Sociolinguist within: critical language awareness, linguistic ideologies, and the creation of heteroglossic ideological and implementational spaces in teacher preparation

What do preservice teachers know about the language they are required to teach?

“Standard English would be described as the way American Society talks.” One among the 128 preservice teachers whose definitions anchor this article offered this succinct, conditional formulation, an answer that is at once confident and evasive, naming nothing while gesturing at everything. The phrase encapsulates the conceptual vacuum this article sets out to examine: a vacuum in which California's Teacher Performance Expectations (TPEs) [California Commission on Teacher Credentialing (CTC), 2016] require beginning teachers to teach Standard English (SE) and Academic English (AE), and yet provide preservice teachers strikingly little to work with. The TPEs are in turn assessed through the California Teaching Performance Assessment (CalTPA), the portfolio-based licensure examination through which candidates must demonstrate the skills, knowledge, and dispositions the TPEs describe (Muñoz-Muñoz, 2018). The companion assessment handbook sparsely defines AE as “the language of literacy and books, tests, and formal writing within an educational context” (CTC, 2024, p. C−1); a definition of SE is nowhere to be found. Into this conceptual vacuum, linguistic ideologies (Kroskrity, 2000; Silverstein, 2022) step in to fill the space, and an ideological space opens for preservice teachers to take over, perhaps without their full awareness of doing so.

The stakes of this ideological vacancy are considerable. California's classrooms are home to a growing and linguistically diverse student population, the backdrop against which teachers, teacher educators, and policymakers design curricula, performance standards, and common academic ground. Teachers are active language policy agents in this process: as Hult, 2018 argues, they exercise this agency not only in the classroom but through designing lessons and managing linguistic resources, an agency that operates within what Hornberger and Cassels Johnson, 2007 term the ecology of language policy. The California Department of Education has reported well over two and a half million students identified as bi/multilingual, a figure that flattens California's linguascape and obscures the reality that language is always in flux: hybridizing, shifting, transforming, and being transformed (Otsuji and Pennycook, 2010). Teachers like the thousands credentialed in California each year will be the most sustained adult presence in these students' linguistic lives, which raises the question this article takes up: what conceptions of language do preservice teachers bring to the profession, and can these conceptions be supported, developed, and mobilized to embrace California's linguistic diversity?

The TPEs are not a neutral backdrop to this question. They are part of a policy ecology, alongside the California Standards for the Teaching Profession (CSTPs), the Teaching Performance Assessments (TPAs), and the Continuum of Teaching Practice, whose alignment has tightened considerably over the past decade. The need for the heteroglossic spaces this article argues for is not abstract; it is legible in the linguistic landscape of the very county in which this study was conducted. Santa Clara County, the heart of California's Silicon Valley and home to the university where these preservice teachers were credentialed, is a county in which 55.7% of residents speak a language other than English at home and 42.1% are foreign-born (U.S. Census Bureau, 2023). This is what Vertovec, 2007 terms “superdiversity,” a diversification of diversity itself (see also Kraftl et al., 2019), in which the proliferation of countries of origin, migration trajectories, and legal statuses outpaces the categories teacher preparation policy has historically used to describe its students. A preservice teacher completing a credentialing program in this county is not preparing for a hypothetical future of growing diversity; the superdiverse classroom is already the present condition of practice, a condition research confirms is widely shared and, just as often, inadequately addressed (Knight, 2025). Across its successive editions, the TPE document has undergone what this research terms a “linguistic turn,” a dramatic, multi-fold increase in the textual centrality of language, of SE, AE, and the speaker populations these categories are meant to describe (Muñoz-Muñoz, 2025). Yet, as the policy context analysis below shows, increased textual volume has not resolved the ambiguity of these constructs; if anything, it has multiplied the occasions on which that ambiguity surfaces in practice. This is the monoglossic ideological space against which a heteroglossic push, evident in the professional community's growing embrace of translanguaging, codemeshing, and other counterideological framings of language, is increasingly arrayed (Flores and Schissel, 2014).

This conceptual vacuum could be read as a preparation gap, remedied by clearer policy language or more explicit instruction. This article proposes a different reading. Rather than treating preservice teachers as blank slates awaiting correct definitions of SE and AE, this article reframes the gap as an underutilized resource: a body of sociolinguistic knowledge that preservice teachers already carry into their credentialing programs, often in unrefined, contradictory, or contested form, but present nonetheless. This article terms this latent capacity the “sociolinguist within.” The data examined here, definitions of SE and AE elicited from preservice teachers before any sustained classroom discussion of these constructs, capture this knowledge as close to its raw state as the methodology would allow: critical, ambivalent, occasionally naive, but rarely empty of insight. This reframing is not without precedent in the recent literature on critical language awareness in teacher preparation, where it travels increasingly under the label Critical Multilingual Language Awareness, or CMLA (De Costa and Van Gorp, 2023). Van Gorp et al., 2023 found that CMLA development was shaped as much by experience predating a program's coursework as by the coursework itself, a finding this article's cold-elicitation design is positioned to test directly. Zhang-Wu and Tian, 2023 similarly found that participants could readily articulate critical, ideologically aware stances toward language even as their actual lesson plans reflected an unreflective English dominance, a gap this article's earlier-moment data help to explain: the ideological resources are present from the outset, but their translation into sustained classroom practice remains an open achievement.

This reframing connects to a long-standing tension in the literature on language policy and teacher agency, namely whether teachers function as pawns of top-down policy mandates or as linguistic agents who interpret, resist, and reappropriate the policies that govern their practice. Menken and García, 2010 describe this as a recognition of “educators on the ground” as the final arbiters of language policy implementation, since policies are negotiated in classroom practice regardless of how they are codified in text. More recent work on bilingual and Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) teacher candidates extends this recognition of agency into the domain of identity formation itself: Venegas-Weber and Thompson, 2025 document how bilingual BIPOC teacher candidates develop translanguaging stances that function as professional identities in their own right, not merely as instructional techniques layered onto an otherwise fixed sense of self, a finding that strengthens the case for treating the ideological resources preservice teachers bring with them as integral to who they are becoming as educators, not as incidental beliefs to be corrected or confirmed. This article's empirical core, drawn from preservice teachers’ own definitions of SE and AE, offers an early test of that agency: before student teachers ever set foot in a classroom of their own, before they have absorbed a program's explicit curriculum on language, what ideological resources are they already deploying?

