Challenging Native Speakerism in Literacy Research and Education

Abstract

Scholars have examined the myth of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPIs) as model minorities in education and specifically within mathematics education, yet less is known about how this myth reveals an intersection of race and language that shapes the experiences of AAPIs in the literacy field. In this article, I argue that a monolingual model rooted in nativist ideologies of English is part and parcel of AAPIs’ racialization as model minorities and forever foreigners. Drawing from AAPI and literacy studies as well as autoethnographic insights, I further argue that the positioning of AAPIs in literacy research illustrates its Eurocentric legacy. This Insights article seeks to raise awareness of a racialized native speaker ethos of literacy research and education, and to call for more literacy research on AAPIs—an invisible minority within the field. Implications include expanding notions of literacy with varied and global perspectives through more research with and from multilingual nondominant communities.

The weekend before the 2018 Literacy Research Association (LRA) conference, I sat in a café finishing a presentation. Another patron interrupted to ask if I speak Chinese. He wanted me to translate a word in a book. A few days later en route to catch a flight to the conference, the Uber driver asked, “If you don’t mind, could I ask what your nationality is?” After asking for clarification of what he meant, I reluctantly confirmed my citizenship. He apologized and explained that he should have known better as my “English is very good.” During what proceeded as an amiable conversation, I inquired if he had ever been asked his nationality in his 22 years living in our shared city. He had not. Shortly after returning from LRA, upon a colleague’s introduction of me as a language and literacy faculty member of our local university to his neighbor, she asked if that meant I teach English as a second language. These interactions felt friendlier than yet still akin to those in which people have asked if I speak English or explained to me “how things are done in this country.”

Across a catalog of similar encounters in public places and within the recursive surprise over my spoken English and profession, the intersection of race and gender surfaces, as do nativist perceptions of English literacy and language expertise. The encounters illustrate the privilege and marginalization of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPIs) in a racialized order of otherness. They additionally underscore how race and language intersect, as do race and gender, as axes of racialization to uphold existing structures of Whiteness and nativism. In this article, I focus on the social construction of AAPIs as nonnative speakers of English. I discuss how the Model Minority Myth (MMM) reveals an intersection of race and language that shapes the positioning of AAPIs and other nondominant groups in literacy research and education. This Insights article seeks to (a) raise awareness of exclusionary and monolingual perceptions of literacy expertise and (b) stimulate more research on the literacy experiences of AAPIs. More broadly, this article aims to problematize native speakerism—an ideology of those representing “Western culture” as the “native speaker” ideal for English and the teaching of it (Holliday, 2005)—and advocate for more literacy research with and from multilingual nondominant communities.

The Model Minority Myth

AAPI stories and perspectives are often absent or rendered invisible in public and academic discourse due to the MMM that universalizes AAPI experiences. The very category of AAPI is a social and political construct (Coloma, 2006) that elides diverse histories, languages, and experiences across and within AAPI panethnicity, such as the distinct histories of Pacific Islanders. The MMM obscures differences across and within ethnic groups such that “the complexities of AAPI lived experiences with race, racism, and settler colonialism in education remain concealed within this dominant framing of education and race” (Poon et al., 2016, p. 472). The MMM operates as a racial device to uphold anti-Black racism and social and institutional inequities rooted in White supremacy (Kumashiro, 2006); it asks AAPIs to emulate a “model” of middle-class Whiteness and casts a deficit lens on other minoritized racial groups for not achieving similar assimilation.

Within U.S. education, the MMM homogenizes AAPIs as successful and therefore not in need of understanding or support, despite research that has found the contrary (Ngo & Lee, 2007). The difference between AAPIs doing well versus being well (Bankston & Zhou, 2002) is evident in AAPI students’ depression and stress (Kiang & Buchanan, 2014) and experiences of racial discrimination and lack of school support services compared with peers of similar socioeconomic and academic backgrounds (Cooc, 2019). The peripheral status of AAPI languages within education further disavows the experiences and concerns of AAPI students and families, such as parents who describe low interaction with schools due to linguistic and cultural barriers (Sohn & Wang, 2006). Bilingual education research in the United States sometimes includes but seldom features AAPIs, even as 74% of AAPIs are foreign-born (Pew Research Center, 2013) and thereby likely to be from bilingual or multilingual families.

