Applied Linguistics and Education

Applied Linguistics and Education

Margaret Kettle, Queensland University of Technology - Kelvin Grove Campus and Susy
Macqueen, Australian National University

https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264093.013.304
Published online: 31 March 2020

Summary
Language is fundamental to teaching and learning, yet is prone to invisibility in education systems. Drawing on
work from applied linguistics that foregrounds language use in education, a “power” heuristic can be used to
highlight linguistic privilege and its implications for students and their individual language repertoires. Language
can be understood as a tool for performing particular interpersonal and ideational functions; its structure and uses
are determined by context. For most students, experiences of language that is education-related reside in three
core domains: the home and community, the school, and the nation state. Language expectations in these domains
vary and position the linguistic repertoires of students differently. A key consideration is the student’s first language
and its relationship to the expectations and privileged varieties of different institutions, for example, the local
school and the national education department. By foregrounding linguistic privilege in education, the alignment, or
misalignment, between students’ language resources and the prevailing language norms of educational institutions
is made visible and open to change. Inherent in the level of alignment are issues of educational inclusion, access to
powerful language forms and genres, and academic achievement. The concept of power affordances can be used to
refer to the enabling potential of the relationship between language status, language affiliation and a student’s
linguistic repertoire. Power affordances can operate as three broad potentials, capabilities or statuses:
socioeconomic power, which resides in the language of global and state institutions ranging from government to
schools and manifests in instruments such as national standardized tests; sociocognitive power, which enables the
capacity to learn and recognizes the language intensity of knowledge; and identity power, which references social
belonging and is strongly indexed to language. Conceptualizing language and its power affordances in education
provides a useful framework for understanding the relationship between students’ language resources and the
often implicit linguistic demands and practices of education systems. It also highlights the rich potential of applied
linguistics in understanding education.

Keywords: affordances, applied linguistics, cultural capital, educational assessment, educational linguistics, language in
education, language learning, language and power, language variety, standard languages

Subjects: Languages and Literacies

Introduction

Applied linguistics addresses “a broad range of language-related issues that affect individuals
and society” (American Association for Applied Linguistics, n.d.). Prominent among its strands of
inquiry are language-focused teaching, learning, and assessment—indeed, a deep preoccupation
with education. Despite this affinity, language and its workings often remain invisible to
education practitioners (Fillmore & Snow, 2018; Shuy, 2015).

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Language is central to educational practice. In classrooms it brings together the social and the
cognitive, enabling learners to integrate new and old knowledge through the system of
communication made available by the teacher and curriculum (Barnes, 1976). For schools, most
objectives related to learner development of curriculum knowledge, social relationships, and
self-awareness are grounded in language (Cazden, 2001). Language is not only the means of
achieving the goals, it is also the objective. Applied linguistics recognizes this dualistic endeavor
in education, that is, the emphasis on language (spoken and written) as a medium and tool for
learning as well as language (certain genres, vocabulary, and grammar) as curriculum content to
be taught, learned, and assessed.

The evolution of applied linguistics as a field has seen an enduring focus on contexts of use,
particularly the classroom. This focus can be traced to the foundational work of Dell Hymes, who
in the early development of the field responded to Chomskyian grammatical idealism in linguistic
theory by engaging with theorists in other disciplines more oriented to social context. The cross-
disciplinary dialogue, largely inaugurated by scholars such as Hymes in the United States and
responsive to the language priorities of the geo-political and sociocultural changes of the post–
World War II period, advocated for the “ethnography of communication” as a means of
examining locally contextualised institutional language problems (Iyer, Kettle, Luke & Mills,
2014). Hymes (1972) states that “to cope with the realities of children as communicating beings
requires a theory within which sociocultural factors have an explicit and constitutive role” (p. 54).
His development of the concept of communicative competence foregrounded the role of context in
shaping language use; the concept also demanded that linguistic research concern itself with the
dynamics of communicative competence, for example, when children enter schooling without
competence in the language of instruction (1972, p. 68). Since then, applied linguistics has
become a “language-centered problem-solving enterprise” (Grabe, 2010, p. 2) and has continued
to focus on communicative competence in first and second language education (e.g., Canale &
Swain, 1980; Cazden, 2001).

In this article we consider applied linguistics research and its relationship to education. Of
interest are the convergences between language and education in the experiences of learners. Our
argument is that the relationship can be best examined in terms of power and the affordances
enabled by certain language varieties and forms, not because of their inherent qualities but
because of the people who speak them. Fairclough (2001) usefully refers to the social structuring
of legitimacy for certain varieties over others as power “behind” discourse while constraints and
curtailments of utterances in interactions indicates power “in” discourse. Recognizing the
language–power relationship with associated affordances and constraints is a useful means by
which practitioners can understand the education experiences of their students more deeply.

