Negotiating Tensions in the Linguistic Demands of the Classroom: A Multi-Method Exploration of Teachers’ Academic Language Ideologies

Abstract

Over the past decade, teachers in the United States have felt an increase in the linguistic demands of the classroom due to three fundamental shifts: the curricular, the demographic, and the critical. The language demands presented by these shifts coalesce in recent debates in the literature about equitable academic language instruction with language minoritized learners. In this three-paper dissertation, I first present a conceptual framework and literature review synthesizing literature about academic language and equity. In paper two, I utilize principal components analysis and multiple regression analysis of survey data (N=154) to uncover heuristic patterns of language belief among K-12 educators in the United States. In paper three, I contextualize the quantitative findings from paper two with a phenomenological interpretative analysis of interview data collected with intermediate grades teachers (N=9) who live and work in a new immigrant destination state in the Southeast region of the United states. This study underscores the need to work alongside teachers as they negotiate ideological tensions in policy, context, and practice concerning equitable academic language instruction with language minoritized learners.