Navigating competing goals for language in curricularized school settings: Lessons from teachers of multilingual students

Abstract

As an international phenomenon, standardization has become increasingly prominent, and language has been curricularized through learning progressions, curricula, and high-stakes assessments. Curricularized systems exist in tension with what we know about how individuals develop language. As scholars have asserted, language development is mediated by students’ motivation, investment, and agency, suggesting that learners’ goals and purposes for communication are key drivers of language learning. A contradiction therefore exists in institutionalized language teaching: How can curricularized goals—that, by definition, are not created for individual students—be negotiated such that students’ own language goals and curricularized ones work together rather than in opposition? We take up recent calls for teacher-informed research and use qualitative case-study and constructivist grounded theory to synthesize insights from a set of US elementary teachers teaching in English-medium classrooms. We engaged in an inquiry-based professional development initiative with these teachers to explore how they address students’ purposes and goals for language use in the context of the curricularization that takes place in schools. Findings suggest a complex and interdependent set of instructional practices that form a possible pedagogical model that navigates expectations found in curricularized classroom settings with multilingual students.