Reconceptualizing “Home” and “School”

Language: Taking a Critical

Translingual Approach in the English
Classroom
KATE SELTZER
Rowan University
Glassboro, New Jersey, United States

This article adds to the growing body of literature that calls for shifts
in teachers’ and researchers’ stance and practice toward a re-seeing
and re-hearing of students for their linguistic assets and expertise. By
taking up the theory of translanguaging (Garc
ıa, 2009; Garc
ıa & Li
Wei, 2014) to understand students’ language practices, I trouble the
labels and terms so often assigned to language minoritized students,
particularly those that fall into the larger categories of “home” and
“school” language. To do this, I draw on data collected during a year-
long ethnographic study of an 11th-grade English language arts class-
room in New York City. This study took up what I term a critical
translingual approach (Seltzer, 2019), engaging language minoritized
students—bilingual students as well as those students traditionally
viewed as monolingual—in metalinguistic conversations, literacy activ-
ities, and writing that delved into the role language played in their
identities and lived experiences. By centering students’ talk and writ-
ing about their own languages, this article serves as a call to educa-
tors and researchers to relinquish conceptualizations of “standard” or
“native” language and to embrace those that foster students’ critical
integration of new features into their existing linguistic repertoires.
doi: 10.1002/tesq.530

I n working with students learning English in schools, U.S. educators

and researchers take up a variety of terms. Students are labeled “lim-
ited English proficient” or “English language learner” and then, often,
“newcomer” or “student with interrupted/incomplete formal educa-
tion (SIFE)” or “long-term English language learner (LTELL)”. Even
those students who test out of the English language learner category
carry labels: “former ELLs” in some states, “reclassified fluent English
proficient (RFEP)” in others. Students’ languages, too, are labeled—they

986 TESOL QUARTERLY Vol. 53, No. 4, December 2019

© 2019 TESOL International Association
have a first language and a second language, a native language and a
new language, home language and school or academic language. They
are programmed into ESL and TESOL classes as well as, less commonly,
“heritage language” or “native language arts” classes.
For those who work with the large and diverse population of stu-
dents whose language practices are marginalized by the educational
system, these labels are often accompanied by head-scratching ques-
tions: what is the “first” or “second” language of a student who learned
two languages simultaneously? How is it that some “long-term English
language learners” report speaking no language other than English?
Why do some “native” Spanish speakers fail their foreign language or
world language Spanish classes?
This article is not the first to engage in a “terminological tussle”
(Cunningham, 2018), questioning the labels institutions place on lan-
guage-minoritized1 students (Flores, Kleyn, & Menken, 2015; Flores
& Rosa, 2015). Instead, it adds to the growing body of literature that
calls for shifts in teachers’ and researchers’ stance and practice
toward a re-seeing and re-hearing of students for their linguistic
assets and expertise. In taking up the theory of translanguaging
(Garc
ıa, 2009; Garc
ıa & Li Wei, 2014) to understand students’ lan-
guage practices—rather than an external, named language perspec-
tive (Otheguy, Garc
ıa, & Reid, 2015, 2018) that reifies dichotomies
like “home” and “school” language—I trouble those labels and terms
assigned to language—minoritized students. To do this, I draw on
data collected during a yearlong ethnographic study of an 11th-grade
English language arts classroom that took up what I have termed a
critical translingual approach (Seltzer, 2019), engaging language-mi-
noritized students in metalinguistic conversations, literacy activities,
and writing about the role language plays in their identities and lived
experiences.
This article features students’ explicit talk about language—what
Rymes (2014) calls metacommentary—and their writing to broaden the
conversation about language-minoritized students’ language practices
past the limiting labels placed on them. Students’ own metacommen-
tary reveals their critical takes on their own languaging and serves as a
counternarrative to what is written and said about them in schools and
in research. As a white educator and researcher whose ways of hearing
language-minoritized students have been shaped by deficit language
ideologies, I center students’ metacommentary both as a way to
1
I use this term to refer to students whose language practices are minoritized by the ide-
ologies that circulate through schools and other institutions in U.S. society. Though
these students may not be in the numerical minority in their school or community, their
ways of languaging are marginalized and portrayed as deviations from an ideological
“standard,” which often ties them to labels and discourses of minoritization.

RECONCEPTUALIZING “HOME” AND “SCHOOL” LANGUAGE 987

develop my own raciolinguistic literacies (Flores & Rosa, 2015; Seltzer
& de los R
ıos, 2018) and to provide other educators and researchers
with insights into alternative approaches to teaching the named lan-
guage of English.
I first delve into research that has attempted both to describe and
critique what a variety of fields routinely refer to as “academic lan-
guage.” By describing commonsense conceptualizations of academic
language and critiques of such conceptualizations, I discuss how the
diglossia inherent to discussions of academic language can be destabi-
lized through the theoretical lens of translanguaging. I then extend
this framing to a discussion of the critical translingual approach taken
up with one English language arts teacher, Ms. Winter, as we co-de-
signed a year of instruction for her 11th-grade students. Integral to
this approach is the design of classroom discussions and literacy activi-
ties that are metalinguistic and bring to the surface not only students’
diverse language practices but their translingual sensibilities (Seltzer, in
press). It is through the voicing of those translingual sensibilities in
Ms. Winter’s classroom that new understandings of home and school
languaging emerged.

