Mid-Career Award from AERA's Second Language Research SIG

Several of my friends/colleagues who came to celebrate me as the Second Language Research business meeting. Please ignore that I am holding the award upside down :)

At AERA, I was awarded a Mid-Career Award from the Second Language Research SIG. As a part of this recognition, they asked all award winners to answer three questions: What are your main research interests? What drew you to the field of second language research? What do you see as important future directions for the field? Below, I share the responses that were included in the SIG’s latest newsletter.

What are your main research interests? 

My main research interests center on the everyday educational practices that impact the academic trajectories of bilingual adolescents in US schools. I am interested in these seemingly mundane educational practices because they are rarely examined, yet they play important roles in students' lives. For instance, in my most recent article in TESOL Quarterly (2022), I used an intersectional anti-adultism conceptual lens to investigate how 20 high school youths understood the relationship between two routine EL practices—English language proficiency (ELP) testing and EL-related course placement—and their institutional EL classification. This study found that most participants did not use ELP testing or EL-related course placement to recognize their labeling. That is, even though youths took ELP tests and/or were placed in EL-related course placement, most did not realize they were identified as ELs. Youths’ interpretations of the meaning of these two practices were related to how they understood themselves and their schooling experiences. As such, the findings highlight the necessity to create structures for multidirectional and intergenerational communication between youth and adults that challenge institutionalized adultism within EL policy. The interconnection of my research interests across the past decade is the careful analysis of the seemingly mundane, which I contend is fundamental for more just research, policy, and practice. 

What drew you to the field of second language research?

Multiple languages have always been a part of my life. My mother was raised in a multilingual family. Her childhood and adolescence occurred across various European, Asian, and African countries. Although my father was raised in the southern United States as a monolingual English speaker, he worked manual labor jobs in Los Angeles from the 1970s through the 1990s. Given his profession, he worked with many Spanish speakers and learned Spanish as a second language. I saw learning more languages as a way to be in community with the people who were an essential part of my daily life. As a result, I was determined to know more than English. I remember dragging my younger brother to the public library to check out language-learning cassettes during the summer. I became a certified Spanish-English bilingual history teacher because I love languages and education. However, I was drawn particularly into Second Language Research because of the adolescents I taught who were identified as English learners within the US school system. Their righteous discontent with their schooling experience and the labels ascribed to them caused me to question everything I was taught. They showed me how I was complicit in an unjust system, and their experiences pushed me toward creating change.  

What do you see as important future directions for the field? 

An important future direction for second language research is incorporating intersectional anti-adultism. Whether or not future studies use this specific terminology is less critical than researchers’ engaging with the following three commitments to youth (Brooks, Under Review): 

• The commitment to center youth knowledge and voices. 

• The commitment to document and act against dehumanizing practices towards youths. 

• The commitment to unlearn adultism in all aspects of life.  

These commitments require that researchers build on the understanding that youth knowledge and decision-making are necessary for equitable education. It is essential to define adultism to understand what an intersectional anti-adultism lens necessitates and how these three commitments are interconnected. Adultism entails “a set of beliefs, attitudes, policies, and practices that construct adults as developed, mature, intelligent, and experienced, based solely on their age and ensures that adults control the resources and make the decisions in society” (DeJong & Love, 2015, p. 490). As a result, anti-adultism entails rejecting age bias. Anti-adultism recognizes that adults are not necessarily more mature or in possession of other positive qualities because of their age. I argue that an intersectional anti-adultism lens is necessary because it acknowledges that age bias is not the only form of marginalization that youths experience; their multiple marginalized identities impact how they experience adultism. The three commitments of the intersectional anti-adultism lens shape how researchers engage in second language research to center youths.