Two narrower questions guide the present article. First, how do preservice teachers interpret the language concepts embedded in California's Teacher Performance Expectations? Second, how are linguistic ideologies negotiated and enacted in teacher preparation programs? The article proceeds as follows. The conceptual framework and literature review situates these questions within the fields of linguistic anthropology, language planning and policy, and critical language awareness, alongside a review of the contested literatures on SE and AE. The methods section describes the survey-based, Critical Action Research design through which the data were collected. The policy context section offers a brief discourse-analytic grounding in the TPE text. The findings present preservice teachers’ definitions of SE and AE and the ideological processes these definitions reveal. The discussion and conclusions address implications for the creation of heteroglossic ideological and implementational spaces in teacher preparation.

Ideology, policy, and the language of schooling: a conceptual map

Three fields, one premise: linguistic anthropology, LPP, and poststructural policy analysis

This research is grounded in three complementary fields. From Linguistic Anthropology of Education, it draws on the premise that language use both presupposes and creates social relations in cultural contexts (Wortham, 2008). Silverstein’s (1985) notion of the “total linguistic fact,” the inseparability of form, use, ideology, and domain in the production of meaning, provides the conceptual core: no single one of these elements can be presupposed or extricated if an analysis is to account for how meaning is generated in a specific situation. This framework helps unravel semiosis in educational settings by bringing together the formal aspects of language with the pressures of institutional context and the notions of linguistic order, namely linguistic ideologies, that govern how language is perceived and judged.

From Language Planning and Policy (LPP), this research adopts a grounded approach situated within the so-called New Wave of Linguistic Policy (Menken and García, 2010; Ricento, 2006; Tollefson, 2002), which conceives language policy as a dynamic, multidirectional process, not a unidirectional decree. Preservice teachers and teacher educators are understood here as agentic members of the “ecology of language” (Hornberger, 2005; Hornberger and Cassels Johnson, 2007), occupying a position from which they negotiate, interpret, and at times resist the policies that nominally govern their linguistic conduct. A Poststructural Policy Analysis (PSA) lens (Bacchi and Goodwin, 2016) further informs the brief discourse analysis of the TPE policy text below. Bacchi and Goodwin's “What is the problem represented to be?” heuristic treats policy texts as productive rather than merely descriptive: policies do not simply respond to pre-existing problems but actively construct the categories of language and speaker that they purport to address. Finally, the empirical work reported here was conducted within a Critical Action Research (CAR) tradition, which fuses the collection of survey data with a critical orientation toward the transformation of teacher preparation practice.

Taken together, these three fields converge on a shared premise that organizes the remainder of this article: that the categories through which language is described in policy and in professional discourse, SE and AE chief among them, are neither neutral nor self-evident, but are themselves the outcome of situated, ideologically motivated processes of construction. Approaching preservice teachers’ own definitions of SE and AE through this lens means treating those definitions not as more or less accurate approximations of a stable linguistic fact, but as data in their own right, evidence of the ideological work preservice teachers are already performing as they make sense of the language demands embedded in their credentialing process.

Seeing through language: CLA, raciolinguistics, and the listening subject

Critical Language Awareness (CLA) (Alim, 2005, 2010; Fairclough, 1999, 2014) organizes this article's central commitments. Fairclough, 1999 observed that power relations are increasingly maintained in the routine workings of everyday social practices rather than by overt force, which means that common-sense language practices, classroom language among them, become a critical site for sustaining or contesting power relations. Alim, 2005 frames this critical study of language around two programmatic questions that resonate throughout this article: How can language be used to maintain, reinforce, and perpetuate existing power relations? And how can language be used to resist, redefine, and possibly reverse those relationships?

Linguistic ideology supplies the complementary analytic vocabulary. Silverstein, 1979 defined linguistic ideologies as “sets of beliefs about language articulated by users as a rationalization or justification of perceived language structure and use” (p. 193), a definition that foregrounds the work of after-the-fact rationalization that ideology performs. Irvine, 1989 sharpened the construct's political stakes by describing linguistic ideology as “the cultural system of ideas about social and linguistic relationships, together with their loading of moral and political interests.” Kroskrity, 2004 further established that linguistic ideologies operate not as single, unified beliefs but as multiple and often internally contradictory systems, a plurality that, as the findings demonstrate, is readily visible even within a single preservice teacher's definition of SE or AE. Building on this work Irvine and Gal, 2000, account of the semiotic processes of iconization, fractal recursivity, and erasure describes the mechanisms by which such ideologies are made to appear coherent: iconization transfers qualities from nonlinguistic social facts onto linguistic forms, fractal recursivity reproduces an ideological distinction at ever smaller (or larger) scales, and erasure renders invisible whatever evidence might contradict the ideology's internal logic. These three processes recur throughout the analysis of preservice teacher definitions in the findings.

Raciolinguistic ideologies, as theorized by Flores and Rosa, 2015, sharpen this apparatus further by locating the perception of linguistic deficiency not in the speech of racialized speakers but in the perceptions of the listening subject, a reorientation the authors trace directly to Inoue' 2006 theorization of the “listening subject” in her study of gendered language ideology in Japan. Seltzer, 2023, in a companion commentary on language awareness in teacher education, builds directly on this reconceptualization, proposing a “multilingual listener-as-teacher stance” that invites educators to shift from policing language to recognizing the full breadth of what speakers bring. Flores and Rosa argue that the construction of communicative events as racialized prevents listeners, including educators, from recognizing the linguistic assets and capacities that racialized students bring to the classroom; deficiency, on this account, is not a property of an utterance but a judgment performed by the listener who hears it. Flores, 2020 extends this critique specifically to the construct of academic language, arguing that academic language functions as a raciolinguistic ideology that frames racialized students as linguistically deficient and in need of remediation, and proposing “language architecture” as a counterideological framing that instead recognizes the language practices of Latinx and other racialized students as already aligned with the literacy demands of college- and career-ready standards. This critique anticipates several of the counterideological stances documented in the findings, particularly those that locate the deficiency not in language itself but in the institutional gaze that judges it, and it returns directly in the findings below, where one participant's account of SE and AE turns explicitly on the question of who is doing the listening. Smith, 2024, extending the raciolinguistic framework to literacy teacher educators specifically, further underscores the urgency of this reorientation for the field of teacher preparation.

