Embracing Multilingual Repertoires: A Critical Literacy Project in an Intensive English Program

HeeYeon Kim

Qianying Zhang

Yujuan Zhang

Renmengya Zhou
 Context
Description of the Communicative Repertoires of Participants/Prestige of their Communicative
Repertoires
Our proposed critical language awareness lessons are targeted towards young-adult
ESL/EFL students who are currently enrolled in an international gateway language program at a
four-year higher education institution in the United States. This student population, made up of
international students from the age of 18 to 24, have been conditionally accepted to the affiliated
university and will be able to officially matriculate as full-time students once they pass the
language requirement of the school, which is a composite score of 100 and above on the
TOEFL-iBT exam (the exam is scaled from 0-120, with 120 being a perfect score).
The students in the intensive English program are from various cultural and linguistic
backgrounds. Thirty-five percent of the students are from Saudi Arabia and speak either Najdi
Spoken Arabic or Standard Arabic. Thirty percent of the students are from Mainland China,
Hong Kong and Taiwan, who all speak Mandarin in common and may also speak a local dialect
of the region they grow up in, such as Cantonese or Shanghainese. Twenty percent of the
students are from the Republic of Korea and speak Korean while fifteen percent of the students
are from Japan and speak Japanese. The amount of prior exposure to English education varies
among the students and how English education is approached in these four countries is also
different.
The TOEFL iBT test measures the ability of students from non-English-speaking
countries to use and understand English at the university level. The language of learning
materials used in the intensive English classes corresponds to the construct of the test. It is
mostly introductory college-level, and is presented in a fairly engaging way with varying syntax
and sentence length. The tone of the text is academic, not informal or jokey, containing little or
no idiomatic or slangy language. Since the stakes involved in the TOEFL are extremely high for
the students enrolled in the gateway program, they spend a considerable amount of time
immersing themselves in such text to improve their performance on the test and make it their
goal to align themselves with the type of English used on the TOEFL in their own reading,
listening, writing and speaking.

Relevant Socio-cultural Issues

Colonial/national governmentality The use of academic English on the TOEFL test reinforces
national governmentality because this preferred form of English by the test maker, Educational
Testing Service (ETS), is produced according to prescriptive authorities associated with
publishing houses and schools. Given the high stakes involved in the test, students have a keen
and exclusive interest in improving their language skills of using academic English correctly.
Therefore, during their learning processes, students are likely to privilege this form of English as
the perfect American English over other forms of language. We believe that this dominant
tendency will possibly limit students to accepting only one variation of English as legitimate and
as a result, they will not be able to develop understandings of varied aspects of language or
different ways of using language based on the specific occasions or audiences.
Language ideology of native speakerism Given the test orientation of the classes in the intensive
English program, students share the common goal of improving language skills according to the
criteria of the ETS. Because the test is not entirely authentic, it may fail to prepare the students
for language use outside the classroom as well as their continuation as full-time college students.
One of the challenges EFL/ESL students will face is anxiety and a sense of inferiority while
conversing with people who they see as native speakers of English. When ESL/EFL speakers
engage in dialogues with native speakers, they often have the tendency to position themselves in
less powerful roles and remain passive and relatively silent. It is likely that with native speakers
dominating the conversation, the ESL/EFL students will accept such power dynamics as the
norm and develop the ideology that native speakers are inherently more competent in that
language than people who learn it as a foreign language.
Language identity as multilingual learners Students in the intensive English program negotiate
their language identities and position themselves in the practice of community throughout
interactions with others by using their multilingual repertoires. However, in this process, the
students are likely to tend to identify themselves as illegitimate speakers and position as
marginalized members in the community of practice because of their perceived language
proficiency, as did the participants in Moritas study (2004). The students view the multilingual
repertoires they have possessed as deficits that interfere with their English speaking and writing
instead of useful tools that can benefit them in becoming legitimate members of community of
practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991, p. 89).

