Linguistic Ideologies

Abstract

At the center of thinking about multicultural, multilingual, first-generation community college students and how they are oriented to academic discourses through their writing courses is the thinking about how their identity formations are languaged. Many theories attempt to explain how language functions in a cultural context. Within the context of a community college writing classroom, the concepts of language and identity provide rich lenses for exploring college students’ language production, particularly their academic writing. Bakhtin (1981, 1986) provides a theoretical construct for the intersection of these lenses. Bourdieu (1991), Gee (1989, 2003, 2008), Pavlenko and Blackledge (2004), Fairclough (1995, 2001), and Canagarajah (1999, 2004, 2005) enrich the exploration. Their ideas, and the relationships among them, provide a framework for understanding the multiple social, cultural, and linguistic realities in this community college writing classroom.