What is ESL?

Much has been said about the diversity in the population we often refer to as ESL students. Although the bulk of the research on secondlanguage writing in the 1980s and 90s was concerned mostly with international students with visas to study in the US, significant attention in the last decade has been paid to an important distinction between international students and US-resident learners of English. Several books have been written about resident linguistic minority students (Harklau, Losey, and Siegal; Ferris; Kanno and Harklau; Roberge, Siegal, and Harklau) and the ways in which their needs as writers differ from the needs of international students (see also Reid; Matsuda and Matsuda). Several special issues of the Journal of Second_Language Writing have been devoted to early childhood and adolescent second language writing as well, and disciplinary links have been made in recent years with bilingual education (Edelsky and Shuck). In fact, the complexity that is the ESL population is so rich and intricate that I am tempted to use scare quotes every time I use the word population. After all, many multilingual learners of English have far more in common with native English speakers/writers than they do with other learners of English.1 For now, however, I\u27ll frame this paper with a summary of who multilingual students are

Conversational Performance and the Poetic Construction of an Ideology

This study places conversational performance, or speakers’ attempts during everyday talk to draw attention to the aesthetic form of their utterances, at the center of an analysis of linguistic ideology. It examines, in particular, the ways in which two white, middle-class, U.S. university students use performance strategies to construct as Other an English-speaking man whom one student encounters on a flight from Saudi Arabia. Drawing on a socially and ideologically situated theory of verbal art, this article proposes five interconnected relations between performance and ideology. Together, these relations constitute a step toward an integrated theory of an inextricable link between the ideological structure of performance and the potential for performance in ideological discourse

Language in Human Life: A GE Course Targeting English Language Learners

The presenter will describe a cross-cultural course, Language in Human Life, designed to meet several university needs: 1) To provide a course for non-majors that fulfills a long-standing gap in general education courses at the presenter’s institution that introduce students to linguistic thought, 2) to be a magnet course for speakers of English as an additional language in order to allow all students to learn about each others’ languages, and 3) to offer a linguistically accessible course for lower-proficiency users of English that is taught by an instructor with ESL expertise but that fulfills a university requirement for all students. Many U.S. colleges and universities offer general education courses in linguistics: Language and Mind, Language in Society, etc. More institutions are now serving the needs of multilingual learners of English by creating courses that draw on their expertise as multilingual students, allowing those institutions to move away from the still prevalent “deficit” model of language-learning, which depends too heavily on a monolingual native speaker as the standard to which nonnative speakers are always compared (and usually are thought to fall short). Language in Human Life asks students to explore—among other topics—code-switching, sociolinguistic norms in different languages, and the prevalence of prescriptivist ideologies and their relation to socioeconomic class or perceived ethnic, gender, or regional superiority. Enrollment is controlled to ensure a majority of multilingual students, who can then work in cross-linguistic groups with monolingual students to gather data from each others’ languages and develop a community of inquiry. To access PowerPoint slides for this presentation: Click the Download button on the upper right-hand side of the page. Course documents related to this presentation (LSA Member Login required): Language Beliefs Questionnaire-- http://www.linguisticsociety.org/e-learning/language-human-life-language-beliefs-questionnaire Language Background Questionnaire-- http://www.linguisticsociety.org/e-learning/language-human-life-language-background-questionnaire Terms of Address Assignment-- http://www.linguisticsociety.org/e-learning/language-human-life-terms-address-assignment Linguistic Presentation-- http://www.linguisticsociety.org/e-learning/language-human-life-linguistic-presentation Language Journal-- http://www.linguisticsociety.org/e-learning/language-human-life-language-journa

Imagining the native speaker: The poetics of complaint in university student discourse

