The Rhetorical Construction of Multilingual Students

Abstract

Construction of Students are remarkably diverse, and thus no one label can accurately capture their heterogeneity. Yet that does not stop teachers and research-ers from labeling. It may be that we use labels such as ESL-even if they do not match students' profiles-to provide us with a shared shorthand by which we can talk about learners. But even if our reasons are well intentioned, we need to consider that, in the process of labeling students, we put ourselves in the powerful position of rhetorically constructing their identities, a potentially hazardous enterprise. At worst, a label may imply that we sanction an ethnocentric stance. At the very least, it can lead us to stigmatize, to generalize, and to make inaccurate predictions about what students are likely to do as a result of their language or cultural background. Even if we cannot eliminate all problematic terms, we can interrogate the casual and seemingly inno-cent ways in which we use them.1