We present first a description of language varieties and their social ordering in education
contexts. We follow with a “power” heuristic, which we utilize to examine the language–
education nexus in the three core domains impacting students directly and indirectly: the home
and community, the school, and the nation state. Our focus is the Anglosphere, reflecting much of
the early work in applied linguistics (see Davies & Elder, 2004; Iyer et al., 2014) and our

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Applied Linguistics and Education

backgrounds in Australia as an English-dominant country. The examples we offer relate to

language in education in English-speaking countries, although we acknowledge the
diversification of the field and the growing focus on other language contexts.

Language Varieties in Education Contexts

The overlap between applied linguistics and education fundamentally concerns different
language varieties and their acquisition, use, and roles in education. Language variety is a broad
term that refers to the linguistic system and way of speaking of a defined social group, for
example, a group of people categorized by geographical region, nation state, social network,
ethnicity, or socioeconomic class. The term includes:

1. Reified languages such as French, Vietnamese, and American sign language, which are
generally recognized as discrete languages.

2. Regional dialects of one language, such as different varieties of English, for example,
Standard Australian English, Singlish, or of Arabic (e.g., Sudanese, Lebanese, or Egyptian
Arabic).

3. Languages that may or may not be unrecognized as reified “languages” by their speakers
but are acquired as first languages and operate widely in communities, for example,
1
Australian Gurindji Kriol (see Meakins, 2012) or Light Warlpiri (see O’Shannessy, 2013).

4. The systematic and identifying language usage patterns of social or ethnocultural

groupings, such as language patterns used by African Americans or British urban teens (see
Rampton, 2010).

None of these varieties is intrinsically better or worse than any other, but they differ in their
social roles, patterns of use, and/or the groups of speakers with whom they are associated. The
notion of a language itself is something that is constructed as a result of forces such as the
establishment of nation states and the official recognition of particular languages for political
and economic purposes (Iyer et al., 2014; Makoni & Pennycook, 2012). Most people in the world
have at least two contexts in which they use different language varieties since the majority are
multilingual rather than monolingual. Using elements of more than one language variety in
interaction is typical of communication in multilingual communities (Wei, 2013). Thus, the term
linguistic repertoire more aptly describes the language capacities of most people, rather than
association with a single language.

In educational settings, the language variety with the most political and socioeconomic clout is
known as the standard variety due to its relative uniformity and standardization of form. This
variety prevails across multiple domains in political jurisdictions and even across jurisdictions.
Despite entrenchment in different contexts, a standard language is an ideal abstraction of actual
language use. It is just one of many varieties in a jurisdiction, but its power derives from
cumulative developments such as print literacy, mass education, and the social structuring that
privileges its speakers (Milroy, 2001). Societies with these features are known as “standard

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language cultures” (Milroy, 2001, p. 530). In these cultures, the prioritization of the standard
variety is maintained through education, in particular goal-setting in curriculum, assessment,
and academic objectives.

While modern academic knowledge is not exclusively expressed through one variety, it is usually
taught, learned, and assessed only in standard language varieties. Access to school-based
knowledge is therefore structured linguistically; students who do not speak the standard variety
at home and do not have its literate forms embedded in their initial symbolic practices take a less
direct path to academic content than those who do. Thus, the status of a child’s home language
variety impacts participation in education, especially for those students entering an education
system without a high level of proficiency in the standard language variety used as the medium of
instruction. Approximately one third of the world’s children undertake formal education without
being proficient in the language of schooling, and most of these children are in developing
countries (Walter, 2008). This means that for some of the least advantaged children across the
world, learning academic content and attaining literacy occurs simultaneously with learning the
language of instruction.

The issue of language and educational participation is not limited to similarities and differences
between home languages and the standard languages of local educational jurisdictions. Rather,
unprecedented migration and mobility for the purposes of education are bringing a global
consciousness to the relationship between language use and educational participation, notably in
higher education (Brooks & Waters, 2011; Kettle, 2017). Thus, the language–education nexus can
be conceptualized as systematic patterns of use which operate in and across learners’ experiences
of different educational domains. We represent these core experiences as the home and home
community, the school, and the nation state (Table 1).

Table 1. Educational Environments and Associated Language Configurations

Educational Context Language Varieties

The Home and First language/s (mother tongues)

Community Additional language varieties in the home and immediate community and patterns
of use (e.g., code-switching)
Heritage language varieties (i.e., encountered through kin)
Informal introductions to reading and writing (literacy)

The School Teacher/s linguistic repertoires, shared & unshared with students, and patterns of
use
Students’ individual & shared linguistic repertoires and patterns of use
Patterns of classroom discourse
Register of discipline or occupation
Language/s learned through instruction as objects of study

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Educational Context Language Varieties

2
The Nation-State Officially constituted languages and national lingua francas
National and standardized languages of education and knowledge production, for
example, through research
Designated language/s of national tests and assessments
International lingua francas which index high economic value for the state

As seen in Table 1, there are multiple varieties and configurations of linguistic resources that
might be in use in different educational contexts. Broadly, these can be classed as language
varieties (e.g., a variety spoken as a first language) or an interactional configuration, for example,
classroom discourse. These educational varieties and configurations overlap variously with the
diverse linguistic repertoires and discourse experiences of individual students. On entry to
schooling, the degree of overlap depends mainly on the relationship between the child’s home
language and those privileged by the institutions and structures of modern society (i.e., schools,
education systems, state and national governments).