This study outlines relationships between ideological construction and conversational performances, or utterances during casual conversation whose aesthetic quality is highlighted. I identify a distinction between native and nonnative English speakers that is imagined in predictable ways and expressed in regularized discourse patterns. The ideology of nativeness is rooted in a monolingualist view of the world--an association of one language with one nation--and intersects with ideologies of race and education. The regularity of patterns associated with this ideology provides resources for performances by white, middle-class U.S. university students about incomprehensible accents, bad teachers, lazy or angry foreigners, and rude code-switching or uses of non-English languages. Speakers use performative strategies such as rhythm, dialogue, and emphatic stress, to frame performances as worthy of special attention. Utterances are interpreted as more or less performative depending on the density and intensity of those strategies. The notion of the discourse frame accounts for speakers' desire to complete performances and for listeners' understanding that they are expected to respond positively. Performance and ideology are reciprocally related, such that performances index and depend on the stability of ideological models while providing opportunities for sudden shifts in ideological position as well as for transformations of those models. As speakers frame performances, they simultaneously create social truths, such as exaggerated hierarchical relationships between linguistic in-groups and out-groups, in ways that become memorable and at least momentarily acceptable. Because performances are bounded and memorable, they are decontextualizable, which enables them to be re-performed by the same speakers or by their listeners in other contexts. Performances thus contribute to the pervasiveness of the ideological discourse patterns that form the basis of those performances. Because of many speakers' drive to establish social solidarity with their listeners, performances can coincide with a dramatic shift in ideological position. Such shifts are also understandable if we recognize that dominant ideologies are embedded in highly regularized discursive patterns, readily available to any speaker who wishes to employ them

Racializing the Nonnative English Speaker

This article identifies some discursive processes by which White, middle-class, native-English-speaking, U.S.-born college students draw on a monolingualist ideology and position themselves and others within a language-race-nationality matrix. These processes construct the speakers\u27 Whiteness and nativeness in English as unmarked and normal; mark nonnative speakers of English as non-White and foreign; and naturalize connections between language, national origin, and race. I argue that dominant ways of talking about race in the United States persist as templates for creating arguments about language. Ideological models are projected onto each other, recursively reproducing a hierarchical social order in which U.S.-born citizens, native English speakers, and Caucasians retain a privilege widely perceived to be a natural outcome of certain characteristics thought to be intrinsic to American-ness, nativeness (in English), or Whiteness

Combating Monolingualism: A Novice Administrator’s Challenge

The article presents the perspective of a writing program administrator with an experience in second language writing on the ideology of monolinguism. A situated account of her work as a tenure-track faculty member in a university English department is provided. Suggestions that writing program administrators might consider in developing or modifying programs for the linguistically diverse students are offered. Issues regarding the creation of additional administrative positions to address second language writing are raised

Stealth Faculty Development in Adopting Plurilingual Dispositions: Collaboration on a Student Conference on Language

In my first semester as an assistant professor and director of the brand new English Language Learner Program in 2001, I embedded what has come to be known as the Boise State Conference on Language, Identity, and Culture (here-after, the Conference ) into a developmental ESL writing course. The position I accepted, a tenure-track faculty position in the English Department, was new in 2001 and required second-language writing experience. It was also described as having an administrative focus on advocating for multilingual students and designing and implementing new programs to support their success across campus. Because of the campus-wide scope of the program, which I had renamed English Language Support Programs, I wanted the Conference to be a venue for multilingual students of educate the university not only about their needs as learners of English but also about their expertise as users of multiple languages. The Conference would have a direct or indirect influence on faculty audience members\u27 approaches to language and pedagogy just by their attending. Helping audience members understand what it means to value multilingual students\u27 knowledge and experiences has been one of my primary strategic goals in organizing this set of presentations (Shuck, 2004). However, a few years ago, the Conference took on an unexpected additional role: as an avenue for stealth faculty development for instructors who had to learn quickly how to teach fully multilingual classes. While the Conference had long been a venue for educating the campus, a fellow TESOL-trained instructor and I had been the only faculty participants involved in its planning. It had not yet served as a faculty development opportunity beyond the educating of audience members about the presenters\u27 cultural and linguistic contributions to the larger campus community

Pattern Analysis of Perceived Dialect Regions

This paper presents the results of a qualitative study conducted in the Boise State University LING 105 class during the spring of 2023, which investigated patterns in people\u27s perceptions of language variation across the United States. The study involved collecting multiple maps of the US annotated by people who had lived in the US for more than a year, noting the perceived dialect regions and their descriptors. From the collection of maps, 50 were randomly selected and analyzed for similarities and differences, and the boundaries of the regions were manually traced and assigned a color based on the states they covered. The results revealed seven main clouds or areas of high line density, including the South, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Michigan (WMM), the East Coast, Hawaii, Alaska, Texas, and California. The paper discusses the distinct dialects and explores possible reasons behind the patterns of each cloud, including historical and cultural factors. Overall, the study provides insights into the complex and diverse nature of language variation across the United States