THE HOME/SCHOOL LANGUAGE DICHOTOMY:

ACADEMIC LANGUAGE AND LANGUAGE-MINORITIZED
STUDENTS

Despite its ubiquity in conversations about language-minoritized stu-

dents, researchers and educators have not agreed on a definition of
academic language. Taking up a Bakhtinian lens, Vald
es (2004) compre-
hensively explains that conversations around so-called academic lan-
guage are multivoiced and complex, and no matter how neutral these
heteroglossic conversations might seem, they take place “in a context
that is influenced by ideologies about the standard language” (p. 105).
Research has highlighted the deficit perspectives inherent to concep-
tual frameworks that distinguish between home and school language.
One such framework, which continues to be taught acritically in TESOL
and bilingual teacher preparation contexts, is Cummins’s (1979, 2008)
differentiation of basic interpersonal communicative skills (BICS) and
cognitive academic language proficiency (CALP) for students learning a
new language. The argument that such students acquire BICS (which
might fall under the category of home or community language) sooner
and more easily than CALP (school language) rests on the existence of
a dichotomy between the two. Critiques of this concept address both the
“slippery, unstable” (Aukerman, 2007, p. 629) nature of the BICS/CALP

988 TESOL QUARTERLY

divide and the deleterious effects it can have on the experiences of stu-
dents labeled English language learners when they are “relegated to sep-
arate academic trajectories, where English academic language
development is emphasized at the expense of the broader curriculum”
(Poza, 2016, p. 404).
This critical research offers alternative framings of and approaches
to teaching language and literacy to language—minoritized students,
particularly those labeled English language learners. Aukerman (2007)
recommends that teachers engage students in “socially meaningful par-
ticipation” where “children appropriate the language they need in
order to fulfill a range of purposes, both academic and nonacademic”
(p. 632). Poza (2016) suggests moving students from “the margins of
school interactions and the learning of academic content” toward
learning environments where “academic varieties and their rules are
negotiated” (p. 418). Flores (2016) challenges researchers and educa-
tors to question racializing deficit perspectives that leave “few available
discourses that could even imagine [language-minoritized students of
color] as gifted sociolinguists” and advocates for engagement “in met-
alinguistic conversations that support students in reflecting on the dif-
ferent ways that they currently use language to discuss particular topics
as well as in exploring other ways that language is used to explore
these topics” (paras. 8–9). Rather than teaching academic language as
dichotomous from students’ other language practices, this approach
would “support language-minoritized students in becoming language
architects who are able to apply the knowledge that they gained
through their critical inquiry to design language in their own terms
and for their own purposes” (Flores, 2016, para. 10). In order to take
up these kinds of alternative pedagogies, educators and researchers
must also take up new theoretical framings that can help shift conver-
sations about language-minoritized students and about language itself.
One such framing is that of translanguaging.

TRANSLANGUAGING IN THEORY AND PRACTICE:

SHIFTING PERSPECTIVES AND “DISINVENTING”
NAMED LANGUAGES

Integral to a theory of translanguaging (Garc
ıa, 2009; Garc
ıa & Li

Wei, 2014) is a shift in perspective on the language practices of bilin-
gual people. An external perspective views bilingual language use from
the outside, with an ear tuned to the named languages (Makoni &
Pennycook, 2006; Otheguy et al., 2015, 2018) speakers use. On the
contrary, an internal perspective understands bilingual language use

RECONCEPTUALIZING “HOME” AND “SCHOOL” LANGUAGE 989

from the speakers themselves, who draw from a unitary linguistic sys-
tem to assemble features socially categorized as English, Spanish, or
any other named language. At times, bilingual speakers may sound
like monolingual speakers of a named language, but always at work,
albeit suppressed, are myriad other linguistic features. Other times,
bilingual speakers have fuller access to their integrated repertoire and
engage in translanguaging with other bilingual speakers. Thus,
translanguaging refers to “the deployment of a speaker’s full linguistic
repertoire without regard for watchful adherence to the socially and
politically defined boundaries of named (and usually national and
state) languages” (Otheguy et al., 2015, p. 283).
Translanguaging has been taken up both in theory and in practice,
offering a lens for understanding and leveraging students’ languaging
in transformative ways. Studies in bilingual, TESOL and ESL, and “gen-
eral education” classrooms (Garc
ıa, Johnson, & Seltzer, 2017; Garc
ıa &
Kleyn, 2016) have documented the ways in which translanguaging can
provide students with access to classroom content, generate higher
levels of participation and richer engagement with texts, build strong
relationships between students and their teachers, and enable students
to represent their bilingual, bicultural voices and experiences. Addition-
ally, researchers (de los R
ıos & Seltzer, 2017; Flores, 2014) have high-
lighted the inherently political and transgressive nature of
translanguaging, demonstrating how a translanguaging pedagogy can
provide language-minoritized students with opportunities to critique
and resist the monoglossic ideologies present in their education.
Though a translanguaging perspective destabilizes the very notion
of languages and concurrent ideological concepts and labels like “L1,”
“L2,” “native speaker,” and even “monolingual” and “bilingual,” such
constructs have real consequences in the lives of language-minoritized
people (Otheguy et al., 2015). However, in acknowledging the “invent-
edness” of named languages, we can also “disinvent” related constructs
that elevate certain language practices and speakers and marginalize
others (Makoni & Pennycook, 2006). It is this dual focus—destabiliz-
ing oppressive language ideologies and unpacking the real effects of
those ideologies on language-minoritized people—that is at the heart
of a critical translingual approach in the classroom.

A CRITICAL TRANSLINGUAL APPROACH: DRAWING ON

STUDENTS’ TRANSLINGUAL SENSIBILITIES
The burgeoning body of literature on translanguaging approaches
in classrooms has highlighted the importance of valuing and

990 TESOL QUARTERLY

leveraging students’ full linguistic and semiotic repertoire in instruc-
tion. Whether the classroom is officially English-medium or bilingual,
all students should be given the opportunity to access all of their lin-
guistic resources for both meaning making and socioemotional well-
being (Garc
ıa et al., 2017). This literature has provided important
insights into how translanguaging can shape curricular development
and instruction (Garc
ıa & Kleyn, 2016; Garc
ıa et al., 2017), and assess-
ment (Ascenzi-Moreno, 2018; Flores & Schissel, 2014) in ways that ben-
efit language-minoritized students.
A critical translingual approach extends existing research on class-
room translanguaging in a number of important ways. First, this
approach starts from the assumption that all language-minoritized stu-
dents—both bilingual students and those viewed as monolingual, but
whose uses of English have been marginalized, such as African Ameri-
can students—engage in translanguaging and would benefit from lin-
guistic flexibility in their education. Additionally, this approach
centers in curriculum and instruction the disinvention of named lan-
guages and related ideologies that render students’ languaging defi-
cient or incomplete. In this way, a critical translingual approach moves
past understandings of translanguaging as merely “scaffolding” toward
“proficiency” in a named language and toward a translation of this
kind of poststructural linguistic thinking into practice in language and
literacy classrooms.
A critical translingual approach requires that classroom educators
engage with scholarship that pertains to translanguaging and related
theories. This professional development and, ideally, ongoing reflec-
tive conversations with other educators should encourage teachers to
unpack the language ideologies at work both in the broader education
system and at the classroom level. This approach asks that teachers
then translate this professional learning into their instructional
designs, especially emphasizing (a) the use of multilingual, multidi-
alectical, and multimodal texts; (b) the development of classroom
activities that bring forth and leverage students’ multimodal, digital,
multilingual, and multidialectical language and literacy practices; and
(c) the development of writing projects and a writing process that
deemphasizes monolingual, standard language ideologies and encour-
ages code meshing, or the integration of different language practices,
styles, and modes in a text (Canagarajah, 2012).
The yearlong ethnographic study I carried out in Ms. Winter’s 11th-
grade English language arts classroom is one example of a critical
translingual approach in action. The enactment of this approach
brought to the surface not only students’ translanguaging, but their
metacommentary (Rymes, 2014) about the impact of language ideolo-
gies on their lives and a collective expression of their translingual