Beyond the early learning and development in the home and home community, the language of
education is primarily a specific variety for academic purposes (or varieties in bilingual
educational contexts). Language learning circumstances for academic purposes range from
young children beginning to learn the language of instruction and its written form upon entering
school to adult students embarking on postgraduate degrees in a variety that is neither their first
language nor their language of schooling. Although classrooms and their surrounds can be
extremely complex linguistically, the language varieties that hold most sway in the educational
trajectory are those in which students are assessed (Shohamy, 2001). The varieties used in
assessment are typically high-status official languages of government and education, usually the
standard variety. In addition, it is noted that the ascendancy of English globally means that it is
also increasingly the featured language of assessment, even when it is not an official language of
the state, for example in China (see Cheng, 2008).

Power Affordances

The affordances for individuals participating in the different educational contextual levels (see
Table 1) can be thought of in terms of three “power” sets which are associated with the language
varieties acquired, used, and encountered through the lifespan in “standard language
cultures” (Milroy, 2001, p. 530). Drawing on Gibson and Pick’s (2000) ecological approach to
affordance theory, an affordance is defined here as the power, capacity, or potential of a language
variety or interaction pattern in relation to the educational environment. We argue that the term
“power” can be used as a heuristic for the power-capacity-potential of three sets of affordances:
socioeconomic power, sociocognitive power, and identity power. These “power” categories
enable interpretation of the complex interrelationships between educational contexts, language

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varieties, and the ways in which individual linguistic repertoires are used, positioned, and
responded to socially and academically. Because the categories pertain to multiple elements—
individual language users, groups of speakers, educational systems, and socioeconomic systems
—each of which can be described as a complex adaptive system which shifts over time (Larsen-
Freeman & Cameron, 2008), the power affordances are always relational and interdependent.

1. Socioeconomic power is the status or value associated with varieties which symbolize cultural
capital (Bourdieu, 1991). Socioeconomic power operates at both local and global levels, with
influences between the levels. Socioeconomically “prestigious” varieties are in a continual
process of renegotiation of their association with high social status. In a single variety, features of
language such as a particular consonant pronunciation may shift allegiance to different social
strata over time (Labov, 1972). More dramatic dynamism can occur in response to shifts in
political and economic power when, for example, one language variety comes in contact with or
replaces another as a high-status variety for a community, a state, a region, or the world or when
a variety is imposed suddenly through top-down political processes. Socioeconomic power
associates with language varieties through historical, political, and socioeconomic processes and
not through any intrinsic linguistic superiority of the variety other than its development across
domains of high status. Their privileged use in sought-after domains leads to the development of
an infrastructure of power, such as standardized writing, testing programs, language courses,
teacher training programs, knowledge databasesm and textbooks, which contributes to the
entrenchment of their high status and their wide representation in applied linguistics research
(e.g., Kaplan, 2001). Varieties with high socioeconomic power also have reach into the media
where they are the object of discussion, for example, the discourse about Australian higher
education and the threat to English standards from low international student English proficiency
levels (e.g., Trounson, 2011) as well as the means of influencing the perceptions of their audience
(Fairclough, 2001).

2. Sociocognitive power refers to the capacity and potential of language varieties and linguistic
repertoires to afford cognitive development and academic learning for an individual student.
Typically, the ultimate sociocognitive power resides, at least early in life and in beginning school
contexts, with first language varieties as the initial and most automatic means of the expression
of thought and learning (e.g., Bialystok, 2011). The varieties used for education may or may not be
the same, or even similar to first language varieties. Sociocognitive power encompasses three
kinds of capabilities or potentials, which may or may not be present in educational contexts. The
first is the potential for the development of first language skills both in oral and written forms.
The second is the potential for development of competence in additional languages for academic
purposes. These first and second language development potentials are affected by the status and
modes (oral/written) of language and the access to instruction. Some language varieties will have
abundant resources for their spoken and written modes and even be used as the medium of
education. Other language varieties may not be offered (or recognized) as a necessary or
legitimate focus of instruction (e.g., Sellwood & Angelo, 2013), or they may not have a written
form. The third kind of potential is the affordances of a language variety and its interactional
patterns for the learning of academic content, such as science or another language. The term
“sociocognitive” reflects the understanding that all learning, including first and later language
learning, has social origins in which language is intimately involved (Lantolf & Thorne, 2006;

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Vygotsky, 1978). It includes both academic development (e.g., knowledge of concepts in biology)
and cognitive development (e.g., memory) since these are inextricably interrelated in education
contexts (see also Thomas & Collier, 1997).

