrants learn new languages to access new forms of social capital (Warriner, 2008; Monzó & Rueda, 2009) to forge new futurities with state inclusion (Harjo, 2019; Migliarini & Cioè-Peña, 2024).

Methods
We deploy ethnographic methods of participant observation, as both authors have co-taught the ESL class at the heart of this paper since mid-2024. We emphasize that the methodological affordances of our positioning as teachers and observers offers a unique stance at the crux of ideological contestations. The data used for this analysis include lesson plans; field notes of classes; a “living” slide deck where the mothers’ suggestions, questions, and work were recorded during class; post-class reflections between the authors of this paper/teachers of the class, and ethnographic interviews. Through classroom discourse analysis, we analyze how hegemonic discourses around language and belonging shaped what the mothers felt they should learn.

Findings
We argue that the women in the class had internalized raciolinguistic (Flores & Rosa, 2015) ideologies and histories. As such, they pushed to center SAE in class, to learn English that they saw as ‘unmarked’ and ‘unaccented’ and thus move toward becoming an ‘unmarked’ “good” citizen. The mothers’ agency within the class allowed them to challenge our teaching approach, exercising their own sense of local control. They pushed back as a means of taking ownership of resources they wanted to receive by suggesting that a certain kind of English would help them move toward a future of belonging in the U.S.

Significance
We emphasize the agency of immigrant Latina mothers by demonstrating how competing ideological approaches to language learning come to head in the classroom and by considering the rationale behind some of these more prevalent ideologies. We offer these findings as a pedagogical tool – moving away from prescriptivist approaches to language teaching may be met with resistance and we seek to humanize some of the reasons behind the resistance.

Authors

• Jackson Gzehoviak, University of California - Los Angeles

• Flora Zempleni, University of California - Los Angeles