American Association of Corpus Linguistics 2018

Presenters: Kristin Terrill

Abstract: Many factors in educational contexts impact bilingual students’ linguistic development. Schools are accountable to their communities for facilitating students’ acquisition of language skills. They also provide an environment in which young people are socialized to the norms and knowledge of their communities, including language ideologies. A contemporary disruption in the education sector—the “school choice” movement—compels ongoing observation as innovative approaches to teaching emerge. No approach to education is ideologically neutral. The goal of this research is to identify ideological perspectives surrounding schools’ accountability to general sets of standards. Particular attention is paid to ideologies surrounding linguistic intellectual development and ideologies related to the role of language in school communities. This research, which focuses on bilingual education, is based in second language acquisition studies, and adopts a language ideology framework to explore approaches to teaching in bi/multilingual settings. A triangulated method that incorporates corpus- and critical discourse analysis is used to analyze documents collected from a division of the Arizona Board of Education tasked with oversight of charter schools. These documents reveal language ideologies that inform the educational approaches of schools emphasizing innovative approaches to bilingual education. This study has implications for educational practitioners, especially school administrators, and researchers whose interests include second language acquisition (SLA) studies and language ideologies. 

Note: This research project was also presented at GPSRC 2018 and Kaleidoscope 2018.