Linguistic Confinement: Rethinking the Racialized Interplay between Educational Language Learning and Carcerality

Language assessments are often framed as benign mechanisms needed to objectively classify people’s linguistic proficiencies. In this article, I argue for the need to critically re-examine how purportedly objective institutional language assessments and our participation in them deceptively reify historical and contemporary inequities. I offer the analytic of linguistic confinement that is structured by an ideological bundle of race, language, and disability. Linguistic confinement aims to re-think the racialized interplay between educational language learning and carcerality. I show this through examination of the ‘long-term English learner’ (LTEL) category. More specifically, I explore what insights we gain into the experiences of racialized students when we consider how colonial and carceral strategies structure educational language learning and access to broader learning opportunities. By doing this, I urge educational language scholars to attend to carcerality and scholars of carcerality to reckon with language.