Education Commons^™

Conflicting Ideologies Of Mexican Immigrant English Across Levels Of Schooling, S. Gallo, H. Link, Elaine Allard, S. Wortham, K. Mortimer

Educational Studies Faculty Works

This article explores how language ideologies—beliefs about immigrant students’ language use—carry conflicting images of Spanish speakers in one New Latino Diaspora town. We describe how teachers and students encounter, negotiate, and appropriate divergent ideologies about immigrant students’ language use during routine schooling practices, and we show how these ideologies convey different messages about belonging to the community and to the nation. Although the concept of language ideology often assumes stable macrolevel beliefs, our data indicate that ideologies can vary dramatically in one town. Elementary educators and students had a positive, “bilinguals-in-the-making” ideology about Spanish-speaking students, while secondary educators used more …