RECONCEPTUALIZING “HOME” AND “SCHOOL” LANGUAGE 991

sensibilities (Seltzer, in press). In working with students over the
course of the year, hearing and reading about their experiences with
language, I noted a number of common experiences, from physical
mobility, both in the United States and transnationally, to the use of
technology and social media in ways that shortened linguistic dis-
tances. I relate these experiences to a series of sensibilities: the impor-
tance of meaning making in interaction, an understanding of
language as fluid and interconnected, an interest in different lan-
guages, and a resistance to and transgression of monoglossic norms
and ideologies, which often manifested as pride in linguistic “mixing”
and a rejection of deficit portrayals of minoritized language practices.
Students’ translingual sensibilities set the course for the design of
weekly lessons, activities, and projects. Their questions and comments
—as well as the texts they shared with us through email, social
media, and classroom journals—were learning experiences for Ms.
Winter and me, because our own translingual sensibilities were more
emergent than those of the students and drove us to ask different
questions, find different texts, and design different writing prompts
that would engage students in metalinguistic inquiry. Students’
translingual sensibilities, mainly articulated through their metacom-
mentary, also opened my mind as a researcher. Following Rymes’s
(2014) advice, I listened for those elements of language that students
discussed, imitated, reported on, and consistently revisited. In this
way, students’ talk about their own language practices stimulated my
thinking about how such practices are forced into reductive cate-
gories and labeled with terms that do not account for their complex-
ity, creativity, and possibility.

A CRITICAL TRANSLINGUAL ENGLISH CLASSROOM:

THE RESEARCH PROJECT

Beginning the summer before the 2015–2016 academic year, Ms.

Winter and I met regularly to read about and discuss topics ranging
from translanguaging to raciolinguistic ideologies (Flores & Rosa,
2015) to critical literacy (Morrell, 2008; Shor, 1999) and critical lan-
guage awareness (Alim, 2005; Clark, Fairclough, Ivani
c, & Martin-
Jones, 1991). As we read scholarly articles and blogs, excerpts from
practitioner books, and past student work, we reflected on the ideolo-
gies at work in English classrooms and how the class might interrogate
those ideologies while still building the requisite language, literacy,
and critical thinking skills needed to pass the high-stakes standardized
test given to all 11th-grade students in New York State.

992 TESOL QUARTERLY

 We planned to begin the year with an introduction to key ideas and
terms that would enable students to delve into their linguistic inquiry.
Along with introducing these ideas and terms, which provided new
ways of articulating knowledge and understandings students often
already had, we included a series of activities that aimed to bring stu-
dents’ language practices to the surface of the classroom. For example,
students created and then took a linguistic survey, created language
diversity pies (Rymes, 2015), and read texts and watched videos about
the various ways that people use language in the United States. The
units that followed further explored the role of language in students’
lives, from how it shaped their identities to how it intersected with sys-
tems of power. Lastly, students wrote mock college essays that demon-
strated their learning over the course of the year through the
purposeful integration of their different language practices.

Setting and Participants

Ms. Winter’s four sections of 11th-grade English were located in

South Bronx High School2 (SBHS) in New York City. The largest
group of the student population was designated Hispanic (71%), fol-
lowed by African American (26%); the majority of students (90%)
received free or reduced-price lunch. Students labeled by the state as
English language learners made up 19% of the population. Though
most of the students who carried this label spoke Spanish, there were
smaller numbers of students who spoke Arabic, French, Albanian,
Urdu, and Fula.
Much like the label English language learner, the racial and ethnic
groups into which students were categorized often concealed their
lived realities. Some students labeled “African American” were actually
immigrants or children of immigrants from Africa, Jamaica, and Haiti,
and their cultural backgrounds, languages, and racial identities were
different from those students with African ancestry tied to slavery
whose families had lived in the United States for generations. A small
number of the large population of “Hispanic” students had emigrated
from Mexico and Honduras and felt minoritized among their mostly
Dominican and Puerto Rican peers. Other “Hispanic” students identi-
fied themselves by their hybrid ethnic identities: “I’m Puerto Rican
and Italian” or “My mother is from Cuba and my dad is from the
Dominican Republic.” Whenever possible, I draw on students’ self-
identifications to avoid sorting them into the kinds of categories and
labels under critique in this article.
2
The name of the school is a pseudonym, as are the names of all participants.