3. Identity power (strength of group fit) refers to the capacity to use language variety(ies) (or
group-insider linguistic resources) which symbolize and enable expression of belonging or
resistance to a group (e.g., Norton, 2013; Pavlenko & Blackledge, 2004; Rampton, 2006, 2010).
Identity power is not necessarily related to competence in a language variety (though it can be)
but rather the desire to affiliate culturally and socially with a group or culture or the expression of
being a group-insider or a “type” of person. Identity power may be consistently, fleetingly, or
fluidly performed; it is “a mosaic rather than a monolith” (Edwards, 2004, p. 25). Importantly,
identity power is not simply the addition of affect to the hard reality of socioeconomic status or
education’s core business of learning. Rather, identity power is deeply interrelated with
socioeconomic and sociocognitive power in that it includes the desire to invest in learning a
target language for the purposes of gaining cultural capital (McKinney & Norton, 2011). The
motivation is to belong or be a certain way, for example, seeing oneself as having the potential to
be a fluent speaker of a particular language (Dörnyei & Ushioda, 2009); the desire to set oneself
akin to or apart from the norms of socioeconomically dominant group (Duff, 2002); and the self-
worth derived from language affiliation, for example, the effects on self-worth of a (de)valued
linguistic identity (Morcom, 2017; Wright & Taylor, 1995).

These three types of power are enabled through the specific language varieties and patterns of use
that students have acquired or are in the process of acquiring, as well as the varieties that are
academically valued and accessible for learning. “Accessible for learning” refers to academic
enablers, such as appropriate instruction, materials, exposure, and assistance in the target
variety, and not simply the presence of the language in the environment. The amount of overlap
between an individual’s linguistic repertoire and the varieties that predominate in the
educational context brings about a configuration of power affordances that ultimately enables or
disables the student’s participation and engagement in school and academic learning.

For example, a student whose home language variety overlaps to a large extent with the
education language variety will find adapting to the language of education relatively seamless.
Similarly, for a student who has been socialized in home interaction patterns that match those
that occur in the classroom, transition to classroom participation will likely be quite natural
(Heath, 1983). Further, a student who has had extensive exposure to literacy practices in the
home which are akin to those of school literacy is likely to benefit from the familiarity with such
practices (e.g., De Jong & Leseman, 2001).

On the other hand, there are many students whose home and community language varieties do
not overlap with the language of the nation state. When this is the case, there is a loss of
continuity between the home and school and a power disjunct, which may have implications for
part or even the whole of the students’ education. Let’s consider an example—in a sociolinguistic
and acquisitional context documented in the work of Meakins (2008, 2012)—of a student
entering school in Australia with Gurindji Kriol as the first language (L1). This formative language
of the student’s early years likely holds the most sociocognitive power (or capacity) because it is

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her mother tongue and the variety that has scaffolded her experiences and learning thus far.
Therefore, Gurindji Kriol is the language variety that is likely to enable the greatest ease of
understanding for the internalization of new concepts. To learn through another language variety
at school will present a significant cognitive burden for her, although the burden will likely
decrease as her proficiency in the language of schooling (her second language) increases. For this
student, schooling and national standardized assessments will be in Standard Australian English
(SAE). As the variety that enables participation across levels of schooling and the broader
workforce, SAE will ultimately probably provide the most socioeconomic power (or economic
value) for the student.

A different but related language variety is Gurindji, which has a higher social status in her local
community as the more traditional language of the older people (Meakins, 2008). In some
circumstances, features of Gurindji might hold the most identity power (or strength of
belonging); in other circumstances across her lifespan, features of Gurindji Kriol or English might
be used to do identity work. A point of note is that her first language, Gurindji Kriol, a contact
language, is neither recognized nor named by her community as a separate language from what is
sometimes called “proper” Gurindji (Meakins, 2012, p. 109). So, although Gurindji Kriol is a
related but identifiably different language system from “proper” Gurindji and is acquired as a
first language by children in the community (Meakins 2012), it is not actually named, or reified,
as a language. Thus, a language variety need not be specifically named or recognized as “a
language” to hold significant affordances for children who speak it as a mother tongue (see
Angelo & Carter, 2015).

