Constructing English Language Learners: an analysis of register processes and state effects in the schooling of multilingual migrant students

Abstract

Migration in recent decades has increased language diversity in America, fueling controversies about bilingual education, and revealing how deeply national identity is entangled with assumptions about language and race. Drawing from an analysis of policy debates about the federal legislation and education policy known as No Child Left Behind and from ethnographic studies of multilingual migrant households and schooling practices in upstate Nueva York, I examine how metadiscourses about languages and persons circulate across differently-scaled discursive events and social spaces, including congressional hearings and academic policy research, as well as the classroom sites where individual schools enact policies for ‘English Language Learners’. My analysis uses anthropological theories of register, racialization, and the state to investigate how linguistic and social inequality are co-constructed in an era of increasing social polarization. Such co-construction depends upon forms of governmentality, forms of decentralized ‘state effects’, that operate across the apparent boundaries between state and civil society, and result from both top-down and bottom up processes, policy mandates as well as local categories of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ minorities. The analysis revealscomplex, enduring connections between language, race and inequality in processes of education; their critique remains a pressing task for the Anthropology of Education.