African Americans in World Language Study: The Forged Path and Future Directions

Abstract

This article examines the history of African Americans in the academic study of world languages and presents an overview of inquiry on the topic. The paper focuses on the impact of race in second language acquisition (SLA) as exemplified through the experience of black students in language education and study abroad. It discusses objectives, policies, instructional priorities and strategies, conditions, and materials related to how black students have in the past, are currently, or should be engaged in language learning. The article examines the path forged by African Americans in world language study, signals gaps in the present body of knowledge, and suggests future directions for investigations into this important topic in the field of applied linguistics and SLA for ARAL's 40th anniversary.

Enacting culturally sustaining immersion pedagogy through SFL and translanguaging design

“…This contextualized view of language allowed him address content‐language integration (e.g., Turkan et al, 2014) and position his students agentively in and through translanguaging design. The findings from this study suggest that for language immersion teachers, like teachers in other contexts, knowledge of content and language integration alone is not enough; rather this knowledge must be enacted in ways that are culturally sustaining (e.g., Cavallaro & Sembiante, 2021; Harman & Khote, 2018; Harman, 2018; Mizell, 2021; Sembiante & Tian, 2021) and consider students' racialized identities in the language classroom (Anya, 2017, 2020). As Zheng (2019) described, immersion teachers need critical language awareness that develops their functional linguistic understanding and enables them and to scaffold content and language integration through culturally sustaining immersion pedagogies.…”

“…As Paris noted, these pedagogies can "support young people in sustaining the cultural and linguistic competence of their communities while simultaneously offering access to dominant cultural competence" (Paris, 2012, p. 95). In our work in immersion education, we view culturally sustaining immersion pedagogies as part of building an immersion classroom community that is socially just (e.g., Glynn et al, 2018) and that acknowledges students' "racialized identities" (Anya, 2017), along with the ways in which language education has historically limited the language learning experiences of culturally and linguistically diverse students-and specifically, African American students (Anya, 2017(Anya, , 2020.…”

“…For instance, of the six focal students in this study, four of the focal students-Tasha, Mariah, Oscar, and Sasha-were African American. Informed by our ethnographic exploration of his classroom, we witnessed Ahmed's knowledge of their families and of African American Language (AAL) (e.g., Anya, 2020), through which he established deep connections with them and leveraged these relationships to position them as agents in language and literacy activity in varieties of French and English. In our exploration of student positioning in Ahmed's classroom, we chose to focus predominantly on Tasha, Mariah, Oscar, and Sasha because they were highly visible in the interactive data from Ahmed's teaching and we wanted shed light on the language learning experiences of African American students (Anya, 2017(Anya, , 2020.…”

The Impact of Race on Speech Perception and Accentedness Judgments in Racially Diverse and Non-Diverse Groups

“…From the speaker perspective, these results are also important for other minoritized groups. For instance, Black students have the lowest participation in language learning classes in the US (Anya, 2020).…”

“…It is therefore important to understand how race and the colonial history of English shape perception of marginalized varieties to ameliorate (i) classroom practices, (ii) language policy making, (iii) language assessment tools, and (iv) multilingual practices (Anya 2020;Dewaele et al, 2020;Flores & Rosa 2015;Kang et al 2020;Rosa 2019;Rosa 2016).…”