Britton and Austin publish in TESOL Quarterly

Content

Emma Britton, Ph.D. '21, and her advisor, professor Theresa Austin, just published an article investigating language ideologies and their impact on English language learners at the collegiate level. The study captures how students’ idealized perspectives about native English speakers and about the nature of English language shape their learning.

Using comparative case-study approaches, the article features two students who participated in a developmental writing course taught by Britton. Both students experienced a critical language curriculum which aimed to promote sociolinguistic equity through the recognition and legitimation of stigmatized English language varieties. Yet through their course writings and interviews, students expressed a range of dominant and critical perspectives toward English language variation. Case analysis showed that each learners’ beliefs were influenced by several language socialization factors external to the course, including their experiences with language standardization, family immigration, and intercultural communication in their first language.

Britton and Austin argue that is it is important for critical language instructors to learn about their students’ experiences and expectations surrounding language differences, so that they may responsively address and face the ideological tensions that will emerge within a critical language curriculum. While there can be no guaranteed outcomes for a critical language pedagogy, instructors can incorporate strategies to learn about their students’ prior experiences, and help students develop criticality. One promising strategy involves students in creating and recognizing artifacts that are associated with their language socialization. Students can write narratives of language socialization where they recount memories of learning their first and second languages, and explain what each memory illustrates about their beliefs about learning.

For further details see:

Britton, E. R., & Austin, T. Y. (2021). Critical and dominant language learner ideologies: A case study of two Chinese writers’ experiences with a critical language writing pedagogy. TESOL Quarterly, 1–27. https://doi.org/10.1002/tesq.3086