Appropriateness, Ability, and Authority: Academic Language as an Identity-Constructing Resource in Second Graders' Peer Interactions

• In Event: 58.034 - Putting Policy Into Perspective: Exposing Racializing Discourses Through Explorations of Minoritized Students' Perceptions and Practices

Abstract

Academic language (AL) has long been viewed as playing a crucial role in students’ academic success and cognitive development. More recently, AL has come to occupy a prominent place in the discourses surrounding the Common Core State Standards (CCSS; see Valdés, Kibler, & Walqui, 2014). However, clear and effective ways of theorizing and teaching AL remain elusive (Haneda, 2014), partly because observational studies in this nascent field remain scarce (Anstrom et al., 2010), and also because the raciolinguistic ideologies (Flores & Rosa, 2015) that place an overriding emphasis on AL—often narrowly defined—do not account for the full range of students’ linguistic practices, especially for linguistically and racially minoritized students. Hence, to derive more empirically grounded, socially just AL theories and pedagogies, researchers need to examine how these students understand and use AL and other semiotic resources in classrooms.
To contribute to the emerging body of scholarship in this area, in this study of a second-grade classroom in California, I draw on a range of sociocultural theories including Bakhtin’s (1981) dialogicality, sociocultural linguistic theories of enregisterment (Agha, 2003) and indexicality (Eckert, 2008), theories of multimodality (Kress, 2011), and (neo-)Vygotskyan theories of learning (Rogoff, 2003) to take an action-based perspective (van Lier & Walqui, 2012) that defines language not solely in terms of where it is used or who uses it, but rather with an eye to how it works—along with other semiotic resources—to accomplish social action. I propose a novel framework that defines AL as context-specific uses of semiotic resources that allow speakers to index ideologies and identities related to appropriateness, ability, and authority. To understand how students used AL in peer interactions, what ideologies were apparent in their understandings of AL, and how their uses and understandings of AL shaped their identity projects, I engaged in participant observation for nine months, writing fieldnotes, capturing audio and video recordings, and collecting classroom texts. This paper presents an interactional analysis of recordings of students’ peer interactions during math and language arts, focusing particularly on linguistically and racially minoritized students.
Through these analyses, I found that, by contrast with public and scholarly discourses that hold that English learners and students of color struggle to appropriate academic language and literacy practices, focal students frequently appropriated AL in multiple and complex ways. Even in the absence of adults, students used AL and other semiotic resources locally understood as “academic” to accomplish a variety of academic and social actions and to construct a multitude of identities. At times focal students aligned with dominant discourses of appropriateness, ability, and authority, while other times they reconfigured or even rejected these discourses. On the basis of these findings, I discuss implications for theory and practice. Overall, I argue for an action-based, sociocultural linguistic approach to AL, emphasizing that such a perspective allows researchers and educators to see a wider range of students’ semiotic strengths than are made visible by the structuralist accounts of language that have been predominant in this field.

Author

• Meghan Corella, The University of British Columbia