RECONCEPTUALIZING “HOME” AND “SCHOOL” LANGUAGE 993

 As a former English teacher at the school, I had known Ms. Winter
since she began teaching at SBHS, approximately 10 years before the
study took place. However, I got to know her in a new capacity when
she participated in the City University of New York–New York State Ini-
tiative on Emergent Bilinguals (CUNY-NYSIEB)3 research project.
Because of her experiences learning about translanguaging through
that project, as well as her creative and passionate uptake of translan-
guaging strategies in her own classroom, I asked her to participate in
this project as my thought partner and collaborator, and she agreed.
Though Ms. Winter had strong relationships with her students, her
racial identity, socioeconomic background, and language practices dif-
fered greatly from theirs. She identified as white and upper middle
class, and before becoming a teacher she graduated with an English
degree from an Ivy League university. Though her father had emi-
grated to the United States from Italy as an adult, Ms. Winter did not
identify as bilingual and thought of English as her first language.
These details about Ms. Winter’s background speak to the common
disconnects that exist between teachers and language-minoritized stu-
dents of color. For students, teachers like Ms. Winter are often the
embodiments of those whom Flores and Rosa (2015) call white listen-
ing subjects, who hear deficiency in the language practices they per-
ceive as deviating from an assumed (white) norm. Throughout the
year, Ms. Winter worked to hone her translanguaging stance (Garc
ıa
et al., 2017) and raciolinguistic literacies (Seltzer & de los R
ıos, 2018),
becoming attuned to her own deeply held ideologies and more aware
of how they contributed to the marginalization of her students. Similar
to my experience as a researcher in the classroom, as Ms. Winter lis-
tened and learned from her students, her listening practices became
more critical and she began to question the very ideologies that posi-
tioned her as “linguistic expert.”

Data Collection and Analysis

After working closely with Ms. Winter to develop the outline of the
yearlong curriculum, I took on the role of participant-observer in her
classroom in fall 2015. In this role, I looked for evidence of how Ms.
Winter was translating her professional learning into her practice and
how students were engaging with the curriculum we had co-designed.
I observed Ms. Winter’s four classroom sections approximately three
times per week from September 2015 to June 2016. Starting in Octo-
ber, I audio recorded and transcribed classroom sessions to document
3
For more information about the CUNY-NYSIEB project, see Garc
ıa and Kleyn (2016).

994 TESOL QUARTERLY

both Ms. Winter’s and the students’ metacommentary and translan-
guaging.
In addition to these audio recordings and transcriptions, I collected
student and teacher work, took pictures of any visual work they cre-
ated (e.g., posters, collage), and conducted semistructured interviews
with Ms. Winter and select students. The resulting body of data
includes approximately 100 hours of audio recordings, a variety of stu-
dent writing samples, Ms. Winter’s PowerPoint presentations and
handouts, three recorded and transcribed interviews with Ms. Winter
(at the beginning, middle, and end of the project), and recordings
and transcriptions of short interviews with 14 students about their
experiences writing their college essays.
It is important to note that most of the students’ classroom meta-
commentary, writing, and interviews took place in English. Though
this could be seen as a limitation, I wish to trouble the notion that any
languaging done on the part of language-minoritized speakers is “only
in English.” I contend that for such speakers, translanguaging is always
present, even if it is below the visible and audible level of the class-
room (Garc
ıa et al., 2017). I cannot know whether students’ metacom-
mentary and writing would have been different in a different
classroom context (though almost certainly it would have). With that
said, our approach aimed to make space for students to talk about
their own languaging and experiences with language ideologies on
their own terms, even if that meant doing so in what might sound like
“English only.” As I hope to show in this article, students’ uses of and
thoughts about English were highly complex and offer insights into
how educators and researchers have labeled and quantified their lan-
guage practices in ways that have further marginalized them.
The rich and varied data collected from this study enabled me to
triangulate my findings and draw on a number of different perspec-
tives. To ensure rigorous analysis, I engaged in a systemtic approach
to coding that tracked both deductive codes that related to my
research questions and a priori understandings and inductive codes
that came up from participants’ metacommentary. After several read-
ings of the data, I aggregated these codes into two sets of themes,
which I then compared and integrated, looking for similarities, dif-
ferences, tensions, and insights. In addition to thematic coding, I
drew on elements of discourse analysis, paying attention to recurring
metaphors, turns of phrase, and vocabulary present in participants’
metacommentary and writing. I also used Gee’s (2011) discourse
analysis tools to understand “what speakers or writers mean, intend,
and seek to do and accomplish in the world by the way in which
they have used language” (p. x).

RECONCEPTUALIZING “HOME” AND “SCHOOL” LANGUAGE 995

 Lastly, my analysis benefitted greatly from my ongoing relationship
with Ms. Winter and some of the students. Even now, approximately
three years after the study concluded, I still reach out to Ms. Winter to
get her take on what occurred (and continues to occur) in her class-
room. I share drafts of my writings, call her to recollect details, and we
jointly reflect on the work that went on the first year she taught our
co-created curriculum. Ms. Winter also helps me reach former stu-
dents—all of whom have since graduated—to ask them questions that
have arisen over time. These longstanding relationships and member
checks (Lincoln & Guba, 1985) have enabled me to stay close to this
project and push my thinking about the questions that arose over the
course of that year.

COMPLICATING HOME AND SCHOOL LANGUAGING:

STUDENTS’ METACOMMENTARY
I turn now to students’ metacommentary, which complicates terms
like “home language” and “school” or “academic” language. These
terms dichotomize students’ language practices and bind them to sep-
arate physical spaces and ideologies. However, as students’ metacom-
mentary will show, their understandings of their own languaging were
far more complex than these terms allow. I have grouped students’
metacommentary into four themes, all of which present challenges to
—and possible reconceptualizations of—existing discourses about
home and school languaging.

Home and School Language: Which Is Which?

When students wrote their final college essays, which explicitly

invited them to integrate different language practices into their writ-
ing, they made complex choices about which language practices to
include (Seltzer, in press). In interviews conducted with several stu-
dents about these writing choices, they discussed their rationale for
including some but not other of their language practices. For exam-
ple, Marie and Lucia—two students whose multilingualism was often
overlooked in school because of their strong command of English—
made the following statements about their uses of French and Spanish,
respectively, but not what they termed “slang” or “AAVE” (African
American Vernacular English, the term Ms. Winter and her students
used in the classroom):