The (In)visibility and Linguistic Assimilation of AAPIs

AAPIs are in a unique racial bind. Their invisibility as model minorities works in tandem with their visibility as forever foreigners (Tuan, 1998). In January 2019, a Duke University administrator’s rebuke of Chinese graduate students for not speaking in English whether in or outside of classrooms illustrates the racialized language demands of academic spaces. I wonder if this faculty member would have reprimanded, for example, White students speaking in Italian. Although much has been written about the MMM, the role of language and literacy is less attended to yet crucial for its perpetuation. Linguistic assimilation is part and parcel of the MMM; it reproduces Whiteness by hinging the belonging and success of AAPI and other nondominant communities on performing standard English—often at the divestment of other languages that are meaningful to them. For example, East Asian languages, despite gaining appeal in a neoliberal and global marketplace, remain stigmatized in many situations due to a social stratification of world languages (Kim, 2016). This stigma bears out in Hinton’s (2009) study of 250 AAPI youth autobiographies wherein accent ridicule and xenophobic comments were among key reasons AAPI youth gave for “language rejection.” Asians report the most heritage language loss of any U.S. immigrant group (Li & Wen, 2015), even as AAPI youth may seek literacy practices that reflect their personal contexts of multilingualism and migration (Lam, 2009).

Expected linguistic assimilation of AAPIs is a critical issue not only for students. AAPI faculty for whom English is not a dominant language may manage particular challenges to their legitimacy or a sense of alienation. Ponjuan et al. (2011) found the marked speech of international Asian women constrained their presentations of self, communication with senior colleagues and research collaborators, and participation in collegial and mentoring relationships. Jang (2017) described teaching and research expectations he encountered as an international Asian literacy scholar due to his racial positioning as a nonnative English speaker. Across important differences, AAPIs from international backgrounds and those born or raised in the United States may face marginalization in U.S. academe due to their racialization as forever foreigners. For example, research on student evaluations shows AAPI academics’ disadvantage due to nativist ideologies of standard English (Subtirelu, 2015); just seeing an Asian face can result in negative perceptions of the person’s English literacy and language expertise, regardless of the person’s actual speech (Yi et al., 2014).

Never a Native Speaker: Racialized Monolingualism as English Expertise

As a beginning high school teacher, I wrote, “What does it mean for me to be becoming a teacher of English, a subject of which my father is a student? . . . English was the discipline reserved exclusively for especially articulate and almost always White teachers” (Kim, 2002, pp. 74–76). My experiences as a teacher substantiated English education as a field that privileges the narratives and expertise of Whiteness: a parent asking where I am from because my surname is “not American” or a social studies colleague asking me why Amy Tan’s (1989) The Joy Luck Club was in a course titled American Literature. Such incidents reinforced a perceived misalignment between being AAPI and being an ostensible English expert in a U.S. school.

Racialized and monolingual expectations of English expertise instantiate the ideological nature of language and literacy, and language and literacy learning as acts of becoming. Within White-dominated institutional spaces of research academe, the native speaker model familiar to me from previous academic settings is ever present through embodied experiences of being the only AAPI language and literacy or bilingual education faculty member at my institution and the only AAPI person in the room when I teach literacy research courses. Colleagues and students do not question my ethnic provenance or citizenship, and I view my cultural and linguistic repertoires as vital assets to my work, yet repeated encounters in which someone openly puzzles the coherence of my appearance, background, and professional identity reveal the racialized language expectations that AAPI and other literacy researchers of color may navigate.

Even as this article aims to challenge nativism and monolingualism centered in literacy research and education, the act of writing it is an exercise of privilege as someone who can readily access a particular English for professional writing. The aforementioned interactions further illustrate this privileged subject position as interlocutors made sense of my work as a literacy researcher and educator through the in situ evidence of my spoken English. In public and institutional spaces, “identifying who is a native or nonnative English speaker is part and parcel of a racializing process whereby using English becomes a symbol of being American. Conversely, using non-Western languages can index an outsider status” (Kim, 2016, p. 258). Facility with standard American English affords social and institutional credibility within the United States, as well as in professional conversations abroad—further propagating a narrow model of literacy.

