In response to the growing number of linguistically diverse students in elementary classrooms, this Teaching Tip centers stories of students exploring language identity and use in one fourth-grade classroom in the Midwestern United States. Specifically, the author situates this Teaching Tip by first telling how students engaged in a discussion…

Many approaches to literacy instruction treat language as an object of study. The curricular assumptions that inform such instruction are that language is located outside the person, extracted from context, neutral, and explicable through defined rules. An underlying assumption in many language arts classrooms is that children will not pay…