The Racialized Nature of Academic Language: Disentangling the Raciolinguistic Power Structures

This book explores the marginalization that English as additional language (EAL) learners, immigrant or language-minoritized people confront when learning to socialize into using the language of schooling. The authors examine racialized academic language not to dismiss it, but to scrutinize its presence and impact on individuals’ lives.

Beginning with connections between eugenics, intelligence, whiteness, language, monolingualism and bilingualism, it then reviews current practices, and how the construction of academic language in various schooling and non-schooling contexts creates hegemonic structures that perpetuate deficit perspectives. The final section envisions what could help dismantle the power knots that academic language holds in systemic structures.

This is a vital book for teachers, teacher educators, and policy makers who refuse the deficiency orientations placed on non-standardized use of language at schools and want to deconstruct the power that academic standardized language holds in the lives of language-minoritized students.

Sultan Turkan is Assistant Professor in Bilingual Education at Queen’s University, Belfast, UK.

Jamie L. Schissel is Associate Professor at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, USA.