Dissertation

Language Assemblages in Higher Education: EAL Graduate Students' Entanglements with English(ing)

Ali, Yaseen

2026

Overview

This interpretivist study engaged the language frames (i.e. beliefs and attitudes) and self-reported practices of 22 EAL-identifying graduate students at a Canadian post-secondary institution. These students participated in a critical language awareness curriculum that encouraged a shift away from characterizing “English” as a monolithic language with uniform lexico-grammatical norms and towards “Englishing,” a situated activity consisting of translingual, semiotic, and environmental resources. During an academic semester, the participants attended a workshop that challenged native-speakerist and raciolinguistic ideologies, completed self-directed modules about translanguaging and negotiation strategies, and generated reflections about their classroom and lab experiences. Using frame analysis and interpretative phenomenological analysis, participants then reviewed their learning artifacts (e.g., survey responses and idiolect maps) during final interviews to consider any shifts from their initial language frames. Acting as co-interpreters alongside the researcher, the students provided valuable insights into how their languaging beliefs, practices, and desires are entangled within ideological assemblages inhabited by diverse interlocutors and accelerating technologies. As a result of participating in the study, students reported back that they reduced perfectionistic thoughts about their spoken languaging and appreciated the inevitability of linguistic variation across all traditionally named languages. Yet many participants underscored a reluctance to deviate from standard(ized) English in formal writing and in evaluative contexts, expressing concerns about being perceived as using less prestigious varieties of Englishes. This study offers unique insights into EAL students' conceptualizations and interpretations of their own languaging and acknowledges their idiosyncratic strategies as creative and agentive acts to mitigate imbalanced socio-material conditions of translingual precarity. The Englishing study provided a forum for students to develop and hone their own sites of languaging praxis, thus revealing a range of enacted choices between “standard” English and translanguaging. Pedagogical implications centre on fostering non-judgmental metalanguaging spaces that elicit students’ translingual learning strategies beyond a monolingual “English-only” paradigm.

• Publisher: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
• Subject: Education / Higher education / Language / Language arts / Linguistics / Soderbergh, Steven (1963- )
• ISBN: 9798241629500