Looking closely and listening carefully: A sociocultural approach to understanding the complexity of Latina/o/x students’ everyday language

The definitions of “academic language” available to teachers and teacher educators often invoke generalized assumptions about the supposed gap between complex, discipline-specific forms of language and the everyday language of Latina/o/x students. In this article, we advance an alternative hypothesis – that Latina/o/x students boast expansive linguistic repertoires and engage in complex and sophisticated forms of everyday language, including some that overlap directly with the forms of language and literacy explicitly outlined in official English language arts standards, including the Common Core State Standards. With this as our premise, we draw on a robust theoretical tradition of sociocultural scholarship on language and literacy, as well as on our own ethnographic data, to highlight the complexity of Latina/o/x students’ everyday language practices, and to showcase how these complex language practices overlap with those typically framed as academic. We conclude with practical suggestions for beginning to explore Latina/o/x students’ everyday linguistic complexity.