Supporting Asian American Multilingual College Students Through Critical Language Awareness Programming

ABSTRACT

Critical language awareness (CLA) encourages teachers and students to examine language as social practice and reflect on ideologies and power dynamics embedded within language use. In this article, the authors—both instructors in an Asian American Native American Pacific Islander Serving Institution (AANAPISI) federal grant project at a university in New York City—describe how we integrated a CLA framework to create an Asian American Studies class that uses culturally sustaining pedagogies to affirm student linguistic identities and demystify academic research practices. Specifically, we analyzed a project where we introduced the term linguistic landscapes (LL) and asked students to visit Asian American ethnic enclaves to examine linguistic signage. While implementations of CLA have been based in K-12 instruction, university writing courses, and teacher education courses, this paper presents a successful example of a project based in CLA used in credit-bearing university courses, specifically, in an Asian American Studies program.

KEYWORDS:

• Asian American studies
• critical language awareness
• culturally sustaining pedagogies
• identity
• linguistic landscapes
• purpose

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. The authors use the term Asian American in this article and not Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) because to the best of our knowledge, there were no Pacific Islander students enrolled in the Asians in the US courses when we implemented the linguistics landscapes project. In addition, we know that there are few Pacific Islander students enrolled overall at Hunter College. Hunter’s Institutional Research Office collects racial data under the term “Asian or Pacific” so it is impossible to disaggregate the data to know how many Pacific Islander students are enrolled at Hunter. In general, the Pacific Islander community in New York City is small, and we know from program data that almost all students in HCAP programs identify as Asian American.

2. Hunter College Human Research Protection Program (HRPP) gave permission to the authors to present student projects and classroom data.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Paul McPherron

Paul McPherron is a professor of Applied Linguistics in the English Department at Hunter College of the City University of New York (CUNY), where he has served as the co-PI on Hunter College’s AANAPISI Project (HCAP) since 2016. HCAP is aimed at strengthening student support programs for Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) students who are first-generation college goers, English Language Learners (ELLs), and/or students from low-income, immigrant families. Previously, he served as the Director of Hunter College’s center for teaching and learning, named Academic Center for Excellence in Research and Teaching (ACERT), from 2017-2021. Paul teaches undergraduate and graduate classes on linguistics, applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, English language teaching, and the structure of English. He is a socio/applied linguist whose research interests have involved questions about language learning and teaching in relation to identity, politics, and educational policies, particularly in China and the United States.

Linh An

Linh An, Ph.D., is the Multilingual Learner Specialist (MLL) at the Hunter College AANAPISI Project (HCAP). As the MLL, she helps develop academic and research skills seminars and is currently leading financial literacy programs and co-directs the undergraduate research program. Linh is a first-generation college graduate with a long history of working with underserved AAPI students in NYC. Outside of Hunter, Linh is leading the development of a psychoeducation program for Chinese caregivers in partnership with New York University’s School of Medicine’s Department of Population Health. Additionally, she is building a holistic wellness intervention for Asian American college students that integrates psychoeducation, professional development, and racial identity exploration with New York University’s Department of Applied Psychology. She is currently on the Board of Charles B. Wang Community Health Center. Linh received her bachelor’s degree from Queens College and her PhD in Anthropology from UCLA.