Identities in Second Language Learning

Catalog description

This course investigates the ongoing collaborative construction and negotiation of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual, and social class identities in second language learning (SLL). It examines how we learn to speak our multiple selves in a new language, for example, how we learn to language race according to our prior background and the cultural practices and understandings of second language contexts. The impact of these social identities and polemics of racism, sexism, xenophobia, colonialism, homophobia, and elitism that arise when we study them are not restricted to experiences outside the classroom, nor can they be divorced from language curriculum and pedagogy. Examining such issues in SLL can be challenging due to the belief that raising them courts controversy unnecessarily and goes against mindsets that many value, such as colorblindness, because language learning is an area that naturally welcomes and fosters integration and interaction between different groups in multicultural education. Course participants will interrogate the idea of colorblind language learning classrooms and curricula and examine how the realities of language learners' differentiated, inequitable access, treatment, and experiences in multilingual contexts challenge the field's declared values of multiculturalism in education.