What (and Who) Counts in Literacy Research and Education

Last year, I received a request to review a manuscript for this journal. Like most academic journals, JLR’s system prompted me to select representative keywords. Scanning the available categories, I learned that AAPI experiences and perspectives do not count as an area of interest or expertise in literacy research. More precisely, AAPIs are invisible. In the journal’s roster of 239 topics, none included “Asian” or “Pacific Islander.” I was surprised by this discovery as JLR publishes studies that include AAPI participants (e.g., Compton-Lilly et al., 2017; Woodard et al., 2020). I wondered if research on AAPIs and other nondominant communities had been subsumed by broader equity-related areas. Indeed, “Equity” is a standalone category, as are “Diversity,” “Discrimination,” and “Race and Ethnicity.” Also available are categories focused on specific communities, such as “Visually Impaired,” “Rural,” and “Refugee Literacies.” Six categories begin with “African American,” and other categories representing nondominant communities include “Latinx Experiences and Perspectives,” “LGBTQ,” “Sexuality and Sexual Orientation,” and “Queer Theory and/or Studies.”

The absence of AAPIs from JLR’s list is not unique. Research in the Teaching of English offers reviewers 16 categories composed of 202 topics from which to select “Areas of Interest or Expertise.” Categories such as “Diversity” enumerate subareas. Under “Literature Studies,” the expanded list includes historically marginalized communities through keywords such as “African American literature,” “Latino/Latina literature,” and “LGBTQ literature.” These encouraging discoveries evince efforts to redress the centrality of Whiteness and heteronormativity in literary studies. The omission of AAPIs, however, neglects the fastest growing racial group in the United States, whose projected population will increase 75% from 2015 to 2040 (Ong et al., 2016). Moreover, this oversight perpetuates a long-standing “common understanding which suggests that Asia and the Pacific are ‘over there,’ outside of and apart from what is considered ‘American’” (Coloma, 2006, p. 11). Rendering invisible Asia, the Pacific Islands, and peoples of their diasporas contributes to the perseverance of an occidental perspective—one that undermines efforts to decolonize research and honor different ways of understanding the world (Ndimande, 2018).

Toward a Racially and Linguistically Diverse Model of Literacy

Novelist and English literature scholar Viet Thanh Nguyen encourages AAPIs to tell their stories as a way to challenge racism and the American story and also to express gratitude and love to our families, communities, and country—even as we live in a country that does not ask to hear our stories. As the MMM persists, such as in its recent deployment to buoy educational, legal, and public debates regarding affirmative action, I join a call among AAPI scholars to reframe racial discourses about AAPIs in educational research and highlight the experiential knowledge of AAPIs (Poon et al., 2016). I extend this call by advocating more studies of AAPIs in literacy research to make visible the diverse knowledge, perspectives, and experiences of this overlooked population. As literacy researchers and educators, who we study, and the research we cite and teach, matter for issues of (in)visibility.

As racial narratives pervade U.S. discourse and shape AAPI and non-AAPI students’ experiences within education, such as narratives of Asians exceling in mathematics (Shah, 2017), racial narratives of English education are less known yet critical to consider for literacy research and education. The dearth of AAPI literacy researchers and research on AAPI experiences contributes to racialized notions of who belongs in the field and neglects the potential migration and language diversity that AAPI researchers and educators may bring (Kim & Cooc, 2020). Building on an argument that a lack of racially and linguistically diverse K–12 teachers means students learn to read the world through a predominantly White, monolingual, and middle-class lens (Haddix, 2017), I argue that uprooting a native speaker model of literacy requires more racially and linguistically diverse literacy researchers. Alongside calls for K–12 and higher education faculty diversity, efforts to support literacy research with and from multilingual people of color can help to challenge the hegemony of English that harms nondominant communities (Martinez et al., 2019) and lead to considerations of literacy through more varied and global perspectives.

Literacy research has challenged traditional notions of literacy by recognizing students’ out-of-school literacy practices as assets for in-school learning. The “out-of-school” literacy and language experiences of researchers, especially those underrepresented in specific fields, are likewise relevant to academe (Li & Beckett, 2006). A model of global meaning making (Tierney, 2018) in literacy research requires recruiting and sustaining more researchers from multilingual, immigrant, and international backgrounds. Diverse linguistic repertoires of literacy researchers of color in particular are essential for advancing literacy research and education and challenging the racialized monolingualism of academe writ large. Multilingual literacy researchers from AAPI and other nondominant communities can contribute to remodeling epistemologies, pedagogies, and perspectives centered in monolingual Whiteness, as can literacy research that values minoritized varieties of English, disconnects English facility from race, and challenges racist discourses of a particular language as evidence of one’s citizenship or belonging. Questions pertaining to my country of origin or knowledge of English are not innocuous queries as they reify literacy’s racialized and Eurocentric legacy. Disrupting this legacy requires changing notions of what literacy and language expertise looks and sounds like.

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