Complicating methods for understanding educators’ language ideologies: transformative approaches for mixing methods

Abstract

This study enlists a transformative approach to mixed methods research in order to problematize what different methods can offer for expanding understandings of educator language attitudes and ideologies. Analyses consider Likert-scale survey responses and linguistic autobiography data from a sociolinguistics course in an online Educating Multilingual Learners master’s degree program at a Southwestern U.S. university. A regression analysis of survey data suggests that older participants are predicted to orient more positively to linguistic diversity and participants with more teaching experience are predicted to orient less positively. Meanwhile, a discursive analysis of autobiographical essays from the oldest participants (over 45) and those with the most teaching experience (over 10 years) illuminate reflexively constructed stances, which we draw on to complicate (not necessarily triangulate) statistically significant findings. Discussion considers the methods by which we examine educators’ language ideologies with implications for both research and teacher education.

Keywords:

• Linguistic diversity
• teacher attitudes
• language ideologies
• discourse
• methods

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank our participants, anonymous reviewers, Chris Chang-Bacon, and Katie Bernstein for helpful comments on prior versions of this article. Kate would also like to thank the Institute for Social Sciences Research at Arizona State for seed funding that supported data collection and analysis. Any remaining shortcomings are our own.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 The LA prompt included the following: “Your culminating individual project for the course…is primarily to help you articulate connections between your own relationship to language use, language learning, and your attitudes about language variation, multilingualism and education…This assignment will help you develop a clearer picture of your personal linguistic traits and beliefs as well as insight into how those shape your role as educator.”

2 We arrived at cutoff values for age and years of teaching after looking holistically at all ­participants’ demographics. In order to engage in the discursive analysis of qualitative data, our goal was to look at no more than 20 participants’ LAs. A cutoff of 45 years old and 10 years’ teaching experience created neat boundaries for these groups of participants that fit our goal for 20 or less LAs that also matched these criteria. We do not consider Asian-identifying participants (n = 7) as they comprised only a small proportion of an otherwise White-majority participant set.

3 Excerpts are presented in participants’ words, with any omissions or edits made for readability indicated by ellipses and square brackets. We used a different ID generation process for each year of data collection and identify participants by these randomly generated numbers.

4 As an exercise, the authors each independently arranged the 17 focal participants on a continuum from least to most tolerant (without setting criteria for the ordering and before engaging in the qualitative analysis above). We all arrived at quite different orderings, which offers further evidence that discursive forms of data, like LAs, do not lend themselves to singular planes of judgement, as focusing on different aspects of stance-taking therein can lead to different assessments of relative tolerance.