A substantial and fast-growing body of recent scholarship has extended CLA specifically into the domain of teacher preparation under the banner of Critical Multilingual Language Awareness (CMLA), and this literature supplies the article's most immediate disciplinary home. De Costa and Van Gorp, 2023, introducing a special issue devoted to the construct, argue that CMLA must move from a pedagogical stance toward more evidence-based instructional practice, a call this article answers by treating preservice teachers’ unprompted definitions of SE and AE as exactly such evidence; Bale et al. (2023) similarly presses for greater theoretical and definitional clarity in teacher-education research that invokes multilingualism, a methodological caution this article's explicit treatment of the SE/AE distinction attempts to honor. Seltzer, 2023, as noted above, explicitly connects language awareness to a listener-oriented stance in teacher education. Van Gorp et al., 2023, in the same special issue as De Costa and Van Gorp, traced how CMLA emerges unevenly across preservice teachers depending on prior experience and coursework, a finding with direct bearing on the cold-elicitation design described in the methods section: the definitions analyzed in the findings were gathered before coursework could plausibly account for whatever critical awareness they display, isolating something closer to incoming disposition than program effect. Bale et al. (2023) offer a book-length study of teacher-education programs explicitly redesigned to counter raciolinguistic ideologies, documenting a suite of guiding principles and practices whose ambition aligns with this article's own recommendations in the discussion.

Mahalingappa, Polat, and Meyer, 2025 pursued a related question under more adverse political conditions, designing an experimental intervention to develop CLA at the intersection of language, identity, and ideology explicitly in response to legislative pushback against the teaching of critical perspectives on race in United States schools; their finding that such instruction remains both necessary and contested anticipates the discussion of how political context bears on whether preservice teachers’ latent critical capacities are ultimately cultivated or suppressed. Finally, Mahalingappa, 2024, focusing specifically on multilingual preservice teachers of color, documented the development of what she terms linguistic critical consciousness, a construct closely allied to this article's “sociolinguist within” and one this article returns to when interpreting the raciolinguistic contestation voiced by participants of color in the present sample. Recent reviews of teacher agency within language policy more broadly corroborate the premise that organizes this article's conceptual framework: across more than a decade of empirical research on how teachers enact, negotiate, and adapt the language policies that govern their practice, agency emerges consistently as a negotiated, context-dependent process rather than a passive transmission of top-down mandates, conditioned in important part by the institutional structures and identity commitments within which teachers work (Karimi and Mansouri, 2025).

What nobody can quite define: SE, AE, and their contested histories

What is SE? There is no consensus across disciplines, or even within linguistics, about what this language variety looks like, what its boundaries might be, or what its pedagogical implications would be. Lippi-Green, 1997 demystification of Standard American English remains a foundational touchstone: she writes that “non-linguists are quite comfortable with the idea of a standard language, so much so that the average person is very willing to describe and define it” (p. 57), much as they might describe a unicorn or a being from a popular science-fiction universe. Throughout her work, the tenets of this ideology, fixity, grammatical correctness, neutrality, objectivity, and linguistic factuality, are laid bare as ideological rather than descriptive claims.

The American context complicates this picture further. Unlike Received Pronunciation in the United Kingdom, which is explicitly marked as a prestige variety, American SE is typically perceived as unmarked, as Wolfram, 1991 notion of “network American” and its grounding in the practices of accentless Midwestern newscasters illustrates. Preston, 1996 research on folk perceptual dialectology found no clear consensus among American speakers about which regional variety merited both correctness and pleasantness, suggesting that SE survives ideologically less as a stable linguistic fact than as a flexible, locally negotiated evaluative frame. Silverstein, 1996 names the underlying mechanism a “monoglot standard,” sustained by an allegiance to a functionally differentiated denotational norm that marks membership in, and continuity with, a given linguistic community.

Academic English has fared no better in achieving conceptual consensus. Cummins, 1979 classic distinction between Basic Interpersonal Communication Skills and Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency (BICS/CALP) inaugurated a durable, if contested, view of language registers as hierarchically organized by cognitive demand. Scarcella, 2003 later defined AE as “a variety or register of English used in professional books and characterized by the specific linguistic features associated with academic disciplines” (p. 9), insisting that “it is not possible to do science, [or] economics, or do mathematics with only ordinary language” (p. 9). Formulations of this kind build a boundary between components of otherwise fluid linguistic repertoires, and they support concerning, contested assumptions linking linguistic realizations to intellectual capacity. Snow and Uccelli, 2009 proposed a multidimensional model of AE comprising interpersonal stance, information load, organization, lexical choice, and representational congruence. Despite these more holistic accounts, an emphasis on vocabulary acquisition in practitioner-oriented scholarship, most visibly the three-tier vocabulary framework distinguishing basic, high-utility, and domain-specific words (Beck et al., 2013; Coxhead, 2000), has contributed to an ideological reductionism of academic language at the level of school practice, one that, as the findings illustrate, surfaces repeatedly in preservice teachers’ own definitions. Recent empirical work confirms that these ideological investments in SE and AE are not merely residual: Anderson, Avarzamani, and Jiang, 2025 document how educators continue to mobilize ideological justifications for “standardized English” in ways that naturalize its authority, while Bunch et al., 2025, studying preservice teachers’ orientations toward AE in a single preparation course, find that dominant conceptions of academic language persist even among candidates who have been explicitly invited to question them. Confirming the global reach of these ideological patterns, Deng and Budiman, 2024 argue from a Global Englishes perspective that privileging standard over pluricentric varieties perpetuates racial inequalities in language teaching, and Salazar Caro and Pérez, 2023 document a parallel persistence of standard-language ideology among language teachers in Colombia, underscoring that the constructs analyzed here travel across educational contexts wherever a dominant language variety is institutionally enforced.

