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"They ain't using slang″: : Working class students from linguistic minority communities in higher education

Preece, Sian; (2014) "They ain't using slang″: : Working class students from linguistic minority communities in higher education. Linguistics and Education 10.1016/j.linged.2014.10.003. (In press). Green open access

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Abstract

An impact of globalisation on higher education has been an increase in diversity in the stu- dent population in universities in English dominant settings. The increasing diversification has impacted on the linguistic ecology of higher education, resulting in a wide range of lin- guistic repertoires among the student body. In some institutions, particularly those situated in urban areas, the multilingual classroom may well be the norm. Bi/multilingual university students form a heterogeneous group, encompassing temporary sojourners and members of linguistic minority communities resident in the host country. These students’ linguistic, cultural, ethnic and social class backgrounds impact on their knowledge and experience of using academic language in higher education. In this article, I examine academic language in relation to a group of working class undergraduate university students from linguis- tic minority communities in the UK. I focus on the ‘socio-symbolic functions’ (Morek and Heller, this issue) of academic language for the participants in the context of an academic writing programme. I consider their ascribed institutional identity, as remedial users of academic language, and their inhabited identities as bi-dialectal users of English, native speakers of English and as multilingual subjects. I discuss how the participants’ ascribed institutional identity erased their bidialectal and multilingual capital and argue that higher education needs to attend to the inhabited identities of working class linguistic minority students in efforts to foster the development of their relationship to academic language.

Type: Article
Title: "They ain't using slang″: : Working class students from linguistic minority communities in higher education
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1016/j.linged.2014.10.003
Language: English
Keywords: higher education, identity, academic language , social class, multilingualism, linguistic minority
UCL classification: UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10021248
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