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In this article, Nelson Flores and Jonathan Rosa critique appropriateness-based approaches to language diversity in education. Those who subscribe to these approaches conceptualize standardized linguistic practices as an objective set of linguistic forms that are appropriate for an academic setting. In contrast, Flores and Rosa highlight the raciolinguistic ideologies through which racialized bodies come to be constructed as engaging in appropriately academic linguistic practices. Drawing on theories of language ideologies and racialization, they offer a perspective from which students classified as long-term English learners, heritage language learners, and Standard English learners can be understood to inhabit a shared racial positioning that frames their linguistic practices as deficient regardless of how closely they follow supposed rules of appropriateness. The authors illustrate how appropriateness-based approaches to language education are implicated in the reproduction of racial normativity by expecting language-minoritized students to model their linguistic practices after the white speaking subject despite the fact that the white listening subject continues to perceive their language use in racialized ways. They conclude with a call far reframing language diversity in education away from a discourse of appropriateness toward one that seeks to denaturalize standardized linguistic categories.
Despite popular debate about the perceived threat of language diversity to U.S society, there is near-universal agreement among language education scholars about the legitimacy of minoritized linguistic practices.1 For example, there is widespread consensus among language education scholars that African American English is not an example of "bad" English but, rather, a legitimate variety of English that has a system of linguistic patterns comparable to Standard English (Delpit, 2006; Smitherman, 1977). Similarly, there is a growing body of research that illustrates the value of bilingual education that builds on, rather than erases, the home languages of immigrant children (Cummins, 2000). These scholars have critiqued prescriptive ideologies, which dictate that there is one correct way of using languages and arbitrarily privilege particular linguistic practices while stigmadzing others. Such critiques include a long history of studies establishing "the logic of nonstandard English" (Labov, 1969), the importance of valuing different communities' "ways with words" (Heath, 1983), and the "funds of knowledge" that multilingual children bring to the classroom (Moll, Amand, Neff, 8c Gonzalez, 1992).
Building on these critical views of linguistic prescriptivism, scholars have called into...