Bilingual, Multilingual, and Multicultural Education Commons^™

Educating Students Who Do Not Speak The Societal Language: The Social Construction Of Language-Learner Categories, Guadalupe Valdés, Luis E. Poza, Maneka Deanna Brooks

Faculty Publications

On 21 September 2012, California Assembly Bill 2193 was approved by Governor Jerry Brown. The bill added sections to California’s Education Code defining the terms long-term English learner and English learner at risk of becoming a long-term English learner. It mandated that the Department of Education collect data on the number of students corresponding to both new categories and report those data to school districts. This specific example of the construction of categories and labels matters because it is a clear example of how coexisting discourses and language ideologies provide a set of cultural rules, conditions, practices, and power …