Teachers as policy actors: heteroglossia, agency, and the spaces between mandates

Tollefson, 2002 and Ricento, 2006 describe three historical stages of language planning and policy research. The first, the “neoclassical” stage, dating to the 1960s, presumed that a linguistic issue could be addressed neutrally and a-historically through legislative intervention. The “historical-structural” stage that followed in the late 1970s and early 1980s reacted against this neglect of power, recognizing language policy as inseparable from macroeconomic and political forces. The third, postmodern stage, the so-called New Language Policy Wave (Ricento, 2006), is the stage within which this article situates itself. It reframes multilingualism not as parallel monolingualisms but as heteroglossia, and it replaces the hegemonic linguistic monocentrism of the nation-state with what Blommaert and colleagues (2012) describe as a polycentrism of undefined boundaries.

Within this third stage, teachers emerge as ground-level policy negotiators, not passive implementers. Menken and García, 2010 state plainly that, regardless of the policy type or educational context, “there is typically policy negotiation in classroom practice, as it is ultimately educators…who are the final arbiters of language policy implementation” (p. 1), such that policies often produce outcomes their authors never intended. This recognition of teachers as policy actors, not mere conduits of policy text, has become its own active subfield. Heineke et al., 2015, studying field-based teacher preparation, found that preparing candidates explicitly to read and interpret policy documents, rather than simply comply with them, strengthened both their policy literacy and their capacity for policy advocacy once in the classroom. Bylica, 2023 extended this line of inquiry to a student-led arts partnership program, documenting how preservice teachers developed an emergent “policy consciousness” through direct, structured engagement with the policy environments shaping their practice, well before they held any formal authority to shape that environment themselves. Most

Building on Hornberger, 2005, Flores and Schissel, 2014 define “ideological spaces” as ways of understanding language in local settings, and “implementational spaces” as the ways those understandings are enacted in classroom practice. The metaphor evokes crevices of unmonitored practice within which educators on the ground can deploy their own micro-policies and engage in bottom-up negotiation with higher levels of policy discourse, echoing Gutiérrez and colleagues’ (1999) notion of “third spaces.” Schissel and colleagues (2023), drawing directly on this same framework in a collaborative action-research study of translanguaging and testing in dual-language bilingual programs, demonstrate how teachers and researchers working together can actively expand both kinds of spaces within institutional constraints that nominally close them off.

This article is, accordingly, animated by Flores and Schissel, 2014 own framing of the stakes involved: “sustained work with teachers may eventually coalesce into a bottom-up movement against monoglossic language ideologies that brings about a national transformation where bilingualism truly does become the norm for all students” (p. 476). The professional community's growing embrace of counterideological framings of language, translanguaging (García, 2009), codemeshing (Canagarajah, 2011), polylanguaging (Jørgensen et al., 2011), and metrolingualism (Otsuji and Pennycook, 2010), represents one expression of this heteroglossic push, a push this article argues finds an unexpected ally in the critical capacities preservice teachers already bring with them. This push is not uniform or uncontested, however: Nkhi, 2024, studying higher-education classrooms in Lesotho, cautions that pedagogical translanguaging risks becoming a panacea that underestimates the structural force of colonial monoglossic ideology, while Mtanha-Matariro and Makalela, 2025, writing from a Global South perspective, call for approaches to translanguaging in teacher education that are responsive to local linguistic ecologies rather than transplanted wholesale from Northern theorizing.

Recent program-level efforts confirm that this heteroglossic push has moved well beyond theory into the redesign of teacher preparation itself. Lyon et al., 2025, reporting on a federally funded redesign of secondary teacher preparation, describe an integrated biliteracy and disciplinary learning framework that situates translanguaging not as an add-on accommodation but as the organizing principle for how secondary content teachers are taught to plan instruction for multilingual learners, a programmatic ambition this article's discussion returns to directly. Metz, 2024, however, studying English teachers in a politically conservative state, documents how legislative hostility toward the teaching of race-related content, exemplified by anti-critical-race-theory statutes, has produced genuine fear among practicing teachers even as many continue to incorporate critical language teaching into courses ranging from introductory English to African American Literature. This tension between professional conviction and political constraint reframes the question this article poses about teacher agency: agency in language policy negotiation, as the discussion argues, is not merely an interpretive capacity teachers either possess or lack, but a capacity whose exercise is conditioned by the political climate in which preparation programs and, later, classrooms are situated.

How the study was done: critical action research in a credentialing course

A researcher in the room: critical action research, positionality, and design

This study adopts an interpretive epistemological stance situated within the tradition of Critical Action Research (CAR) (Stringer and Ortiz Aragón, 2020), in which method and theory are fused: the researcher's stake in the transformation of teacher preparation practice is constitutive of the research design, not incidental to it. Stringer and Ortiz Aragón, 2020 characterize action research as a cyclical, practitioner-driven process in which inquiry and intervention are pursued in parallel, a description that fits the dual instructor-researcher role described below. In a directly comparable higher-education application, Heineke et al., 2015 embedded a similarly practitioner-driven, reflective inquiry stance into a teacher preparation program's field-based coursework, finding that treating candidates as active interpreters of the policy and practice environment around them, rather than passive recipients of program content, strengthened both their professional reflection and their eventual classroom agency, a precedent that supports this study's own design choice to treat preservice teachers’ unprompted language ideologies as data worth taking on their own terms. McConnochie and Gonzalez, 2023 similarly demonstrate how ethnographic action research anchored in teachers’ own narrative funds of knowledge can surface professional insight that standardized policy language leaves unspoken, a precedent that reinforces this study's attention to preservice teachers’ own definitions as data.

