A Narrative Literature Review of the Identity Negotiation of Bilingual Students Who are Labelled ESL
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A Narrative Literature Review of the Identity Negotiation of Bilingual Students Who are Labelled ESL Shana Sanam Khan1 Received: 19 July 2019 / Accepted: 14 November 2019 © Springer Nature B.V. 2019
Abstract English as a second language or ESL instruction is said to be for students who have moved to the United States (or Canada) from another country and temporarily need assistance in learning the English language. However, statistically, a vast majority of ESL students in the United States were born in the US and are US citizens. When students are labelled as ESL and placed in this tract of alternative education, there is an othering process going on. This narrative literature review questions how do these ESL students negotiate their own identity. It is shown that ESL students are socialized into a deficit model, placed in classrooms where the discourse is hegemonic and are placed in location of constant power play where the system is set up against them. Keywords Identity construction · Bilingualism · ESL · Bilingual students · Classroom discourse It is said that currently one in ten of all students enrolled in a U.S. high school is an ESL or English as a second language student (Sanchez 2017). Statistically, according to 2015 statistics, which are currently the most recent ones available, it comes down to approximately 4.8 million students or approximately over 9% of the total U.S. population enrolled in either a public elementary school or a public secondary school (“Table 204.20”, n.d.). In Canada, the term English Language Learner (ELL) is used as opposed to ESL, and while there is no federal information about the number of ELLs as this is the responsibility of each provincial government, Statistics Canada estimates that approximately 6.6 million Canadians speak a language other than English or French–Canada’s two official languages—in their households (Statistics Canada 2012).
* Shana Sanam Khan [email protected] 1
School of Education, Louisiana State University, # 329, Peabody Hall, Baton Rouge, LA 70803, USA
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While the image of an ESL student is one who is an immigrant and someone who has recently migrated to the United States when in fact the majority of ESL students in the public schools were born in the United States and are U.S. citizens (Quintero and Hansen 2017). To contrast with Canada, in Ontario approximately 25% of ELLs were born in Canada (Ontario 2013) while one in ten students in the Vancouver area receive some form of ELL instruction (Tood 2014). Similarly, California and Texas are the top two states how much of their student body comprises of ESL students (Soto et al. 2015a)—21% and 16.8% of the student body, respectively, according to 2015 statistics, (McFarland et al. 2018)—and both are border states where ESL instruction has been politicized. Spanish has also been shown to be a language that the majority of ESL students have access to in their households (Soto et al. 2015b; Sanchez 2017; “English Language Learners” 2018; McFarland et al. 2018). E
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