“You keep the y'alls”: Multivocality and embodiment in college students' negotiations of academic English

Abstract Throughout their education, students learn to use “academic English,” and to navigate associated language ideologies. In focus groups, college students discuss formal features of “academic English,” especially “removing ‘I’,” and “avoiding bias,” that they link to a sense of alienation and loss. They show themselves not to be passive receptacles for the ideologies they are exposed to as part of their education, but rather, as agents who take up various stances relative to *Academic Standardized American English and to their use of “slang” varieties, and who reintegrate both themselves and their communities into their discourse, through the use of embodiment and multivocality.