We barely wrote this paper: Sociolinguistic relativity in Southwestern U.S. schools and its impact on English language teaching

Abstract

This paper offers a critical discourse analysis of three potentially challenging communicative interactions between teachers and Spanish-speaking Active Bilingual Learners of English (ABLE) students in Southwestern U.S. schools. 1. Passive voice in situations involving causality is much more common in Spanish than in English; 2. results from a pilot study show how the word “barely” is frequently used as a temporal adverb, like “just,” by many individuals living in the Southwest who have grown up in a figured world influenced by the Spanish language and/or Chicano English; and 3. within the figured worlds of many students from Latin America, it is common to respectfully call one’s teacher, simply maestro, profe, Señor, or Señora. The equivalents of these in English often are met with disapproval by U.S. teachers feeling disrespected by being called “teacher,” “mister,” or “miss,” instead of their last name. Although certainly not comprehensive, these three kinds of language use uncover both the ubiquitous and the implicit sociolinguistic relativity of what we refer to as the “linguistic figured worlds” of Spanish-speaking ABLE students in the U.S. Southwest. We use a systemic functional linguistics approach to document this sociolinguistic relativity and to analyze its potential impact on English language teaching.