Researcher positionality, understood here as a dynamic, negotiated site of intersecting identities (Cousin, 2010; Giampapa, 2011), shaped every stage of this study. The researcher served simultaneously as instructor of record for the course from which the survey data were drawn, a dual role that demanded explicit attention to positionality and power. The researcher's own relationship to language is itself part of this positionality: trained and employed as an educator in Europe for several years before relocating to the United States, the researcher brings a bilingual, accented, and externally racialized relationship to English into a classroom in which he occupies the institutional authority of instructor, a vantage point from which the felt asymmetries of SE and AE were not abstract before this study began. Having also served as a bilingual classroom teacher, English Learner coach, and bilingual program administrator during a period in which federal accountability mandates and California's own restrictions on bilingual education were both in force, the researcher arrived at this project already attuned to the gap between what language policy documents formally require and what classroom-level negotiation of those documents actually looks like, an attunement that shaped both the questions this study asks and the interpretive lens applied to participants’ responses. In this sense the researcher's own “sociolinguist within,” formed across these bilingual and cross-national experiences, is part of the analytic lens rather than external to it.

In the data collection reported here, all procedures were carried out under an IRB-approved protocol. The researcher's relationship to participants was that of instructor to student, a power differential acknowledged as an unavoidable feature of the institutional context and actively managed: participants were informed of their right not to participate or to discontinue participation at any time, classroom norms were established by general student consensus, and survey data were kept sealed and unanalyzed until after final grades had been disclosed. Course credit was required for the credential, but survey participation was voluntary and consented under the IRB-approved protocol. The class was structured dialogically, with ample opportunity for unmonitored student discussion, intended to lower the instructor-student differential to the extent compatible with rigorous data collection (Ferguson et al., 2004) and to preserve participants’ capacity to offer candid, unguarded definitions of SE and AE rather than definitions shaped by an anticipated instructor preference.

Site, cohorts, and sample

Data were provided by 128 participants across five cohorts of a “Multicultural Foundations of Education” course at a public university in the San Francisco Bay Area, taught by the researcher. Two cohorts were composed of multiple subject (elementary) candidates, two of single subject (secondary) candidates, and one cohort combined both populations, allowing balanced representation across credential types. The cohorts reflected the credentialing population of a large, majority-minority public university in which roughly 44% of undergraduates are first-generation and the largest ethnic groups are Asian (about 36%) and Hispanic or Latino (about 28%); many participants were bilingual or heritage speakers, though home-language background was not collected as a study variable. Demographic categories and subject-matter specialty were recorded and considered in the analysis but were not used to filter the sample; the full sample was preserved as collected, in keeping with the study's interest in the range of ideological positions among an unselected cohort of future teachers.

Capturing cold knowledge: the SE-AE questionnaire and its rationale

Data were gathered through three separate questionnaires: a pre-course questionnaire, an SE and AE questionnaire, and a TPE questionnaire, piloted with four respondents whose feedback informed the final wording before full administration,. These instruments were administered separately by design, to avoid conflating perspectives or saturating participants. Administering the TPE questionnaire alongside the SE-AE questionnaire risked contaminating the latter by priming participants’ awareness of these varieties as policy-mandated constructs, which would have narrowed responses to strictly educational applications of SE and AE and obscured the links between linguistic ideology and the broader societal perspectives this research sought to elicit. This sequencing decision draws on a methodological literature on survey and questionnaire design for eliciting language attitudes and ideological beliefs: item wording and sequencing should avoid cueing respondents toward an anticipated institutionally sanctioned answer (Beaudrie, Amezcua, and Loza, 2019), and a carefully sequenced, multi-item survey instrument can surface ideological variation that a single global question would tend to flatten (Kim and Park, 2024).

The pre-course questionnaire elicited prior knowledge and degree of comfort with the topics of the course, including one open-ended item asking participants’ opinion of the role of language in education. The SE-AE questionnaire, administered online, posed four items: “How would you describe SE?”; “Based on your ideas, who uses SE? When? Where?”; “How would you describe AE?”; and “Based on your ideas, who uses AE? When? Where?” The item wording was kept deliberately simple and avoided taking any ontological position toward its objects, so as to elicit what this research terms “cold information,” that is, definitions produced prior to any preamble or in-depth group conversation about language in the context of the course. The TPE questionnaire similarly posed open items eliciting participants’ basic awareness of the TPEs and their perceived scope of influence on credentialing and practice. Responses across all instruments were analyzed using a hybrid inductive and deductive coding scheme informed by Critical Discourse Analysis (Wodak and Meyer, 2009) and Saldaña, 2012 coding manual, with thematic categories developed from the literature and from patterns emerging through grounded engagement with the data. The unit of analysis was the individual participant definition. Trustworthiness was pursued through triangulation across the three instruments, active reflexivity given the researcher's dual role, and a deliberate search for disconfirming cases rather than confirmation of an expected pattern.

The policy vacuum: SE, AE, and what the TPEs leave unsaid

The California Teaching Performance Expectations were first developed in 2001 by the Commission on Teacher Credentialing (CTC), the state agency charged with ensuring “integrity, relevance, and high quality in the preparation, certification, and discipline of the educators who serve all of California's diverse students.” The TPEs define the knowledge, skills, and dispositions expected of student teachers entering the profession and function as a foundational stone for the Teaching Performance Assessments (TPAs). They sit within a broader policy ecology that includes the California Standards for the Teaching Profession (CSTPs) and the Continuum of Teacher Practice, which bridges preservice and early in-service stages of development. The policy analysis summarized here draws on and extends the discourse-analytic treatment developed in Muñoz-Muñoz, 2018, 2025; rather than re-present its full procedure, this article takes its findings as the policy backdrop against which the present data are read. The discourse-analytic and Poststructural Policy Analysis treatment described above traced the TPEs’ genealogy across the 2001, 2013, and 2016 editions, coding their references to language varieties, speaker populations, and language-related practices, drawing on Bacchi and Goodwin, 2016 “What is the problem represented to be?” heuristic and following Rennie, 2020 modeling of the TPEs as one text in a wider intertextual policy field. A seventh, literacy-focused expectation (TPE 7) was added to the policy in 2024 and rolled out in the assessment in 2025–26 (Muñoz-Muñoz, 2025); it falls outside this article's scope, as its implementation postdates the collection of the data reported here.

