Multilingual writing in an age of accountability: From policy to practice in U.S. high school classrooms

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Abstract

This article considers the influence of the U.S. accountability- and standards-driven context on the writing experiences of multilingual writers in “New Mainstream” linguistically diverse high school classrooms. Qualitative data from 12 ninth grade subject-matter classes were examined to note how uses of writing in subject-matter classrooms reflected or contradicted district standards and accountability efforts, and how these practices socialized multilingual learners into particular norms for academic writing in English. Findings suggest that classroom practices related to the current standards and accountability climate were socializing adolescent multilingual writers into narrow restrictive norms for academic writing, with the most restrictive norms occurring in the classes with the greatest enrollment of multilingual writers. This study highlights the influence of macro-level contextual factors on particular classroom-level writing practices and norms, and suggests the need for theories of second language writing that account for these influences, particularly in studies of multilingual adolescents in mainstream classrooms.

Highlights

► Classroom practices related to the current standards and accountability climate socialized adolescent multilingual writers into narrow restrictive norms for academic writing. ► The most restrictive writing norms occurred in classes with the greatest enrollment of multilingual writers. ► Theories of adolescent second language writing must account for these macro-contextual influences, particularly in studies situated in mainstream classrooms.

Introduction

As linguistic diversity becomes more commonplace across the United States, K-12 classrooms that are officially considered “mainstream” often serve students from a variety of native language backgrounds and levels of English proficiency. For many students who are learning English as an additional language, these “New Mainstream1” (Enright, 2011) classrooms are the primary contexts in which young people learn the norms and skills for academic writing in English. Unlike ESL classes that focus on language development, or “sheltered” content classes that adapt instruction for students who are still developing in their English proficiency, many New Mainstream subject-matter classes focus on curricular content with little regard for the linguistic diversity of students enrolled in them. A further complicating factor for multilingual writers2 is the standards and accountability pressure that drives instruction in New Mainstream classrooms.

“No Child Left Behind” (NCLB) was a legislative act passed in 2002 that mandated curricular standards and accountability within U.S. federal education policy and established requirements for states to create and assess comprehensive standards for all core curricular subjects. Although not a provision of NCLB, statewide high school exit exams have also become more common and now affect graduation rates, an important factor in the federal law. Under pressure to raise their students’ scores on annual tests and on the high school exit exam, school districts have implemented increased standards and accountability measures. In California, high school students experience these measures as early as ninth grade, since California's high school exit exam (the CAHSEE) is first administered in the fall of 10th grade, and subject-specific standardized tests are administered every year.

The purpose of this article is to examine the relationship between context and classroom writing norms. While many studies that employ social approaches to writing and literacy account for immediate contextual factors such as classroom interactions or the use of feedback or particular materials, this article is concerned with the intercontingencies3 through which the more macro-level national context of accountability mandates has influenced writing practices and norms at the classroom level as experienced by multilingual adolescents in subject-matter classrooms. We begin by describing the accountability policy context of No Child Left Behind in the United States. Next, we articulate the theories of academic socialization and academic literacies that drive our concern about how current accountability mandates might influence the writing development of multilingual adolescents. After describing this study of writing practices in linguistically diverse secondary subject-matter classrooms, we illustrate our findings about writing norms and intercontingencies with examples from the classes in which writing was most predominant: English language arts and science. We conclude with implications for research and theory related to second language writing and adolescent writers.

Section snippets

Academic writing in an age of accountability

Although the discourse around standards and accountability in the United States does not explicitly name student diversity as a problem, the “achievement gap” in academic performance (based on test scores, grade point averages, and graduation rates) between white English-speaking students and non-white linguistically diverse subgroups is seen as a compelling force behind these policies. As such, diversity is at the heart of the educational problems that these policies attempt to remedy. The

Theoretical framework: academic socialization and academic literacies

This inquiry into the standards and accountability context of writing instruction for New Mainstream writers presumes that context does indeed influence writing practices in classrooms, and that these practices, in turn, socialize young people into particular norms for academic writing within and across curricular areas. Theories of language socialization, specifically socialization into writing, provide a useful lens to examine this phenomenon.

Any community has an established set of norms for

The study

This article responds to concerns about the influence of accountability mandates on classroom writing norms by answering the following questions in the context of twelve subject-matter classrooms in a linguistically diverse California high school:

  • (1)

    How did uses of writing in these subject-matter classrooms reflect or contradict district efforts to standardize instruction under NCLB?

  • (2)

    Within this accountability context, what were the norms for academic writing in these subject-matter classrooms?

Our

Research context

This examination of how policy interacted with writing experiences of multilingual writers in New Mainstream classrooms was situated within the context of a larger study, the Diverse Adolescent Literacies (DAL) Project5. The DAL Project was a year-long qualitative study of academic language and literacy practices at Madera

Results and discussion

In order to respond to our research questions, we begin this section by describing district efforts to standardize instruction and promote accountability as those efforts were implemented at Madera High School. Next, we respond specifically to the research questions with regard to writing and accountability in the “core” tested subjects of science and English. Since writing in mathematics—the other core subject area—was limited almost entirely to copying mathematical formulas in students’

Implications

As linguistic diversity becomes the norm in U.S. classrooms, teaching practices and accountability systems “that are the products of a century of monocultural, monolingual educational research and infrastructure development” are unlikely to solve contemporary educational problems (Luke, 2004, p. 91). Skerrett and Hargreaves suggest that today's classroom diversity requires “moving beyond existing strategies of curriculum and assessment standardization toward an era of poststandardization that

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    The Diverse Adolescent Literacies Project was funded in part by the University of California Linguistic Minority Research Institute and the Spencer Foundation.

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