Undoing Competence: Coloniality, Homogeneity, and the Overrepresentation of Whiteness in Applied Linguistics

Abstract

Abstract Conceptualizations of competence that permeate applied linguistics systematically fail to account for the role of racialization in language learning and assessments thereof. To interrogate the racialization of linguistic competence, we first examine its discursive emergence in conjunction with the ideological construction of linguistic homogeneity as central to the naturalization of race within the context of European colonialism. We then track how ideas about linguistic competence took shape jointly with a genre of the human that is overrepresented as white, as well as how this particular genre of the human informed foundational conceptualizations of communicative competence. After analyzing relevant examples of how communicative competence has been taken up in ways that reify this racializing ideology, we end with an alternative conceptualization of the goals of language learning that focuses on the worldviews and lifeways of racialized communities to move beyond universalizing conceptions of competence as the desired outcome.

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