Deconstructing and Reconstructing Language, Race, and Power Relations in a Secondary Classroom in the United States

Abstract

In classrooms, teachers explicitly and implicitly engage students in exploring the language ideologies that influence their attitudes about language variation and race relations. The case study reported here uses detailed ethnographically informed discourse analysis to examine how the instructional conversations in a secondary language arts classroom invited students to reflect on, deconstruct, and reconstruct language ideologies that influenced how they viewed language use and race relations.  We employed a microethnographic, discourse analytic frame, informed by interactional sociolinguistics, critical race theory and raciolinguistics to analyze the instructional conversation.    The analysis made visible how the instructional conversation guided students’ deconstruction and reconstruction of language variation through positioning one another to question linguistic binaries, linkages between language ideologies and racial hierarchies, and language ideologies that lack grounding in their own everyday language experiences.  The findings also show that the students’ own social identities were implicated in the language ideologies they held, deconstructed, and reconstructed.