(De)legitimation of monolingual ideologies in a US teachers’ online forum

ABSTRACT

The prevalence of English monolingualism in the current sociopolitical public has well been documented in the field of educational linguistics. In the United States, the monolingual underpinnings of educational policies have been criticized extensively for putting language minority (LM) students at a disadvantage. An important consequence of such policies is that teachers, who are in the position to enact them, could internalize the covert ideological underpinnings, and in turn, engage in the reproduction of unequal power structure through teaching and discursive practices. Drawing on Critical Discourse Analysis and Systemic Functional Linguistics, this study examines the teacher discourse produced in an online forum and explores how they talk about language, monolingualism, and multilingualism. Adopting Van Leeuwen’s [2008. Discourse and Practice: New Tools for Critical Discourse Analysis. Oxford University Press] categorization of legitimation strategies, the analysis illustrates some prevalent ways in which (de)legitimation strategies are used to reinforce marginalization of LM students. Also, the study shows examples of counter discourse among those who advocate for more bi/multilingual and inclusive ways to work with LM students. The paper further discusses the role of teachers’ discursive practices in reproducing and maintaining predominant monolingual ideologies and practices.

KEYWORDS:

• Multilingualism
• language minorities
• language ideologies
• (de)legitimation
• critical discourse analysis

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Dr. Lourdes Ortega, Dr. Nicholas Subtirelu, Dr. Marianna Ryshina-Pankova, Dr. Cynthia Gordon, and anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on the earlier versions of the manuscript. Any remaining flaws and errors are my own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The goal of presenting the quantitative data is simply to illustrate the vast differences in the number of instances, but not yet to make any broad generalizations about teachers’ ideologies. The data deserves deeper qualitative analyses, as presented throughout the paper.

2 Van Leeuwen (2008) defined ‘conformity legitimation‘ as a sub-type of authorization, and ’fact- of-life rationalization’ or ‘naturalization‘ as a sub-type of rationalization.

3 The contribution of this user ranged from 16% to 27% (or 6–8 comments per thread). The average percentage of contribution per user was 10% across the threads.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Amy I. Kim

Amy I. Kim is a PhD candidate in the Department of Linguistics at Georgetown University. Her research focuses on bi/multilingualism, language assessment, and language planning and policy.