Multilingualism

This dissertation explores the perspectives of culturally and linguistically diverse learners and English learners on school conditions that enable them to share their heritage languages and cultures, as well as the ways that these learners propose that their heritage languages and cultures could be more recognized in an English-only middle school setting. This study focused specifically on the role that culturally and linguistically diverse learners and English learners perceived that they played in the process of their own social empowerment, a role that could be achieved through the development of their voices by becoming critically involved in creating spaces for their heritage languages and cultures in English-only settings. In this study, student voice is the means for the culturally and linguistically diverse and English learners' voices to emerge: the voices that are frequently oppressed because of the lack of power. This framework provides guidance to integrate the excluded learners' voices in a school milieu that habitually muffles these voices. Listening to the bicultural and bilingual voices is important but not sufficient to challenge the power structure of U.S. schools. In this study, culturally and linguistically diverse learners and English learners conceptualized ways that their heritage languages and cultures could be (more) recognized in their school settings. The voices of the students are important; they should be respected and valued. Hearing the students in this study reminds us and validates the assertion that students from diverse languages and cultures are not monolith. They have different and unique experiences and this study gave voice to some of those. Leaders from state level, district level, and school level could open the doors for students to share their experiences in the schools; in the case of this study, to learn from these students what a school milieu that authentically recognizes their cultures and languages is.

If we define language fluency as more than simply a way of speaking, but also a
way of thinking, acting, and being, then we enter a conversation of language as
‘Discourse’ that was sparked by James Paul Gee. This conversation invokes discrete
designations of Discourse as home-based, school-based, dominant, and non-dominant.
These designations reveal divisions between Discourses that are believed to manifest
themselves in the identity formation of ‘language-minority students:’ those whose
home Discourse is non-dominant. The dominant Discourse that these students
encounter in school generates two documented paths: Richard Hoggart’s scholarship
boy and Herbert Kohl’s not-learner; both paths reflect the limited agency of these
students within academia. In order to counteract this delimiting of student agency, this
project proposes a progressive shift towards a post-modern conception of identity
formation; this can be accomplished by opening the Composition classroom to student authored, non-traditional, ‘hybridized’ Discourses.