Lesson 1: Language Identity Through Reflective Thinking

Objectives In this lesson students will be able to: Materials

Experience a form of language use that is
different from the dominant language form
Reflect on their own knowledge of and
experiences with different forms of English
and their attitudes towards them;
Explore the relationship between language
and identity through the lenses of another
person by reading a narrative essay;
Understand the usefulness of reflective
thinking in how a person perceives varieties
of language use and how they relate to
ones identity;
Learn about the individual project in terms
of what the purpose of the project is and
what tasks need to be completed.
Setting up the Context
1). Give students some simple background
information on the Hawaiian Pidgin and
show them the 4-minute video of The Voice
of Hawaii. After the video, ask the students
to think about how they think of the
language spoken in the video and answer
the following questions:
a. What did you notice about the
language spoken by Hawaiians?
b. Is it the same as the language used
on the TOEFL test? Which form of
English do you think is more useful?
c. What language did the linguist Kent
Sakoda speak in front of the camera
(1) PBS Hawaii documentary: The
Voice of Hawaii;
(2) Reading Passage: Finding the
Inside by Mira Shimabukuro (See
Appendix A)
Teacher Note:
a. The teacher should be bear in
mind that although the concept of
pidgin is introduced in this class,
the teacher should avoid using the
term pidgin so that the students
are not confused by the technical
definition of the word. The goal
here is only for the students to
experience a form of English use
that they are not familiar with.
b. The questions to be asked after
the video are intended for raising
critical literacy awareness among
the students and the teacher should
 and why? How do you think Kent
Sakoda views Pidgin as a language?
2). Debrief the discussion and stress the
importance of speech community and context in
language use.
3). Divide students into four different
groups and ask each group to think about their
knowledge of or past experiences with different
forms of English and their attitudes toward
them. Four groups will write down what they
have discussed and take turns to share it with the
class.
Valuing Reflective Thinking as a tool for
understanding language and identity
1). Ask each group to think about one of the
following questions while they are reading the
article:
a. What happened on the night after the visit
to Auntie Sues pineapple farm? How did Mira feel
about Pidgin when she first heard her cousins
speaking it?
b. What happened on the wedding day? How
did Miras attitude towards Pidgin change?
c. Why did Miras opinion of Pidgin change?
How did she achieve the realization It is my
family. It is in my blood while Stacy and Tracy
never thought of that night?
d. How do you think Mira would
communicate with her cousins the next time she
visits hawaii?
2). Give students 10 to 15 minutes to read Finding
the Inside by Mira Shimabukuro by themselves and
then discuss with their groups about the assigned
question.
guide the conversation in this
direction.
c. The teacher needs to be aware of
the different ethnic, racial, cultural,
and linguistic backgrounds of the
students. Forms of English
should be loosely defined here,
meaning that the teacher should
encourage the students to share
any encounters they have had with
different ways of using English. If
the students remain silent, the
teacher can start the discussion by
giving an example of a Chinglish
expression (without calling it
Chinglish) to give the students a
more concrete idea.
Teacher Note:
After each group has presented, the
teacher should ask the rest of the
class if they have anything to add
to or comment on the groups
answer so that more ideas can be
and exchanged and the learning
process is deepened.
3). A representative from each group will
summarize and synthesize the group discussion and
answer the assigned question on the groups behalf.
Using Reflective Thinking in the Individual Teacher Note:
Project The teacher needs to clarify that
1). Use Miras story as an opening and introduce the students have the freedom to
reflective thinking as a useful tool in rethinking and ask the questions they deem as
inspecting ones own language use and its
appropriate for achieving the
relationship to the persons identity.
2). As a class assignment, ask students to go into purpose of the project.
the cultural community that they are interested in
and pay attention to the way English and other
languages are spoken in that community. Explain
that the purpose of the project is to expose the
students to the varied aspects of language use so
that the students can use what they have seen, heard
and learned in self-reflection about their own ideas
of language and identity. This project requires them
to conduct at least one interview with one member
of the community in English and provide a list of
suggested questions that the students can ask during
the interview:
a. How many languages do you speak on a
daily basis?
b. (If more than one) When and with whom is
each language spoken?
c. Do you think you speak English well and
why?
d. When you speak English, do you mix in
expressions of other languages? If so, can you give
me an example?
e. Do you think the way you speak English
changes depending on different contexts or remain
the same?

