English Language Learners, Labels, Purposes, Standard English, Whiteness, Deficit Views, and Unproblematic Framings: Toward Southern Decoloniality

Abstract

This paper argues for revisiting ways in which English Language Learners (ELLs), and the learner labels attributed to them, are negatively, racially, and pathologically framed and constructed based on, putatively, their English language competence, or their lack of it. It contends that this framing tends to give rise to a raciolinguistic profiling of these learners, as they end up being classified by their race, pan-ethnicity, nationality, immigrant/refugee status, regionality, and at times, by their skin color, in addition to their language abilities. This raciolinguistic framing often engenders other framings such as White, deficit, and poverty framings, and sub-framings like an othering framing (e.g., the racial others and the linguistic others). These framings, together with the normative ways in which ELLs’ language problems are constructed, have been characterized in this paper as misframings. Additionally, employing southern decoloniality, the paper problematizes and critiques the way ELLs are constructed and labeled, and the appropriation of Standard English (SE) as the sole touchstone of acceptable English in the midst of the other varieties of SE and of pluriversal speakers of English. Finally, the paper calls for the provincialization/localization or the deparochialization of English in keeping with its southern decolonial approach.

Situating Some Aspects of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) in South African Higher Education Within Southern Theories

“…In this regard, this paper seeks to briefly critique the construction of SoTL as delineated above. It does so by locating SoTL within the Global South and by building on views expressed on the Global South by SoTL researchers such as Leibowitz (2010) and Samuel (2017) (see also Chaka, 2020Chaka, , 2021. The contention of this paper is that the construction of SoTL as provided above tends to conceal challenges obtaining in most HEIs located in a Global South region such as South Africa.…”

“…The contention of this paper is that the construction of SoTL as provided above tends to conceal challenges obtaining in most HEIs located in a Global South region such as South Africa. This is particularly so because of the material and sociocultural circumstances prevailing at some of the HEIs situated in South Africa as a part of the Global South and owing to the geopolitics of knowledge practices in these HEIs (Chaka, 2021;Looker, 2018;Mignolo, 2002;Samuel, 2017). In this context, the Global South is a conceptual category more than just a geographic location.…”

“…In crude Marxist terms, this is a view that the superstructure (ideology) cannot be changed without changing its base (economics), even though the two Marxian concepts do not mechanically and unidirectionally feed off each other (Ford, 2021). HE curricula in South Africa are not value-free as they are often projected to be; they are influenced by the geopolitics of knowledge production and circulation (Chaka, 2021;de Sousa Santos, 2014;Lazar, 2020;Looker, 2018;Mignolo, 2002;Samuel, 2017). They also tend to have elements of the null curriculum built into them and, as such, they require decolonization in the sense of Fanon (1963), which works against assimilationist tendencies, and instead promotes epistemic de-linking, as espoused by Mignolo (2010).…”

“…Furthermore, the language through which curricula are mediated to students in most South African HEIs has to be taken into account and concomitantly critiqued. For example, since one such a language is English, then, the coloniality of the English language (Chaka, 2021;Veronelli, 2015) needs to be foregrounded in SoTL debates. This aspect becomes more relevant when considering that in the Global South, especially in South Africa, the majority of students for whom HE curricula are mediated through English are not mother-tongue English speakers.…”

“…Therefore, SoTL cannot unproblematically validate such framings of teaching, learning, and students when those framings tend to exclude and marginalize other related framings, such as multilingual framings. If the SoTL continues doing so, it runs the risk of perpetuating misframings (Chaka, 2021).…”