996 TESOL QUARTERLY

Marie: I chose to include standard academic English, and I’m going to
incorporate one of my language practices that’s not, like, you know,
slang or AAVE. It’s just like a whole new language I speak.
Kate: Which—what language—
Marie: French. I wanna include that to let them know that I do speak another
language. But I chose not to write in AAVE ’cause—I mean, to me I
personally feel like . . . you know, in a college essay, that’s what they
want. So yeah, I feel comfortable just using that. (Student interview, 5/
19/16)
Lucia: Well, like, Spanish . . . I feel like maybe it might slide [in the essay]
because you remind them that you have two languages. Some people
aren’t aware of—that slang can be two languages. So I think that
they’ll think you’re just uneducated because of that. They think that
slang is just uneducated and, uh, two languages is . . . you’re
multilingual. (Student interview, 6/7/16)
By choosing to include French and Spanish in their college essays,
but not AAVE or slang, Marie and Lucia exhibited an understanding
that the former named languages might be sanctioned in school writ-
ing. The use of French and Spanish in an academic essay “might
slide,” as Lucia put it, because it alerts readers to the fact that she is
“multilingual,” not “uneducated” (as she might be perceived if she
used AAVE or slang). The two students’ writing choices here reveal a
nuanced understanding of which of their home language practices
might actually pass as school language because of their prestige in the
view of their readers.
During a small-group conversation, Jania, an African American stu-
dent, further complicated the dualistic nature of home and school lan-
guaging by locating school language in her home:

Kate: So who speaks standard English?

Jania: My mother. Professionals. Old people. My grandmother—she speaks
standard English all the time. You can’t speak to her in slang. That
would be a smack across your face.
Gina: So how you have to speak to your grandmother?
Jania: [Changes her style of speaking] You have to speak to her like this, you
have to speak to her very proper, and in complete sentences all the time
—
Gina: Sophisticated?

RECONCEPTUALIZING “HOME” AND “SCHOOL” LANGUAGE 997

Jania: Very sophisticated, very calm. (Classroom transcript and field notes, 11/
23/15)
Here Jania ascribes “standard English” to her family, namely her
mother and grandmother (as well as “professionals” and “old peo-
ple”). In Jania’s home, language practices like slang, which she
reported using in school with her friends and with teachers she felt
comfortable with, are not accepted. In fact, when talking to her grand-
mother she has to shift her language practices to be more “proper,”
“sophisticated,” and “calm”—adjectives students used at other times to
describe the language of the school and professional spheres.
During another class, Yari, a student from the Dominican Republic
labeled an English language learner, and Doris, a multilingual student
from Sierra Leone, engaged in a conversation that muddied what
counts as home and school languages when one “home” language per-
vades a school environment. When planning out a role-play, which
asked students to enact situations in which they navigated different
language practices, Ms. Winter first asked students to think about
when and where they used such different language practices:

Yari: It’s mostly during school.

Doris: No, me at home. ’Cause here’s it’s only one language, English.
Yari: Well . . . with you. Because I use Spanish and English. (Classroom
transcript, 4/7/16)
Because the student body of SBHS was majority Latinx, Yari’s com-
ment points to the way that a “minority” language like Spanish can
transcend home and school dualities in Latinx-majority spaces. On the
other hand, Doris—one of the few African students and the only Krio-
speaking student at the school—sees “only one language, English” as
the language of school. This makes sense, as Doris does not hear or
use Krio during the school day, nor does she use the other three “na-
tive languages” she reported speaking: Mende, Temne, and Limba.
Thus, unlike Doris, the fact that Yari is in the demographic majority
and uses Spanish, a language practice that is omnipresent in both the
school and the neighborhood, leads Yari to her perception that both
languages are part of her school languaging.

“I Just Wanna Get Out”: School Language as Protection

Another way that students’ metacommentary destabilized the
home/school language dichotomy was their description of language
practices typically associated with school (i.e., what students referred

998 TESOL QUARTERLY

to as “SAE” or “standard American English”) as protection against hav-
ing to share other more vulnerable or intimate parts of their lives and
identities. Two bilingual students, Yessica and Amir, explicitly linked
the use of this kind of “standard” English in writing to their reticence
to share parts of their lives. During one whole-class conversation, Ms.
Winter asked if all writers, on some level, wrote about their own lives.
Yessica, whose family hailed from the Dominican Republic, seemed
frustrated by this idea:

Yessica: I think it’s possible not to write about yourself. Like, there’s people who
would want to be another person, so they would try to change
everything up. They would probably talk proper English and
everything. If your goal is to not put anything about you [in your
writing], that would happen eventually. You just have to focus on it.
[Ms. Winter acknowledges her point and moves on to another student.
Yessica says quietly to me, “I would switch up everything. My name’s
not Yessica, it’s Jane.” I laugh a little, and she says, without smiling,
“I’m serious.”] (Classroom transcript and field notes, 3/17/16)
Amir, whose family is from Yemen, articulated a similar reticence to
tell his own story during an interview about his college essay, in which
he had used “only standard English.” During that interview, I asked
Amir whether he would include any of his other language practices,
which he had identified as “a little bit of Arabic” and “lots of slang
and AAVE”:

Amir: I wouldn’t talk about my identity like that. I wouldn’t give them my
identity. I wouldn’t use some words. Like some words in AAVE? Yeah, I
wouldn’t take a risk. I’d try to write standard academic English.
Kate: And when you say you wouldn’t give them your identity—
Amir: Yeah. I don’t wanna talk about myself. And my background and stuff.
Kate: Why not?
Amir: I feel like . . . they don’t need to know that stuff. (Student interview, 6/
7/16)
Present in Yessica’s and Amir’s words is an understanding that
school languaging (described as “standard” and “proper” English),
rather than those language practices more closely linked to their iden-
tities, can serve as a shield against the kind of marginalizing percep-
tions students experience as a result of their home languaging. Using
this kind of school language, then, was a way of avoiding a “risk” and
even becoming “another person,” which enables students like Yessica
and Amir to keep their “stories” and their “identities” to themselves

RECONCEPTUALIZING “HOME” AND “SCHOOL” LANGUAGE 999

(for more on students’ college essay writing choices, see Seltzer, in
press).
As part of SBHS’s project-based learning approach, all students were
required to present one summative assessment to other teachers at the
school. During that presentation, students were given the opportunity
to explain their decisions and their learning, and a small group of
teachers provided feedback. In the quote that serves as the subheading
for this section, Honduran student Adam shared his experience talk-
ing to another English teacher about his college essay:

Adam: She said not to use slang or other language practices [in my essay].
Just be professional.
Ms. Winter: And what did you say to that?
Adam: Um, I agreed with her.
Ms. Winter: You agreed with her? So in your essay you’re not going to take
any risks?
Adam: I just wanna get out. (Classroom transcript, 5/20/16)
Similar to Yessica and Amir, Adam seems to be expressing that the
use of “professional” language practices (which align ideologically with
school language practices) and the avoidance of linguistic risks in his
writing is a necessary step to “getting out.” In this way, the use of
school languaging is actually the way out of school, not a way to gain
further access to the academic or professional realm, as it is typically
communicated to students. By taking up the language practices associ-
ated with these realms, then, Adam paves his way out of high school
(perhaps toward college, though it was not clear where “getting out”
might lead) without taking the linguistic risks associated with other
home language practices.

