SCOPE Brown Bag Seminar Series - Beyond the "English Learner" Label: Recognizing the Richness of Students' Multilingual Responses, Presented by Ramón Antonio Martínez

Date
Mon February 13th 2017, 12:00 - 1:30pm PST
Location
CERAS 101 Learning Hall
Event Sponsor
Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education, Graduate School of Education, Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, John W. Gardner Center for Youth
SCOPE Brown Bag Seminar Series - Beyond the "English Learner" Label: Recognizing the Richness of Students' Multilingual Responses, Presented by Ramón Antonio Martínez
Speaker: Ramón Antonio Martínez

As the population of students officially classified as “English learners” continues to grow in school districts nationwide, increased scholarly attention has been devoted to specifying the various language demands that these students will face. In some of this scholarship and in much of the attendant discourse, academic language demands are framed as challenges, invoking generalized assumptions about the supposed gap between discipline-specific forms of language and the everyday language of culturally and linguistically diverse learners.

At this SCOPE Brown Bag Seminar, Ramón Antonio Martínez will discuss how the “English learner” label not only masks tremendous diversity, but can also serve to obscure the linguistic competencies that students bring to the classroom. Drawing from his research in urban schools, Martinez will identify how diverse students’ linguistic competencies overlap with the forms of language and literacy valued in academic settings, and how these students make sense of their emergent bi/multilingualism. The discussion will be situated within broader conversations around equity and access for students of color in public schools. It will also include implications for leveraging students’ linguistic competencies as resources for academic literacy learning.

Lectures in the 2016–17 SCOPE Brown Bag Seminar Series are co-sponsored by:

  •  The Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity
  •  The John W. Gardner Center for Youth and Their Communities
  •  The Stanford Graduate School of Education