Language in Educational Contexts

Language Varieties at the Home–School Interface

The language varieties of the home, home community, and intimate kin are the varieties acquired
from birth and early childhood, which are learned as mother tongues, first languages (L1), and
sometimes referred to as heritage languages. Bilingual and multilingual children may develop
competence in more than one variety in the home and beyond it. For example, the child of a
Chinese migrant in Australia might learn Mandarin Chinese as well as a regional Chinese dialect
at home and learn English outside it. For many migrant and Indigenous parents whose first
language varieties are different from the language of schooling, the ethnolinguistic identity they
desire for their children is closely related to learning the home language varieties. Unfortunately
for many of these parents, only those with social capital can persuade schools to implement
language programs that aid their children’s multilingual development (García, 2014). Often these
parents are monolinguals with a commitment to second language education for their children.
The students in these bilingual programs then are elective bilinguals (Valdés & Figueroa, 1994),
whose first language capacity and its sociocognitive affordances are under no threat (Baker,
2011). Typically, these elective bilinguals are learning a variety that affords some degree of
socioeconomic power. In contrast, for migrant and Indigenous students who already speak
another language, being bilingual is not an option. They are circumstantial bilinguals, whose first

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language sociocognitive affordances may well be threatened by a “subtractive” learning context

in which the language of schooling, or their second or additional language, may replace the first
(Baker, 2011, p. 4). While this distinction is a simplification of the multitude of complex ways in
which bi-/multilingualism manifests in relation to educational contexts (our focus here), it is
probable that the cognitive advantages of bilingualism (e.g., Bialystok, Craik, Klein, &
Viswanathan, 2004; Kharkhurin, 2008) do not exist for children whose L1 varieties are ignored,
undervalued, or misunderstood at school (Baker, 2011; Clyne, 2005; Cummins, 2000; García,
2014).

Ignorance of L1 varieties is exemplified in the case of children who speak English-lexified creoles
in Australia (in this case, the named varieties of Yumplatok and Yarrie Lingo), which, due to their
historical relationship to English, are often viewed as poor English rather than systematic L1
varieties (Sellwood & Angelo, 2013). Sellwood and Angelo argue that such contact language
varieties are invisible to teachers and the broader education system to the extent that children are
“educated into a belief that their own languages have no place” (2013, p. 252). The invisibility of
these L1 varieties and thus the children’s second language learning needs is inextricably tied to a
colonial history and the resultant societal monolingual ideology (Sellwood & Angelo, 2013). Thus,
these home varieties afford little socioeconomic power, and their sociocognitive potential as
either a scaffold for learning the language of school or as the medium for academic content is
unrealized.

The linguistic repertoire a child brings to school is fundamental in determining the degree of
cognitive burden she or he will experience in accessing the language variety used at school for
curriculum delivery, assessment, and academic literacy practices (e.g., Collier, 1989; Thomas &
Collier, 1997). In some places, accommodating the language needs of students is made difficult by
the fact that teachers lack training in teaching students from diverse language backgrounds. For
example, in Australia an influential study on teacher education titled Studying the Effectiveness of
Teacher Education (SETE) (2015) found that graduate teachers entering the profession are deeply
concerned about their capacity to “work constructively with culturally and linguistically diverse
students” (Mayer et al., 2015, p. 123). The findings resonate with arguments in the applied
linguistics literature that many mainstream classroom teachers are not bilingual and have little
awareness of the role of language in learning curriculum content (e.g., Fillmore & Snow, 2018;
García, 2014).

Attempts to address issues in the provision of bilingual education include programs designed to
sustain the sociocognitive potential of the L1 varieties of language-minority children through the
development of L1 literacy skills and curriculum content knowledge while also developing the
sociocognitive potential of an additional language, usually the language of education in the
jurisdiction. However, even in these contexts, socioeconomic power can eclipse efforts to nurture
L1 development. Lo Bianco and Slaughter (2017) chart the Australian experience of non-prestige
bilingual programs (i.e., learning via varieties without socioeconomic clout), which have been
gradually eroded through policy changes, shortage of teachers, and national literacy and
numeracy testing in English, among other things. They contrast this with the expansion of
“prestige” bilingualism, that is, programs that teach through high-status language varieties
such as French and that demonstrate a commitment to both linguistic and cognitive

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development. The prestige of such programs derives from the orientation to sociocognitive power
and the context in which socioeconomic power exists in both the home variety of the students and
the additional language acquired through school.

Yet for children entering education without the language of the institution, much research points
to the significant sociocognitive advantage of first language development in the school domain as
a deep scaffold for the second language (summarized in Cummins, 2017). This productive
bilingual relationship, however, is highly susceptible to political interference. In the United
States, for example, García, Flores, and Woodley (2012) outline how English-only ideologies led
to the banning of bilingual education in the two American states with the largest Spanish-
speaking populations—California (ban implemented in 1998) and Arizona (ban implemented in
2000). The California ban was overturned in 2016 with schools negotiating the provision of
bilingual education from 2017 (Sanchez, 2016). The Arizona ban remains in place.

