Thread by @mark3141592

Yesterday, I successfully defended!!!!! my dissertation: Making Sense of Language: How Representations of Language Inform Teachers' Work. I was supported there by my friends, family, teachers (like @nelsonlflores and @brymes, students, and colleagues. What did I present? Well...

My work is all about a few big question: Why do we teach about language the way that we do now, instead of some other way? What are the consequences for teachers and students? And if the consequences are negative, what can researchers do about it?

In this study (using ling. ethnography + discourse analysis), I spent a year with a bilingual teacher trying to understand her planning and teaching. I wanted to examine how teaching involves models of how language works and how students should use it.

From this perspective, I didn't ask, why did this teacher decide to do XYZ? Instead, I asked, where is she getting these models from? How do these models represent students' language? What consequences are these models having for her and her students?

I found the demands of assessment produced tons of restrictive models of language. But more alarmingly, these models were redundantly distributed through multiple planning resources and reinforced each other. For example, it's not just that the state standards are too strict...

In fact, state standards were often the loosest or vaguest model of a particular genre (e.g., fairy tales) or skill (e.g., asking questions). But when you seek out ideas for meeting standards-like from ed materials orgs and online comm's like Pinterest-those models get stricter.

Similarly, models of language that position monolingualism as the norm didn't just emerge from allocation policy (how much of each lg was taught, and who teaches), but from numerous planning resources and even arrangements of how teachers collaborated.

So what should we do? I argue that the problems of these strict models of how language works are rooted in curricularization, what Valdes (2015) describes (basically) as the process that turns language into a curriculum, with neatly divided skills and functions. My study shows...

that curricularization applies to teaching broadly, not just what we typically call language teaching. Language assessment as we know it in schools simply is not interested in recognizing all children as whole and complex communicators.

So, I argue that researchers ought to be more clear about the value of naming deeply embedded problems and offering big, impossible-sounding solutions (like ending language assessment). There's value in offering help to teachers trying to get by, but that doesn't mean...

... that we avoid naming the big issues. There should be room in linguistics for naming systemic policy reforms around language (and even ones that might not seem at first to be about language!) As I wrote in 2018, it's a shame that US sociolinguists didn't...

...take very seriously Geneva Smitherman's proposal that findings on African American Language warranted a moratorium on standardized testing. Her work had a big impact on how I understand the implications of my study. cambridge.org/core/journals/…

So. Teaching involves making sense of language as part of your job, and the tools they're given weren't designed to value all children. Even for a great teacher, it's hard to escape curricularized models of how language works and how students should use it. We need huge reforms.

Thanks for coming to my Thread. I've thanked all my IRL people, but uh, thanks to all those in the Language Twitter universe who liked my tweet about language ideologies being horcruxes (from Harry Potter). That... ended up in the Q&A. Sort of by accident.