‘Unlearning Privileges’: Interrupting Pre-Service Teachers Deficit Thinking of Immigrant Students with Origins in the South

Abstract

Drawing from critical and postcolonial theoretical perspectives, this paper demonstrates how a teacher educator has implemented some experiential strategies in order to encourage pre-service teachers to challenge their largely unexamined, deficit thinking regarding their English as an Additional Language (EAL) students. Teacher educators preparing teachers to work effectively and equitably in a linguistically, culturally and racially diverse context can employ teaching strategies described in this paper.

EAL Writers and Peer Tutors: Pedagogies that Resist the “Broken Writer” Myth

“…higher order concerns versus lower order concerns. This finding is quite promising because in second language acquisition (SLA) literature, EAL writers have been seen from a deficit-oriented perspective (Guo, 2015;Marshall, 2012;Tangen & Spooner-Lane, 2008). Postsecondary teachers might stereotypically assume that all EAL writers' work will have grammatical errors and that the written products might not be as good as the work produced by native English-speaking students.…”