“It Stays With Me”: School Language and Identity

Throughout my time in Ms. Winter’s classroom, I heard many stu-

dents speak about their own language practices as different—less
“proper,” “standard,” or “professional”—than those expected of them
in school. However, other students expressed that these school lan-
guage practices were a part of their linguistic repertoires and identi-
ties. This points to yet another complication in the home/school
language dichotomy: What if school language feels like home?
Jacqui, who identified as Puerto Rican, saw the language she used
in school as part of her “regular language” and seemed to associate

1000 TESOL QUARTERLY

the use of those language practices with her identity as a good student
and a motivator for her friends:

Jacqui: I just use my regular language. I don’t switch it up. Like, the
language I use in school, I talk the same way I talk to my friends. Like
to convince them, like, “you have to go to school!” I don’t know, it
sticks with me. It stays with me. Like before, I used to talk very loud,
cursing every other sentence, using slang, but now I don’t use as much
as before. Cause, alright, when you’re learning English, all these words
you learn, they eventually stay in your head and you use them. So that
becomes your new language. (Classroom transcript, 3/14/16)
Jacqui links her use of school language to the process of growing
up and maturing. Though she “used to talk” in a different way, the
language she learned in school—specifically in English class—has
“stayed” with her. Though her statement could be read as an apparent
internalization of those raciolinguistic ideologies that render her lan-
guage practices “inappropriate” (being “loud,” “cursing,” and using
“slang”), I struggled to code it as such. Jacqui spoke about her “new
language” with pride, connecting it with her role as a motivator, urg-
ing her friends to go to school. When Jacqui expressed that school
language had come to feel like her “regular” language, it felt reductive
to assume she is merely a subject of such ideologies.
A contradiction also emerged in Faith’s metacommentary. Faith, a
young Latina woman, set herself apart from her peers through her lan-
guage practices. She self-identified as a poet whose “high vocabulary
standards” put her on the receiving end of judgment from two differ-
ent sets of listeners: white listening subjects and members of her own
family and community. As we can see in the following two excerpts,
Faith’s description of her language practices and her attitude toward
her potential audience is highly complex:

Faith: When you read my poetry, even my own family, like my mother or my
cousin, they feel like . . . they can’t relate. Not in the sense that they
don’t know what I’m talking about, but . . . they feel like my writing is
. . . white. Like I read it to my mom and she sits there, for a good, like,
2 minutes after, analyzing everything, and she goes, “Why you talk like
that? You not writing an essay.” And that’s—that’s where I’m most
comfortable, writing poetry. There’s some poems where I have curses and
it comes off as—people could read it and think it’s a rap. But [with
other poems] there’s people who get offended, like, “Oh, you’re not
writing to us, you can’t relate to us.” (Classroom transcript, 4/11/16)
Faith: I feel like, me personally, I could really care less about the white
audience. Cause that’s not my audience. I don’t relate to the white—to

RECONCEPTUALIZING “HOME” AND “SCHOOL” LANGUAGE 1001

 the white society. When I write my poetry and when I write my songs,
I’m not doing it for people who live in suburbs. I’m doing it for my
people, for my block, for people I know who could relate to me. That’s my
audience, that’s my truth. (Classroom transcript, 5/10/16)
Though Faith’s own family describes her poetry as “white” and like
“an essay,” which ideologically links it more with the school realm, she
seems to be trying to define her own authentic writing voice, which
cannot fit neatly into this category. Though her writing and her way of
speaking may be indexically associated with “white” languaging, she
also “could really care less” about white listeners and sees her commu-
nity and “her people” as her audience and her “truth.” In this way, the
dualistic nature of concepts like home and school language are far too
simplistic for someone like Faith, whose identity and language prac-
tices transcend such rigid, ideological categories.

“Not Tricking Them but Tricking Them”: Appropriating

School Language

In conversations about their college essays, some students’ meta-

commentary revealed that their uses of “standard” English were ways
of resisting oppressive language ideologies. In this way, students appro-
priated school language practices in ways that met their needs and
enabled them to express their opinions. In her essay, for example,
Doris chose to write about the topic of linguistic prejudice. Her essay
explained how in Sierra Leone, her language, Krio, was “stolen” by the
British and belittled in the English-medium schools she attended. She
also included a story about her mother, which connected her pride in
Krio to her desire to learn what she calls “standard Academic English”:

Doris: My language represents all the women in my family, most importantly

my mom who decided not to attend my parent-teacher association
meeting because she could not write a full sentence in English.

She will usually say, “A na get natin fi gi ou, na educashin nimir a get
so larn Englesh.” (I do not have anything to give you but education so
learn English.)

My mom’s words made me determined to stand up for what was mine,

this eventually made me determined to learn Standard Academic Eng-
lish for it is the only opportunity I had that will make me prosper as an
immigrant in the United States. . . . I am determined to explain the

1002 TESOL QUARTERLY

 significance of my language and also that it is not inferior, neither is it
superior but it is just a means of communication.

