Authors
Faith Thompson, Ph.D. student, Neag School of Education, University of Connecticut
ORCID 0009-0009-3369-2959
Abstract
With increasingly diverse student demographics and needs, there is growing scholarship recognizing the damaging impact of standardized language ideology on students who come into the classroom speaking minoritized dialects of English. Critical language awareness (CLA) pedagogies have been posed as ways to disrupt these ideologies in the classroom. This literature review addresses the questions How do U.S. secondary ELA teachers intentionally implement Critical Language Awareness pedagogies with students positioned as Standardized English Learners? and What factors limit teachers’ ability to effectively implement such pedagogies? I systemically review existing literature using an adapted version of Onwuegbuzie & Frel’s (2016) seven-step model for literature reviews. Raciolinguistics was a theoretical framing for this review. I find that there are four leading frameworks for CLA pedagogies, and I provide characterizations of each. I also find that contradicting beliefs and practices are the greatest limitation in implementing those pedagogies, including race evasiveness and discounting students’ own prior linguistic knowledge. Teacher education programs need to provide space for pre-service ELA teachers to work through contradicting language ideologies and how those ideologies are informed by concepts of race, and to develop pedagogical content knowledge in CLA.