Across these three editions, the TPEs have undergone what this research terms a “linguistic turn”: while the document's overall length only doubled between 2013 and 2016, explicit references to language increased nearly fourfold, from 56 to 234. Language appears across the 2016 text in overlapping ways: naming language varieties (AE, SE, or students’ primary languages); referencing speaker populations (English Language Learners and, new to 2016, Standard English Learners); describing communicative events such as parent communication; and detailing what Kibler and Valdés, 2016 term the “curricularization” of language, its translation into discrete, teachable content through English Language Development standards. Qualitatively, the TPEs have moved beyond a narrowly grammar-based conception of language toward an emphasis on discourse practices and multimodal communication.

This growth in textual volume has not resolved, and arguably has sharpened, the document's conceptual ambiguity. Beginning teachers are explicitly expected to teach and model AE throughout the 2016 document; explicit references to SE appear only in this most recent edition, and neither term is accompanied by a glossary, an omission flagged during the TPE validation study and never remedied [Human Resources Research Organization (HumRRO), 2016]. The TPEs’ preamble offers an inclusive definition of “all students” that names English Learners and Standard English Learners, yet a critical reading finds this stated inclusivity undermined by inconsistencies in how subgroups are enumerated across the document.

Two conclusions follow from applying the PSA heuristic to this pattern. First, the TPEs’ manifest problem, the need to standardize teacher practice in service of educational equity, sits alongside a more implicit problem: the presumption that some student populations lack the language practices necessary for school success, an assumption resting on the premise that language varieties are discretely bounded and that speech communities share a homogeneous understanding of their own defining features. Second, what remains unproblematized, and effectively silenced, is the power dynamic that produced SE as a construct in the first place, along with the conceptual integrity AE is simply assumed, never argued, to possess. The TPEs thereby contribute to the reification of two constructs with a deeply troubled history in social and educational linguistics, reproducing societal hierarchies under the guise of linguistic fact. It is against this policy backdrop, ambiguous in its categories yet emphatic in its mandates, that the preservice teachers whose definitions form the findings below were completing their credentialing coursework.

The sociolinguist within: what 128 preservice teachers said about SE and AE

Before the conversation starts: preservice teachers on language and education

The findings reported here are drawn from the cold-elicitation SE-AE questionnaire described in the methods section. Before turning to those definitions, it is worth registering the more general backdrop against which they were offered. In response to an open-ended item asking participants their opinion of the role of language in education, all teachers in the sample attributed importance to language, though the framing of that importance varied. Multiple subject candidates tended to emphasize language as personal and socioemotional development, while secondary candidates more often emphasized its role as a mediator in the transmission of knowledge. Some candidates framed language as a gatekeeper for learning; others, in the minority, offered explicitly critical framings, with one elementary candidate writing simply that “our language dictates our value in this country. That's not fair, but it's true.” This general acknowledgment of language's centrality to education forms the backdrop against which participants then defined SE and AE as the specific language varieties prescribed by the TPEs.

What is Academic English? Six themes from 128 definitions

Participants’ definitions of AE clustered around several recurring, often overlapping themes. One theme, here termed boundary porosity, removed AE from any single concrete context, rendering it a diffuse concept that opposed the specificity AE is typically assigned in schooling discourse (Schleppegrell, 2001). One participant described AE simply as “English that requires more descriptive and professional language,” used “in work or for important matters.” Boundary porosity of this kind connects to “democratizing” views of AE that counter ideologies of linguistic scientism (Hyslop-Margison and Naseem, 2007) or linguistic elitism, even as it leaves the construct conceptually underspecified.

A second theme, medium dependency, limited AE to written language or treated printed language as a warrantor of linguistic purity. Thirty-seven respondents conceived of AE in this way. One participant's definition conflated the ideological notions of professionalism, efficacy, and emotional detachment, describing AE as “almost always used in writing,” with “clear syntax and structures,” and “not always most useful for conversations,” adding that AE “denotes the efficacy of ideas being presented” while SE belongs to “the professional person, of separating emotions from ideas.” This theme works to reinforce an equally ideological supremacy of writing over oral language.

A third theme identified AE squarely with vocabulary, often echoing the “Tier 3” terminology that has become ingrained in school jargon through the three-tier register classification developed by Beck and colleagues (2013). One participant, reflecting a common trend in the sample, defined AE largely in lexical terms, naming “Tier 3” vocabulary explicitly, an echo of the way teachers are routinely socialized into this construct through school-based professional development. Ideologically, this theme participates in societal deficit discourses such as the “word gap” and what Avineri et al. (2015) term the ideology of “wordism.”

A fourth, more agentic theme framed AE instrumentally, as a deliberate pedagogical choice in service of deeper learning, content-based or metalinguistic, rather than as an inherent property of professional or academic spaces. One participant defined AE as “the use of specific style, form, and function of language used to enhance comprehension, provoke deeper thought and inquiry,” available to educators “who want students to engage in deeper language understanding” without being obligatory at all times. In definitions of this kind, educator linguistic agency is emphasized and framed as a deliberate choice, a means to an end in the pursuit of deeper learning rather than a fixed requirement imposed from outside the classroom.

A fifth theme, objectivism and authority, framed AE as the linguistic correlate of rationality and epistemological authority, echoing the ideology of scientism (Hyslop-Margison and Naseem, 2007). One participant, drawing on a background in the physical sciences, described AE as English “removed from emotion, and rooted in objective thought and analysis,” language “curated by the mind for the purpose of provoking academic thought or discussion,” found especially “at universities and realms of education” and required in “all educational journals revolving around sciences or social sciences.” A related definition rooted AE's authority in the virtue of canonical literature, citing the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence as exemplars, a move that links the linguistic ideology of academic language to political ideology even as it requires erasing the considerable linguistic change, in spelling and punctuation alike, separating those eighteenth-century texts from the present.

