Linguistic Cartography: Exploring the Power and Potential of Mapping Language Resources Within Classroom Communities

Abstract

ABSTRACT To inform the design of humanizing pedagogies that draw on the whole of learners’ linguistic resources, educators must come to know students as language users, and, more centrally, support students to become aware of the dynamism of their own linguistic repertoires. We highlight one instructional approach—“linguistic cartography”—for making these language resources visible. Linguistic cartography engages participants in mapping and reflecting on all of their language resources learned across a range of contexts and for diverse social purposes. We examine the use of linguistic cartography in one focal middle-grade classroom (23 students, ages 11–13) in a linguistically-restrictive English-only school district in the United States. Through analysis of fieldnotes and interviews conducted with the classroom teacher and with three focal students, we highlight the potential instructional affordances of linguistic cartography for questioning and speaking back to discourses that serve to pathologize plurilingualism in linguistically-restrictive school contexts.