My language is the only thing my ancestors left me as a child. I won’t

ever let it be disempowered, but I can only accomplish that through
education and that is my rationale for planning on going to college
(Doris, College Essay Project).
Though Doris’s essay ends with what might sound like a choice to
uphold a linguistic status quo, her rationale for doing so complicates
this reading. Doris’s use of “standard Academic English” is a form of
appropriation, a way of resisting from within (Canagarajah, 2011) so
she can empower her language and fight the linguistic prejudice expe-
rienced by her mother and the other women in her family. In addi-
tion, her use of her mother’s Krio words in an essay written in a
“standard” style of English contributes to her main idea: that her
home language can be honored and empowered through and along-
side her use of school language.
Eva and Osvaldo, both labeled English language learners, also took
up tactics of linguistic appropriation when it came to the use of school
language in their college essays. When I asked if Eva would actually
submit her essay—which contained, as she put it, standard English,
Spanish, and Mexican Spanish—to a college, she replied that she
would not; the risk was too great, and she did not want to get rejected
because of her essay. When I asked her about future writing, however,
she responded differently:

Kate: If you were to submit a more traditional essay to a college, once you got
in would you consider taking more risks in your writing? Or do you
think you would—
Eva: No, I think I would take some risks.
Kate: Once you got in.
Eva: Yeah. I got in, they can’t tell me not to! (Student interview, 6/7/16)
Osvaldo talked through a similar strategy. Though at first he might
not bring those language practices associated with home into his
school writing, he might do so once he had established himself:

Osvaldo: Say, my first book I’m gonna write, I’ll try to get [my audience], like,
accommodated with me. Slowly but surely I get followers, and then
after a while, I write my second book. I add my language practices
and they would be psyched to read it ’cause they read my first book
first and they’ll think it’s still good, even with my [other] language

RECONCEPTUALIZING “HOME” AND “SCHOOL” LANGUAGE 1003

 practices in it. It’s like tricking them. Like, not tricking them but
tricking them. (Student interview, 6/7/16)
This kind of bait-and-switch tactic is a savvy one for writers like Eva
and Osvaldo. Perhaps this strategy reveals an understanding that their
positionality does not grant them the kind of privilege required to
engage in translingual writing right away. They must slowly build up to
this kind of risk-taking, playing the game first and challenging the
rules later. In this way, Eva and Osvaldo seem to view school languag-
ing as a means to an end, not an end in itself. This kind of attitude
demonstrates that students may not always conceptualize the use of
academic or school language as giving up their identities or losing
their home languages; it may be that students like Doris, Eva, and
Osvaldo appropriate such practices to do, say, and be what they want.

IMPLICATIONS
The first implication of students’ metacommentary is for classroom
practice and for educators who, in particular, teach the named lan-
guage of English to language-minoritized students. All the students I
worked with in this study were keenly aware of how their own language
practices were heard by others and how the perceptions of those lis-
teners impacted their lives. Educators’ awareness of such sophisticated
understandings about language is highly important, because it offers a
new framing of these students as “gifted sociolinguists” (Flores, 2015)
rather than as “English language learners,” “struggling” or “at risk” stu-
dents, or any of the other labels placed on them. This awareness also
offers an entry point for engaging, authentic classroom learning.
Rather than approach the teaching of language and literacy from the
point of view of remediation, teachers can tap into students’ translin-
gual sensibilities, ushering in innovative and creative ways of thinking
about and using language.
A second implication of this work is for those tasked with teacher
preparation across fields such as bilingual, TESOL, and English lan-
guage arts education. If we approach the teaching of English from an
external, named language perspective, we reify those myths and mis-
conceptions that accompany it: that achieving the status of “native
speaker” is the ultimate language learning goal (or is even possible);
that English can be learned in isolation from other language practices;
that monolingual, monodialectical speakers of “standard English” are
the norm (Garc
ıa, 2014). Instead, teacher educators can take up a crit-
ical translingual approach that actively challenges these notions that
are based not in linguistic fact but in ideology and encourages future
teachers to do the same through the design of curricula and

1004 TESOL QUARTERLY

instructional approaches that intentionally bring forth students’
translingual sensibilities and translanguaging practices. By helping all
teachers reframe the teaching of English (or any other named lan-
guage) through a lens of appropriation, flexibility, and creativity,
future educators can learn to facilitate students’ personal linguistic
journeys as they integrate new features into their repertoires.
Lastly, students’ metacommentary about their language practices
has important implications for those researchers working in language
and literacy education. Rather than use dichotomous categories like
home and school/academic language, researchers can (re)orient their
listening practices to truly hear what these students are doing with and
saying about their own language practices. As is evident from the data
presented in this article, when invited to discuss language students are
willing and able to articulate the ways in which such dichotomies fail
to account for the complexities of both their languaging and their
identities. In this way, talk of teaching students academic language as
if it were a subject in its own right ignores the reality that integrating
new linguistic features into their repertoire, especially when those fea-
tures are indexically tied to power and dominance, will never be a sim-
ple or even desired outcome. Instead, by taking up a theory of
translanguaging in critical, transgressive ways and envisioning class-
rooms as sites where “students can interrogate, negotiate, and appro-
priate new rhetorical and discursive forms without fear of institutional
penalties” (Canagarajah, 1997, p. 191), researchers can shift the focus
away from teaching language-minoritized students “academic English”
to inviting them into ongoing conversations with scholars, popular
media figures, authors, and artists who live and create amid ideological
tensions about language, power, and identity.

THE AUTHOR

Kate Seltzer is an assistant professor of bilingual/TESOL education at Rowan

University, where she teaches preservice and in-service teachers of bi/multilingual
students. She is co-author of the book The Translanguaging Classroom: Leveraging
Student Bilingualism for Learning as well as several articles and book chapters on
classroom translanguaging.

REFERENCES
Alim, H. S. (2005). Critical language awareness in the United States: Revisiting
issues and revising pedagogies in a resegregated society. Educational Researcher,
34(7), 24–31. https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X034007024.