Configurations of Language Varieties in Classrooms

The language use of bilingual and multilingual speakers typically makes the most of the full range
of repertoires in common. Cook (1995) theorizes that bilingual minds possess multicompetence
and that this is qualitatively different from the language competence of a monolingual. Among
the differences is the array of linguistic resources, which enables bilingual and multilingual
speakers to mobilize elements from more than one language to achieve communicative goals.
Two ways in which this capacity manifests are in code-switching (e.g., Blom & Gumperz, 1972;
Myers-Scotton, 1993), or the use of two or more languages in the same speech situation, often
organized across sentences, and code-mixing, which refers to the use of two or more languages
within one sentence (Kamwangamalu, 2010). Classroom-based research has found that code-
switching is used by teachers to perform different pedagogical and social functions, many of
which relate to the sociocognitive power afforded by using configurations of the L1 and L2. For
example, a study by Rezvani and Rasekh (2011) of Iranian elementary teachers in an English-
language school found that the teachers switched from the target language (English) to the
students’ L1 (Farsi) for purposes such as promoting comprehension, often through translation,
providing corrective feedback on errors and eliciting correct responses, and giving praise. The
pedagogic and social functions of the two languages reflect similar findings on code-switching in
the bilingual education literature (e.g., Qian, Tian, & Wang, 2009).

In classrooms where the teachers do not speak the students’ first language, which as noted above
is overwhelmingly the case, the code-switching literature points to the value in teachers
“outsourcing” the explanation and review of content to class peers. For example, Finnochiaro
(1988) discussed peer-teaching in which students switch to their first language and work
together as sources of information to aid each other’s learning. Saville-Troike’s (1984)
foundational work in the United States found that English as a second language (ESL) students
who achieved best in content areas were those “who had the opportunity to discuss the concepts
in their native language, either with other children or adults” (p. 216).

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While past definitions of bilingualism emphasized full command of two languages, more recent
understandings foreground dynamic language practices across languages. García (2009, 2014)
advances the concept of translanguaging (after Williams, 1997) to refer to the ways in which
bilinguals and multilinguals “soft-assemble their language practices from a variety of relational
contexts in ways that fit their communicative needs” (García, 2014, p. 95, italics in original). The
soft assemblage of linguistic resources can be seen as the configuration of power affordances
available across linguistic repertoires. Translanguaging recognizes students’ languages (L1s and
emergent L2s) and their “flexible bilingual use in teaching and learning” (García et al., 2012, p.
51). It is distinct from code-switching and code-mixing in that these concepts are underpinned by
a notion of different languages as “structural and cognitive entities” used in structural
configurations rather than “creative and critical” ones (Wei, 2017, p. 5). Translanguaging in
pedagogy is designed to build on students’ home language practices to extend content knowledge
and develop new academic skills and understandings. Examples reported in U.S. research by
García et al. (2012, p. 59) include teachers seeking explanations of ideas in Spanish and English
and students choosing to talk about their ideas in either Spanish or English before writing them
in English. The researchers argue that this pedagogical approach scaffolds the learning in English
of newly arrived migrant students and works powerfully to redress exclusionary monolingual
policies and practices.

Classroom Discourse Patterns

So far, we have been concerned with the power affordances of language varieties and
configurations of language varieties, for example, in translanguaging and code-switching, and
their educational implications. Other lines of research inquiry have focused on language in
educational interaction, notably in classrooms (e.g., Cazden, John, & Hymes, 1972; Gass, 1997;
Kasper, 2006; Rampton, 2006; van Lier, 2002). The understanding is that affordances in
education can also be linked to the nature of interactions rather than the classification of the
language varieties being used. These affordances may apply to all learning, including language:
cognitively oriented to the noticing and acquisition of a language or curriculum feature (e.g., Gass
& Mackey, 2015); sociocognitively oriented to the learning made possible through interpersonal
mediation (e.g., Antòn, 1999; Cazden, 2001); focused on the expression of identity within the
classroom and in relation to the society beyond (e.g., McKay & Wong, 1996); or focused on the
nature of classroom discourse as an expression of and resistance to socioeconomic power (e.g.,
Canagarajah, 1993; Delpit, 1988). Each of these lines of inquiry has developed a rich agenda since
the 1970s when the field reoriented to the sociocultural context of use and established
interactional units of various kinds as fundamental to instructed learning.

Classrooms are inhabited by institutional discourse through which the power of the institution is
exercised and constituted (Mayr, 2008). Delpit (1988, p. 282) refers to the power embedded in
classroom language and interactions as the “culture of power,” a culture which is largely
invisible to teachers and children whose home cultures align with it but very obvious to those
entering school without it and required to adapt culturally. She argues that the language of power
in the United States—“Standard English”—is “the language of economic success, and all

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students have the right to schooling that gives them access to that language” (p. 68). By accessing
the dominant discourse and language-enabled participation, minority students can gain
economic power and transform the prevailing culture of power.

