Challenging Academic Language in Teacher Education

• In Event: Cultivating Multilingual Beliefs in Teacher Education: Exploring Frameworks, Pedagogies, and Instructional Approaches

Abstract

Academic language has long been a central focus in the preparation of teachers of multilingual students. Yet, there is increasing recognition that teacher education plays a role in disrupting the ways that it has historically led to constructing linguistically marginalized students as deficient. In this paper, we explored how teacher candidates took up the construct of academic language in a teacher education program focused on social transformation and justice. Drawing on candidates’ class assignments for analysis, we found that they thought of academic language as a social justice issue in two distinct ways, continued to frame academic language as dichotomous with “everyday language”, and began to expand their ideas about what language counts as academic.

Authors

• Olivia Elvira Obeso, University of California - Los Angeles

• Marjorie Elaine Faulstich Orellana, University of California - Los Angeles

• Andrea Nicole Kern, University of California - Los Angeles