RECONCEPTUALIZING “HOME” AND “SCHOOL” LANGUAGE 1005

Ascenzi-Moreno, L. (2018). Translanguaging and responsive assessment adapta-
tions: Emergent bilingual readers through the lens of possibility. Language Arts,
95, 355–369.
Aukerman, M. (2007). Rethinking the conversational/academic language profi-
ciency distinction in early literacy instruction. Reading Teacher, 60, 626–635.
https://doi.org/10.1598/RT.60.7.3.
Canagarajah, A. S. (1997). Safe houses in the contact zone: Coping strategies of
African American students in the academy. College Composition and Communica-
tion, 48(2), 173–196. https://doi.org/10.2307/358665.
Canagarajah, A. S. (2011). Codemeshing in academic writing: Identifying teach-
able strategies for translanguaging. Modern Language Journal, 95, 401–417.
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.15404781.2011.01207.x0026-7902/11.
Canagarajah, A. S. (2012). Translingual practice. New York, NY: Routledge.
Clark, R., Fairclough, N., Ivanic, R., & Martin-Jones, M. (1991). Critical language
awareness Part II: Towards critical alternatives. Language and Education, 5(1),
41–54. https://doi.org/10.1080/09500789109541298.
Cummins, J. (1979). Cognitive/academic language proficiency, linguistic interde-
pendence, the optimum age question and some other matters. Working Papers
on Bilingualism, 19, 121–129.
Cummins, J. (2008). BICS and CALP: Empirical and theoretical status of the dis-
tinction. In B. Street & N. H. Hornberger (Eds.), Encyclopedia of language and
education, Vol. 2: Literacy (2nd ed., pp. 71–83). New York, NY: Springer.
Cunningham, C. (2018). Terminological tussles: Taking issue with “English as an
additional language” and “languages other than English”. Power and Education,
11(1), 121–128. https://doi.org/10.1177/1757743818806919.
de los Rios, C. V., & Seltzer, K. (2017). Translanguaging, coloniality, and English
classrooms: An exploration of two bicoastal urban classrooms. Research in the
Teaching of English, 52(1), 55–76.
Flores, N. (2014, July 19). Let’s not forget that translanguaging is a political act.
Retrieved from https://educationallinguist.wordpress.com/2014/07/19/lets-
not-forget-that-translanguaging-is-a-political-act/.
Flores, N. (2015, October 1). Is it time for a moratorium on academic language?
Retrieved from https://educationallinguist.wordpress.com/2015/10/01/is-it-
time-for-a-moratorium-on.
Flores, N. (2016, March 25). What if we treated language-minoritized children like
gifted sociolinguists? Retrieved from https://educationallinguist.wordpress.c
om/2016/03/25/what-if-we-treated-language-minoritized-children-like-gifted-soc
iolinguists/.
Flores, N., Kleyn, T., & Menken, K. (2015). Looking holistically in a climate of par-
tiality: Identities of students labeled long-term English language learners. Jour-
nal of Language, Identity and Education, 14(2), 113–132. https://doi.org/10.
1080/15348458.2015.1019787.
Flores, N., & Rosa, J. (2015). Undoing appropriateness: Raciolinguistic ideologies
and language diversity in education. Harvard Educational Review, 85(2), 149–
171. https://doi.org/10.17763/0017-8055.85.2.149.
Flores, N., & Schissel, J. L. (2014). Dynamic bilingualism as the norm: Envisioning
a heteroglossic approach to standards-based reform. TESOL Quarterly, 48, 454–
479. https://doi.org/10.1002/tesq.182.
Garc
ıa, O. (2009). Bilingual education in the 21st century: A global perspective. Malden,
MA: Wiley/Blackwell.
Garc
ıa, O. (2014). TESOL translanguaged in NYS: Alternative perspectives. NYS
TESOL Journal, 1(1), 2–10.

1006 TESOL QUARTERLY

Garc
ıa, O., Johnson, S., & Seltzer, K. (2017). The translanguaging classroom: Leverag-
ing student bilingualism for learning. Philadelphia, PA: Caslon.
Garc
ıa, O., & Kleyn, T. (Eds.). (2016). Translanguaging with multilingual students:
Learning from classroom moments. New York, NY: Routledge.
Garc
ıa, O., & Li Wei. (2014). Translanguaging: Language, bilingualism and education.
New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.
Gee, J. P. (2011). How to do discourse analysis: A toolkit. New York, NY: Routledge.
Lincoln, Y. S., & Guba, E. G. (1985). Naturalistic inquiry. London, England: Sage.
Makoni, S., & Pennycook, A. (2006). Disinventing and reconstituting languages. Cleve-
don, England: Multilingual Matters.
Morrell, E. (2008). Critical literacy and urban youth: Pedagogies of access, dissent, and
liberation. New York, NY: Routledge.
Otheguy, R., Garc
ıa, O., & Reid, W. (2015). Clarifying translanguaging and decon-
structing named languages: A perspective from linguistics. Applied Linguistics
Review, 6, 281–307. https://doi.org/10.1515/applirev-2015-0014.
Otheguy, R., Garc
ıa, O., & Reid, W. (2018). A translanguaging view of the linguis-
tic system of bilinguals. Applied Linguistics Review. Advance online publication.
https://doi.org/10.1515/applirev-2018-0020.
Poza, L. (2016). Barreras: Language ideologies, academic language, and the
marginalization of Latin@ English language learners. Whittier Law Review, 37,
401–421.
Rymes, B. (2014). Communicating beyond language: Everyday encounters with diversity.
New York, NY: Routledge.
Rymes, B. (2015, March 24). Language diversity pies. Retrieved from https://citize
nsociolinguistics.com/2015/03/24/language-diversity-pies/.
Seltzer, K. (2019). Performing ideologies: Fostering raciolinguistic literacies
through role-play in a high school English classroom. Journal of Adolescent and
Adult Literacy. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1002/jaal.966.
Seltzer, K. (in press). Translingual writers as mentors in a high school “English”
classroom. In S. Lau & S. Van Viegen (Eds.), Plurilingual pedagogies: Critical and
creative endeavors for equitable language in education. New York, NY: Springer.
Seltzer, K., & de los R
ıos, C. V. (2018). Translating theory to practice: Exploring
teachers’ raciolinguistic literacies in secondary English classrooms. English Edu-
cation, 51(1), 49–79.
Shor, I. (1999). What is critical literacy? Journal of Pedagogy: Pluralism and Practice, 1
(4), Article 2.
Vald
es, G. (2004). Between support and marginalisation: The development of aca-
demic language in linguistic minority children. International Journal of Bilingual
Education and Bilingualism, 7, 102–132. https://doi.org/10.1080/1367005040
8667804.

RECONCEPTUALIZING “HOME” AND “SCHOOL” LANGUAGE 1007