Understanding Immigrant Youth's Transgressive Classroom Language Use Through a Lens of Critical Race Theory

• In Event: Reconceptualizing Transgressive Language Practices as Critical, Community-Building Tools in the K–12 Classroom

Abstract

Overview: This classroom discourse study examines immigrant youth’s transgressive language use and identity performance through a lens of critical race theory (Delgado & Stefancic, 2001; Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995). A growing body of scholarship in language education and literacy studies has explored the relationship between transgressive linguistic practices, identity, and normative notions of language, classroom talk or curriculum (Jaspers, 2005; Martínez & Morales, 2014; Rampton, 1996; Souto-Manning, 2014b). This analysis, situated in one U.S. English as a Second Language classroom, examines how two immigrant boys appropriated a routinized vocabulary activity – the sentence starter language practice – to agentively perform their identities, and how their identity-displaying language use transgressed the classroom norms of speaking and was sanctioned as inappropriate or irrelevant.

Theoretical Framework: Building off the critical base of research on linguistic practices of minoritized children and youth, I view immigrant youth’s language use as agentive and closely tied to their identity and reading of the world. Taking up critical race theory, I view immigrant youth as racialized subjects, and racism are prevalent in their everyday experience.

Methods: This inquiry is part of a larger, 2-year critical sociolinguistic ethnography on the intersections of language, positioning, and masculinity of immigrant adolescents in one U.S. high school. This analysis focuses on two participants: Tiger, a 15-year-old boy from Taiwan, and Omar, a 14-year-old boy from Libya. Since their linguistic practices are analyzed in relation to pedagogy, Mrs. Turner the ESL teacher is also included in this analysis.
Data include classroom interactions, fieldnotes, and interviews. I utilize analytic tools from interactional sociolinguistics (Gumperz, 1982) and critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 2003) to analyze classroom interactions, and situate analyses of their speech in the micro-level classroom interaction within the macro-level prevailing discourses and racial ideologies (Souto-Manning, 2014a).

Results: My observation indicates that Tiger was subject to both blatant and covert racism, as well as homophobia and linguicism. My analyses of classroom interactions show that he often appropriated the meanings of the sentence starters during this language practice to perform a funny, nonlearner, and hyper masculine identity while using transgressive language. While his language use disrupted the racialized discourse of Asian American masculinity (Cheng, 1999), his performed nonlearner identity run counter to the teacher’s expectation for her students to perform a “good learner” identity. Mrs. Turner considered his language as “not serious,” --as it transgressed the linguistic norms of the classroom--which eventually led to his social identification as a “problem” student.
Omar, as a devout Muslim, was subject to the Islamophobic discourse. He often brought into this language practice current events and counternarratives that challenged such negative positioning. However, his agentive language use was considered as “not relevant” by Mr. Turner who insisted that the language practice focus on grammar rather than politics or ideology. This analysis illustrates that immigrant youth’s language use is agentive and transgressive.

Significance: Teachers should avoid “quick ‘management’ of conflicts” (Souto-Manning, 2014b, p. 630) – simply rejecting them as inappropriate or irrelevant, rather they should read their identity performances with care and open up space in instruction for transformation.

Author

• Kongji Qin, New York University