Students should draw from the materials from this

class and the interview and write an essay on their
findings and their self-reflectionof their own
language ideologies before the next class.

 Discussion
This lesson is designed to raise students critical literacy awareness towards recognizing
different forms of language use and valuing diverse literacies. Students in intensive English
programs are faced with huge pressure to perform well on the TOEFL test. When learning
English for the test becomes the sole focus of these students in their studies, the national
governmentality is reinforced because this preferred form of English by the test maker,
Educational Testing Service (ETS), is produced according to prescriptive authorities associated
with publishing houses and schools. As a result, the students see the use of this form of English
as the only legitimate way. According to Janks (2000), critical literacy education aims to teach
people about the relationship between language and power. Thus our first and foremost goal is to
give students the opportunity to experience varied ways of using language and recognize how
each of them are associated with a certain level of power. Through watching the The Voice of
Hawaii, students will be exposed to a form of English use that bears no resemblance to the
English used in their TOEFL prep materials. The discussion questions is Hawaiian Pidgin
the same as the language used on the TOEFL test and which form of English use do you think
is more useful help the students become cognizant of difference as well as domination, and
realize that the more useful one form of language is in schools, the more power it can give to its
users. This is an optimal time to strengthen the students understanding of the four elements of
critical literacy: domination, access, diversity and design. To raise the awareness that whether an
individual is empowered or disempowered by the language used are determined by political and
social relations (Janks, 1993), we want the students to see that there is no inherent hierarchy in
language use. When students are asked to pay special attention to the linguist Kent Sakoda from
the video who talks to his friends in Pidgin while to the audience in TOEFL English, we want
the students to see that language is used differently because of contexts or audiences instead of
the superiority or inferiority of the language form (Griffith et al. 2014).
Later the students will be asked to reflect on their own experiences of or encounters with
the forms of English use different from TOEFL English, not only are their backgrounds included
in the curriculum, but more variations of English will also be added to the discussion and the
students knowledge of different ways of speaking and writing will be enhanced. More
importantly, they will also think about and share with the class their attitudes towards these
non-TOEFL-like English uses. Given the cultural politics of communication, we expect
marginalization of or biases against certain language forms to surface at this stage (Alim, 2007).
Such personal data are of diagnostic value in the first lesson for the teacher to customize the
learning experience for the students and can serve as a focal point for the teacher to refer back to
throughout the unit.
According to Gee (1990), people often take for granted their ways of saying, doing,
thinking and valuing. In the article, Finding the Inside by Mira Shimabukuro, Mira was able to
change her opinion of Pidgin and realized that it was her blood through reflective thinking so we
decided to use the Mira story as a window to the students introspection of language use.
Because discourses are so inseparable from peoples vast arrays of social identities, we want the
students to use reflective thinking as a tool and rely on discourses to understand more about their
own language ideology (Gee, 1990).
Lastly, the students are informed about the individual project for the class, which requires
them to go into a cultural community that they are interested in and pay attention to the way
English and other languages are spoken in that community. Janks (2000, p. 177) says Different
ways of reading and writing the world in a range of modalities are a central resource for
changing consciousness. One major purpose of the project is for the students to be exposed to
the difference between discourses and to embrace the diversity of language use. We hope that
later in the unit after the project is completed, the students preconceived notions towards certain
forms of English that have been brought up earlier in the first lesson will be changed. By hearing
other peoples diverse languages and literacies, the students will have a chance to examine their
own linguistic repertoires and the language-using environments around them. It needs to be
recognized that diversity in ways with texts should not be considered as a cause for anxiety and
anger but should be seen as an essential productive resource for innovation (Kress, 1995, p. 6).