Domain-specific English language acculturation as strengths for secondary schooling in Australia

Australian schools are largely monolingual, dominated by both the English language and Western culture; and yet, they increasingly serve multilingual students from around the world. A perpetual challenge is the deficit framing of students’ English proficiencies. That framing turns on factors such as years of uninterrupted schooling and academic literacies. English language learning is un/predictable but always shaped in the multiple domains of the lives of students learning in English as an additional language (EAL). The promise of acculturation frameworks for understanding this learning has yet to be realised. Nearly a century ago, acculturation was understood as changes resulting from continuous contact between two different cultures by Redfield et al. (American Anthropologist, 38(1):149-152, 1936). Recently it has been acknowledged that acculturation is domain-specific by Arends-Tóth & Vijver (European Journal of Social Psychology, 33(2):249– 266, 2003), where students choose to acculturate differently in academic and non-academic social spaces. These spaces are changing rapidly for technological and other reasons. Student language acculturation across multiple domains is the focus of this paper. The paper reports a qualitative case study that explored the language acculturation experiences of EAL secondary students. Findings highlighted multiple ways EAL students acculturate to English across their life domains. This offers insights for practice, including the need to revisit curriculum and pedagogy to better employ students’ knowledges when other varieties of English are used. For policymakers, the findings highlight the need to recognise that acculturation pathways of migrant- and refugee-background students may not entail generalised adoption of dominant Australian cultural and linguistic norms. The findings call for differences to be framed as strengths rather than deficits in multicultural, multilingual worlds.