"My Language Speaks of Me: Transmutational Identities in L2 Acquisition"

Abstract

Educational issues involving language minority students and students of color continue to cause much debate and controversy. These students often strive to become accepted by mainstream peers, often shunning their primary language or dialect and practices to become assimilated into mainstream society. In school context, while liberal muliculturalism is promoted in classroom, current educational practices at same time promote quick assimilation, exhibiting a contradiction. Discussion focused on examination of negative consequences of these practices for minority youths' language and development is clearly lacking. This paper analyzes inherent contradiction of inclusion/exclusion faced by language minority students of color, especially those of Mexican and Vietnamese descent. The contradictions in educational practices that affect these students' development have been contributed by historical conquest, colonization, intervention and coercion observed in immigration histories for these populations. In this paper, language and issues faced by language minority students of color are explored in social and historical contexts, stereotypes and uncritical multicultural education practices are challenged, and changes in education for an equitable society are explored. Introduction Debate and controversy surround educational issues involving language minority students and students of color. This is evident as issues surrounding and politics take foreground in advocating for language minority students and their many experiences in U.S. schools. In effect, assimilation model programs and pluralist, but uncritical, multicultural curriculums have either had negative impacts or have become part of essentialization of non-white Other (Kubota, 1999). This is primarily due to devalued cultural capital of non-dominant groups by educational institutions (Bourdieu 1977, Fine 1994, McLaren 1994), often resulting from Western exoticization, colonization, and representation of non-Western cultures (Said, 1978). In schools, language minority students and non-Whites in general are imposed with subordinate identities that are often learned and result in conveyed institutional messages that their language and culture are defective or deficient when measured against mainstream standard (Steele, 1992; Tyson 1999). Through educational institutions, stigmatized labels and identities, or naming that Bourdieu refers to in Language and Symbolic Power (1991:121) make the person instituted feel obliged to comply with this definition [the name/label given], and with of his or her function. According to Pepi Leistyna (1997:272), very term minority is problematic for to refer to non-whites as minorities and to use hyphenations is already a marker of low status that has historically been used to categorize `other' racial groups. The coercive push to conform to hegemonic rhetoric of dominant culture is prevalent in discourse of U.S. schools (Darder, 1991). Clearly, push to become a good U.S. citizen implies that students of color are expected to assimilate to white American standards and in so doing discard values of their primary language, breaking free of all bonds to a or ethnic identity (Darder, 1991). However, this is not so easy a task for non-white students who will remain marginalized simply for color of their skin. The result is a paradox of contradiction in which language minority students are often confused as they strive to become mainstream, while encountering hurdles and barriers imposed by systemic racism. Language minority students and non-Whites in general are coerced to attain unattainable--that of becoming like what is perceived as true through false images presented by media, school texts, and other sources that shape popular notions of what Americans should be. …

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 16 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.