Power affordances, then, are as relevant to interaction patterns and “rules of use” (Hymes, 1972,
p. 60) as they are to language varieties. A well-attested example of classroom discourse is the
three-move set of initiation-response-evaluation (IRE) in which the teacher assumes the
primary roles of initiator and evaluator in the transmission and reproduction of knowledge
(Edwards & Westgate, 1994). In what Cazden (2001) calls non-traditional lessons, the roles of
initiator, evaluator, and responder are undertaken by students, with the rationale that there is
greater student participation as well as process-oriented knowledge building and higher-order
thinking. In many contemporary classrooms, including higher education, student-centered
interaction is the dominant teaching approach (Kettle & Luke, 2013). It is realized through pair
and group work as well as teacher-orchestrated discussions. Research in the area has found that
speaking rights and participation may not be equally distributed, especially among students
whose social and linguistic resources make it difficult for them to be heard in the busyness and
noise of the interaction (Hammond & Gibbons, 2005; Kettle, 2017). The recommendation is that
teachers recognize the social and linguistic burden of being heard and “imposing
reception” (Bourdieu, 1993) on others, notably emergent bilingual students who are unsure of
how to position themselves in the interactive discourse (Kettle, 2017).

Other types of classroom interaction that have attracted the attention of teacher educators and
researchers are questions and feedback, largely because they are foundational to the IRE sequence
and are amenable to variation and change (Cazden & Beck, 2003). The initiation turn in the IRE
sequence is often a question that introduces the topic while evaluation is a form of feedback;
indeed, in some cases, the interactional pattern is referred to as initiation, response, feedback
(IRF) (e.g., Cazden & Beck, 2003). The prevalence of these kinds of units in classroom talk
suggests that they afford sociocognitive power, with the accompanying assumption that the
student is expert in the language variety being used. However, research on classroom questioning
and feedback practices indicates that they are not as benign as one might think. Instead they are
deeply impacted by pedagogical considerations embedded in social and cultural expectations. For
example, a comparative study of primary schools in Russia, France, England, the United States
and India (Alexander, 2005, 2008) found that social relations between teachers and students
operate largely with an emphasis on either the individual, the community, or the collective. The
study found that the teachers in Russian and French classrooms favored the collective principle,
which manifested as very public, and at times loud, classroom talk between teachers and
students. The interactions included explicit public feedback from teachers on students’ correct
and incorrect responses. In contrast, the English and American teachers oriented more to the
individual and worked hard in their responses to protect individual students from public
mistakes. The interactions involved high numbers of teacher questions but a reluctance to
explicitly address incorrect student answers, meaning some of the teacher feedback was
ambiguous and unclear. Alexander’s (2005) recommendation from the research was that while
social priorities such as building students’ confidence are crucial, they should not be to the
detriment of cognitive outcomes related to learning.

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Applied Linguistics and Education

State-Based Testing and Assessment

Tests and assessment systems are instruments of socioeconomic and concomitant political power
because they tend to privilege particular varieties of language in the decisions they make
(Shohamy, 2007). Standardized tests are usually explicitly or implicitly tests of language; for
example, a test of Standard Mandarin delivered in Standard Mandarin explicitly tests language
while a test of science delivered in Arabic implicitly tests Arabic. Whether something is an implicit
or explicit language assessment is not related to the degree to which language ability is relevant.
For example, a test of numeracy can be rendered completely inaccessible through delivery in an
unknown language (i.e., an implicit language assessment), regardless of the student’s numeracy
ability (Macqueen et al., 2018).

Because testing is known to bring about change in the behavior of populations, standardized
testing is increasingly an instrument of policy. Aimed at “reform”—usually in “basic skills” such
as literacy and numeracy—reform-based population testing aims to change life opportunities for
individuals while at the same time being driven by a linking of economic growth and literacy at
the national level. Such systems, although aimed at educational improvement and accountability,
are, at their core, language-mediated instruments of economic, and not educational, policy.
Whether the language of the tests is in the first or additional languages of the children has been
shown to have a significant impact on their performance (e.g., Menken, 2009), meaning that the
scores are likely a reflection of group membership determined by language characteristics rather
than the result of anyone’s educational effort (Dixon & Angelo, 2014). The effect of such testing is
test-focused classroom practices, which compounds the problem of access because it can reduce
the availability of practices aimed at supporting additional language development (Angelo, 2013;
Solano-Flores, 2009).

Standard languages, particularly English, are instrumental as sorting mechanisms in the K–12
educational system as well as higher education. Globally, standard British and American
Englishes have a particularly strong representation in the test products used to evaluate English
proficiency for entrance into English-medium universities. This raises questions about whose
English “norms” or patterns of use should be privileged in such decisions since the global
academic community is increasingly characterized by mobility, diversity, and hybridity. English
is a lingua franca, or commonly shared communicative tool (Jenkins, 2007), rather than the first
language of most of the participants (Davies, Hamp-Lyons, & Kemp, 2003). Indeed, efforts to
capture the profiles of English-language speakers across the world have emphasized decentering
the native English speaker and focused instead on the pragmatic strategies and linguistic features
of English as a lingua franca, designed through use to achieve the speakers’ communicative
intent (e.g., House, 2003; Seidlhofer, 2006). The emphasis is on competence in establishing and
maintaining communication, which resonates with early applied linguistics work and with
ongoing initiatives to recognize the linguistic resources of bilingual and multilingual speakers in
education.

