“The inappropriateness of language” – Dr Clare Cunningham

I propose that situating practitioners and trainee teachers as discourse analysts in professional development and teacher education programmes could be a valuable way to increase awareness of the importance of individual discourses and making steps to adapt them more effectively to the local context.

– Dr Clare Cunningham (297)

In this study, Dr Clare Cunningham analyses educators’ discourses outside the classroom about the multilingual students in their schools (and their languages) through research interviews with a fellow education professional.

The equating of home language with bad behaviour or a taboo has numerous implications for the children whose identity is intertwined with its use, including but not limited to lowering of self-esteem (Cummins 1984), and the perpetuating of English monolingual habitus, with the knowledge that a habitus established at a young and impressionable age carries ‘a disproportionate weight’ (Bourdieu 1990).

– Dr Clare Cunningham (297)

This article can be downloaded here via YSJ Institutional Access.