A sixth theme, identity construction, framed AE as a resource for indexing academic identity or professional credibility (Kroskrity, 2000) rather than as an inherent feature of any single context. One science education candidate described AE as language requiring “careful attention to grammar, syntax, etc.,” useful for communication between professionals, such as “medical jargon that translates from the dentist to the GP to the hospital,” and capable of positioning a speaker “as a more professional person or a more serious student.” In this definition, AE moves from being conceived as inherent to a profession toward a more agentic use of linguistic resources, deployed to signify one's own capacity rather than simply inherited from the workplace. Another participant offered an ironic, situated variant of this theme, first defining AE as a tool for conveying abstract concepts within bounded academic fields and “various academic fields” and their “endeavors,” before then noting, in a register shift that signaled critical distance, that it could equally be deployed by “douche-bros (and their female counterparts) to express a sense of intellectual superiority,” a definition that, read in the context of the Silicon Valley setting in which it was offered, reframes AE as a tool for the local reinforcement of class and racial hierarchy.

Across these six themes, AE definitions converged on one point even as they diverged on most others: nearly all participants situated AE unambiguously toward the formal, sophisticated end of the register spectrum, however differently they explained why it belonged there. This convergence helped seal one boundary of the register spectrum even as the boundaries of SE, examined next, remained considerably more contested.

“The way American society talks”: eight themes in search of a standard

Definitions of SE proved considerably more unstable than those of AE, ranging across at least eight overlapping themes. A first theme identified SE with proper grammar, “correct” English enforced in schools and textbooks; nineteen participants defined SE this way, in contrast to twenty-three others who instead defined it by reference to casual, everyday settings. A second theme, here termed democratic universalism, held that SE is “everyone's English,” shared by the entire community of English speakers with little regard for variation; thirty-eight participants expressed some version of this view. One participant localized SE in “our natural setting,” the variety “we used when we first learned how to speak,” deploying inclusive deictics (“we,” “our”) that reinforce this panlinguistic ideology. A closely related, third theme of nativism treated SE as a first-acquired, native variety, at times compounded with cultural capital markers such as high school graduation as a criterion for native-like competence.

A fourth theme invoked metapragmatic models of SE grounded in mass-media representation, with some participants nominating “California English” or “Hollywood English” as exemplary, tracing a lineage to the “transcontinental accent” once cultivated in the performing arts. A fifth theme, variability, allowed for some internal gradation within SE, distinguishing a “higher” register suitable for formal writing from a “lower,” more casual register, while still treating the overall category as basic and shared. A sixth theme grounded SE's authority in written, lexicographic sources, with one participant invoking “dictionary English” and citing the Oxford English Dictionary directly, a move reflecting a transatlantic lexicographic tradition whose authority over SE persists in the American context (Davis, 2002).

A seventh theme made explicit the racialized and classed substrate beneath several of the preceding themes. One participant described SE as a variety speakers “adopt to speak ‘properly’ and ‘intelligently,’” reflecting “predominantly white influence and neighborhoods,” an expectation that has gone beyond schooling into the everyday judgment of speakers who deviate from prescribed grammatical forms. An eighth theme, language hierarchy and progression, cast SE as a developmental prerequisite for AE, a “before” stage in a presumed linguistic sequence. One participant wrote that “before you learn ‘AE’ you need to learn the foundation of SE,” a formulation whose implications for language-minoritized students are considerable, since a prerequisite relationship of this kind risks compounding into a system of double gatekeeping, in which SE access is required to reach AE, and AE access is in turn required to learn.

Beyond these eight thematic patterns, the sample also revealed two recurring ideological processes by which SE was substantiated as a stable, “real” object rather than as a contested construct. The first process anchored SE directly to schooling itself, treating it as definitionally coextensive with the English language standards taught and enforced in the classroom; one participant defined SE as “the English being taught in school,” found “in schools” and used “primarily” by educators and students, with slang and “language degradation” relegated to the world outside the curriculum. This kind of definition is circular in a revealing way: schools reproduce SE as curricular content, and the existence of that curricular content is then offered as evidence that SE is a stable, identifiable object, a mutually reinforcing logic Kroskrity, 2004 would recognize as characteristic of how ideologies sustain one another. The second process substantiated SE by appeal to an imagined linguistic majority, an “imagined community” in Anderson, 1991 sense, homogeneous enough in its behavior to ground a singular standard. One participant defined SE as “spoken as vernacular by the majority of the population,” acknowledging that English “dialects vary throughout the US and the world” while nonetheless asserting that “certain commonalities exist throughout the majority of English speakers,” a definition that achieves coherence chiefly by erasing the very variation it begins by conceding.

A further participant's account of SE captured the construct's instability as directly as any in the sample, opening with the observation that the very notion is “a bit of an oxymoron,” since “English is not very standard, but can be fluid to fit different contexts,” while still allowing that broadcaster or newscaster English could be considered “more standard” than regional variants. This same participant coined the term “social English” to capture the everyday variation used in “hallways, malls, and social spaces,” a partition that effectively reproduces the “low SE” pole identified elsewhere in the sample under a new name, suggesting that even participants skeptical of SE's ontological stability tend to reconstruct some version of the register hierarchy they set out to question. A related response inverted the standard assumption that slang-free SE belongs to native speaker communities by suggesting that it is in fact non-native speakers, “foreigners,” who hew most closely to “regular” English precisely because slang is rarely an explicit part of classroom instruction, an inversion that counters the robust ideology of nativism documented earlier in these findings.

Reading SE and AE together: collisions, overlaps, and the ideological dance

When SE and AE definitions are read side by side, a further set of tensions emerges, both across respondents and, notably, within single respondents’ own definitions. A recurring opposition pitted restricted against unrestricted, public against private framings of the two constructs. One participant defined AE as “Proper English, with correct grammar and syntax,” generally occurring “in business and academic settings,” while simultaneously asserting that “everyone is capable” of it, a formally demanding, restricted-space construct nonetheless declared an unrestricted good. Such contraposition fills the concept of AE with tension when situated against the backdrop of public schooling. A second opposition segmented the register spectrum into casual vs. formal, educated vs. uneducated poles, with some participants further subdividing SE itself into “high SE” and “low SE,” fractal recursions that, in Irvine and Gal, 2000 terms, reproduce the same ideological distinction at a smaller scale while erasing the boundaries that would make such a partition empirically defensible. A third opposition contrasted emotion against emotionlessness, the objective against the subjective, with several participants describing SE as the vehicle of culture and intimate relationship and AE as its detached, institutional counterpart.

