Sociolinguist within: critical language awareness, linguistic ideologies, and the creation of heteroglossic ideological and implementational spaces in teacher preparation

Abstract

The monoglossic ideological space that dominates United States teacher preparation policy sits increasingly at odds with a growing push for heteroglossic stances in the praxis of the teacher preparation professional community. This article examines that tension through an investigation of how preservice teachers engaged critically with the language policies embedded in California’s Teacher Performance Expectations (TPEs) and negotiated the scope and demands imposed on them by the Standard English (SE) and Academic English (AE) ideological constructs. After a brief discourse-analytic contextualization of the TPE policy text, the article draws on survey data collected through Critical Action Research (CAR) with 128 preservice teachers across five cohorts of a multicultural foundations of education course at a California public university. A qualitative, interpretive analysis of participants’ definitions of SE and AE reveals ideological friction between these constructs, as inherited from policy and professional discourse, and the critical awareness already present in preservice teachers’ own language. Findings document a consistent pattern of contestation and counterideological stances alongside the reproduction of nativist, classist, and raciolinguistic assumptions, suggesting that preservice teachers arrive at their credentialing programs already equipped with a “sociolinguist within” whose knowledge has gone largely unmobilized. The article concludes with implications for creating heteroglossic ideological and implementational spaces in teacher preparation, positioning such programs as sites of sociolinguistic equity and social justice.