Identity and Language

Posts

Raciolinguistics

I read part 3 of the edited book by Alim, Rickford and Ball (2016) this week and I enjoyed reading every chapter and kept nodding my head all through in agreement. Because there are a lot of issues to discuss from the readings, I will only focus on 3 things I found interesting or helpful for my own research on language, ethnicity, and education. Raciolinguistics allows us to see how language and the people who speak it become racialized. It allows us to study how certain linguistic characteristics are racialized because they are spoken by certain racial and ethnic groups. Raciolinguistics shows how multilingual speakers who are very skilled in codeswitching between multiple languages (and language practices) are marginalized because they do not speak the language of power. Raciolinguistics ideologies challenges the monolinguistic, monoglossic, and ‘standard’ way with words by positioning language and language speakers as complex, valuable, and dynamic. In Paris (2016) we see in ...

"Only speak English!"

When I read this week’s readings, I kept thinking of my interest in Ghanaian languages and its exclusion in the classroom. I could live on this topic for a long time. When Anzaldua says that when you can hurt her by talking bad about her language, for me, I think you can hurt me even more if you ignore my language. Although Ghana has approximately 72 languages, the dominance of English as the ‘standard’ of the ‘educated’ makes it easy for policymakers and educators to gear all learning in school via English literacy practices. Outside of the classroom, students live in environments where people speak various Ghanaian languages in the marketplace, on the radio, on tv, on the street, among friends, and family. However, in schools, their textbooks, classroom practices and D/discourses do not reflect that these multilingual practices. Textbooks are all in English. The teacher is supposed to speak only English. English is the language of school. There have been English-only policies t...

Digital Literacies

I now get the appeal of New Literacies in drawing from digital literacies. Digital literacies allow educators and students to use “non-traditional” tools and technologies as part of teaching and learning. It helps to break the norms of how literacy is defined and what tools help in defining literacy. Haddix and Ssealey-Ruiz’s (2012) article rung so true to me as I read, “…in many urban districts I work with, the same tools and practices get policed and censored. Students are prohibited from using them.” I remember when I was in high school (an all-boys boarding school), bringing laptops and cell phones to school were banned. It had been the practiced then and it is still the practice now. Often, students including myself would bring these electronic devices to schools for various reasons. One day I saw a couple of students in the dorm exchanging software that helped them create amazing music, and make demos with these devices. Those who were not familiar were learning from their mor...

Who are you? ...But who are you really?

I must say that this week’s readings left me wondering a lot. It is either there is still a lot of a framing and new grounds to explore in identity and literacy theories or there is something missing. Not to mince the amazing research in these articles, but I feel we are going around the same old ideas wrapped differently. I understand that idea of situated identities in Bartlett (2007) and how certain cultural artifacts have affordances that aid in performing unique contextual identities. I also get the idea of sedimented identities in Rosewell and Pahl (2007) and how in this case, children’s identities are so sedimented that when they create texts, their identities and texts are intertwined with each other. The article by Lammers and Marsh (2018) highlighted the identity cube model and the development of a core identity left me questions. All these articles were good but often while reading I thought this theory is drawing on so many theories that for me it complicates identity. But...

New Literacies

New Literacies re-conceptualizes the traditional idea of literacy as an acquisition of skill and instead focuses on “literacy as a social practice” (Street, 1985). The traditional view of literacy according to Street (2003) is framed in a deficit model which seeks to introduce “literacy to poor, ‘illiterate’ people, villages, urban youth etc.” in order to “enhance their cognitive skills, improve their economic prospects, make them better citizens regardless of the social and economic conditions that accounted for their illiteracy in the first place.” New Literacies throws a new understanding to what counts as literacies and whose literacies are dominant and whose are marginalized. Rather than just printed text, Street (2003) proposes that new literacies are about the ways in which people address reading and writing , and these are embedded in social practices. New literacies shift from the traditional model of imposed western forms of literacy to other cultures or classes wi...

Resistance in Figured Worlds

Barron (2013) This figured world is one where culture, identity, and language come to play in British Pakistani children in kindergarten. These children grow up in two worlds: the one at home, and the one outside their home. In their home they are Pakistani, they perhaps speak a different language, the music is different, the food is different, and maybe even the types of clothing are all different from mainstream Britain. Barron (2013) notes a discourse between the researcher and Mitchell where the child (Mitchell) makes a distinction between Eid and Christmas celebrations based on the darkness of his skin. The discourse I enjoyed the most was between Hamad and the researcher. The game which they played (cricket) is a popular game in both Pakistan and Britain. I found it interesting that even though Hamad was growing up in England, in his figured world, his identity was Pakistani and not British. I am certain that in his observation, home culture and English culture...