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Conclusion

We have proposed a conceptualization of the relationship between language and educational

participation through the heuristic of power affordances. In our exploration of how language
varieties and language use patterns represent various configurations of power affordances for
students, we have focused on three themes. The first of these is the language variety as a
disciplinary object in applied linguistics. We have seen that language varieties are analyzed in
various ways, including as vehicles of sociocognitive and identity power when they are
acquisitional objects, but they are also ideological constructs when they represent a
socioeconomic status arising from political and historical processes. The second theme is that
language varieties are, in fact, highly fluid in interaction and that this fluidity offers affordances
whereby students can work across their linguistic resources for the purposes of learning, identity
construction, and access to cultural capital. We have suggested that power affordances are
present in the interactional patterns of education as well as in the linguistic codes in use. The
third theme relates to the privileged status afforded to certain language varieties and language-
mediated agendas in state-based testing and assessment.

In charting the nature of language usage patterns in educational contexts, it might be understood
that affordances exist as if they can be freely used when they are available or denied where they
are not. However, the existence of an affordance offered by a language variety (e.g., a high status
language variety affords job opportunities) does not mean that this potential is acted upon or can
be acted upon. Being able to act upon an affordance requires the capacity to perceive and realize
affordances—a capacity that has to develop in the individual person (Gibson & Pick, 2000, p. 17).
In other words, communicative competence needs to be developed to the extent that the
affordances of a variety can be realized. As Hymes (1972, p. 283) described it, there must be an
ability for use in the language variety, which he considers inseparable from affective and
motivational factors. An obvious implication is that in order to access the socioeconomic
affordances of a standard variety, proficiency needs to be developed in that variety. A less obvious
implication is that accessing the socioeconomic affordances of a standard variety is made more
possible if the sociocognitive affordances of the first language are also developed (when the first
language is not the same as the standard language). This is attested in studies of bilingual
programs that develop the first language “academically and cognitively” as well as the language
of school (Thomas & Collier, 1997, p. 49). Ricento (2013) points out that individuals are not free to
choose which languages to learn since the choice is “constrained by factors such as social class,
access to free (or private) education, gender, and occupation, among other variables” (p. 538).

Thus, it is not the case that students are able to mobilize linguistic resources purely as a function
of whether it is appropriate in the context. Rather, use of linguistic resources is constrained by
language proficiencies across a student’s linguistic repertoire, the range of the identity palette,
the perception of the situation of use, and the repertoires and roles of those who are co-
constructing the interaction. Recent formulations of competence in this vein have emphasized
the dynamism of the communicative competence of an individual at the moment of performance.
Choice of language variety is “not dictated by some pre-existing and permanent value” of the
variety, but rather the language choices emerge meaningfully from “subjective perceptions of

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shifting power dynamics within the interaction” (Kramsch & Whiteside, 2008, p. 664). In the
same way Canagarajah (2014) proposes performative competence as a means of emphasizing the
dynamic processes that bilinguals use to negotiate language learning and use simultaneously.
These views of bilingual and multilingual use highlight that language choices are more than
passive reflections of state-based language policies and fixed ethnolinguistic identities; instead
they recognize the dynamism and linguistic agility that speakers bring to resourcing the complex
sociolinguistic practices they encounter in their social worlds (Leung, Harris, & Rampton, 1997).

When we speak of the socioeconomic, sociocognitive, or identity-related power affordances of

language varieties and their configurations and discoursal patterns of use, we are talking
essentially about an emergent relationship between the (multi)competence of an individual and
historical patterns of language use and their associations with intimate or heritage community,
societal institutions, and macro-social structures. This strategic mobilization of linguistic
resources emerges in patterned ways, which are both creative and conforming (Bakhtin, 1981).
Language use is constrained by the need to be understood, memory, community-wide
entrenched language use patterns of all sorts, and an intricate array of participant needs and
goals (Beckner et al., 2009). Underpinning it all is the need to develop competence as much as to
perform it. However, becoming proficient in any language variety is a time-consuming pursuit
(Collier, 1989; Slama, 2012; Thomas & Collier, 2002). Therefore, the ability to perceive and then
realize the power affordances of language is not just the activity of students. To recognize what
their students are currently doing and what they are potentially capable of doing, in both
language or academic content/skills, and to assist in this process (Vygotsky, 1978) is very much
the concern of teachers. To ensure that students have access to the socioeconomic,
sociocognitive, and identity-related affordances of their linguistic repertoires is a matter for
policy and practice.

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Notes

1. Gurindji Kriol is a mixed language used in Kalkaringi in the Northern Territory of Australia. Gurindji is a highly
endangered Indigenous Australian language traditionally used by the Gurindji people. Through constant contact and
codeswitching with Kriol (an English-lexified creole variety) over time, Gurindji Kriol has become the language of the
youth in Kalkaringi (Meakins, 2012).

2. Gurindji Kriol and Gurindji as Australian Indigenous language varieties are explained in the end note point above.

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