Reading definitions of SE and AE together also surfaces patterns of co-construction. Some participants treated the two as equivalent, locating both in the expectations of public, credentialed spaces; one participant defined SE as “the dialect of English that the elite/educated class considers to be prevalent/normal,” used by “folks in the academic circle and in professional arenas,” and then described using the term AE “interchangeably” with this same definition of SE, collapsing the distinction the questionnaire had presupposed. Others constructed an oppositional, exclusionary relationship, anchoring SE and AE in distinct institutional and non-institutional arenas; one participant distinguished simply between “English we use outside of institutions” and “English that we use in institutions.” A further participant sharpened this exclusionary framing around the lens of surveillance, describing SE as “slang, walking around talk, curse words” used by “everybody everyday on the street,” contrasted with AE as language used “whenever somebody is watching you,” an opposition that locates the Foucauldian “gaze” (Foucault, 1977) at the very hinge of the distinction: both varieties are displayed in public, but it is the speaker's awareness of being observed and judged that determines which is which. The framing also bears, more specifically, a raciolinguistic charge: the watching party this participant invokes is not a generic observer but, as Flores and Rosa, 2015 account of the white listening subject and its roots in Inoue, 2006 theorization of listenership would predict, a perceiving subject whose judgments of AE-vs.-SE usage are themselves racially patterned, such that the same utterance can be heard as AE compliance from one speaker and SE-bound deviance from another.

Still others described a partial overlap, in which AE appears as “SE plus,” an addition of academic vocabulary and complexity layered atop an already-prestigious base, a framing that can support a gatekeeping ideology in which SE functions as a precondition for AE. One participant defined SE as the written and spoken English “that follows the grammar rules used by Merriam-Webster, peer-reviewed articles, etc.,” available to native and second-language speakers alike, and then defined AE simply as “'SE’ with the addition of more complex words and language,” used by those who wish to be seen as “smart” or “educated.” A third participant extended AE's boundaries well past the conventionally academic, defining it as language requiring technical terms that “vary depending on the situation” and explicitly including sports jargon such as the word “quarterback” as an example, an ideological reversal of academic-language elitism that opens space for a broader reassessment of which linguistic repertoires might count as AE. A particularly pointed instance of this overlap came from a participant who described both constructs explicitly as elitist and discriminatory tools that support the status quo in the distribution of capital and opportunity, even as he recognized everyone's participation in maintaining them “so as not to be judged.”

These cross-cutting tensions are perhaps best captured by what this research terms the “ideological dance,” instances in which a single respondent's stance toward SE or AE remains genuinely ambiguous across the span of a single definition. Wong and Du, 2026, studying teacher candidates’ actual translanguaging pedagogy, document a structurally identical pattern at the level of classroom practice: candidates profess a heteroglossic stance but revert to monoglossic defaults the moment institutional pressures surface, suggesting that the ambivalence visible in the present study's survey data does not resolve itself automatically as candidates move toward practice. One participant first presented AE as “Elite English, institutional English,” language used “when talking to the rich, the privileged, your boss,” before concluding that recognition of and compliance with AE is contingent on linguistic competence, such that failing to abide by its norms signals a lack of ability rather than the possibility of contestation, an ambiguity that leaves open whether AE is being critiqued as an instrument of privilege or simply described as a skill some speakers lack. A related ambiguity appeared in a participant's account of the cyclical reproduction of SE through media, narrative, and everyday speech, an account explicitly attentive to racial hegemony, which nonetheless rationalized the exclusion of African American English Vernacular from SE's “core definition” by appeal to a dialect-vs.-language distinction whose own ideological grounding went unexamined. Such instances illustrate how critical awareness and ideological reproduction can coexist within the same act of definition, often within the same sentence.

Pushing back: the sociolinguist within speaks

Against this backdrop of reproduction, a substantial and consistent strand of contestation also runs through the sample, evidence, this article argues, of a “sociolinguist within” already active in preservice teachers’ own language rather than merely instilled by subsequent coursework. Several participants explicitly challenged the nativist, fixity-based, and purity-based tenets that anchor much of the SE construct. One participant rejected the relevance of slang and accent altogether, defining SE simply as the ability “to communicate fluently in English,” and adding, “I don’t think it's fair to exclude people from communicating in English based on their slang or accent,” a stance that crosses one of the red lines implicit in many of the more conventional definitions, namely that communicability requires neutrality and detachment from regional or community-specific linguistic repertoires.

Other participants countered the gatekeeping ideology of AE directly. One wrote that AE “has a little more practicality because it provides a scaffold for rigorous academic skills, but that doesn’t mean that you need AE to achieve rigorous skills,” reframing AE as an optional aid instead of a necessary vessel for subject-matter learning. A science candidate offered a related counterideology, defining AE functionally, as whatever structure helps transmit disciplinary knowledge, rather than as a preexisting code that scientists or students must master before participating in the discipline, a stance with considerable potential to demystify academic language by blurring the boundary between students’ existing linguistic assets and the demands of academic tasks.

A further cluster of definitions was explicit in its race and class critique. One participant described SE as “the socially accepted way of speaking in English,” used “by the majority in America, white affluent people,” language “standardized by generations of white privilege and European ancestry” since English became the country's de facto official language. Another, preparing to become a science teacher, described AE as “an oppressive way of framing a dominant language so as to privilege those who speak it,” used by those who aspire to join “the privileged classes,” a formulation that names the acquiescence of those who seek upward mobility through linguistic conformity, echoing Gramscian accounts of cultural hegemony and the endorsement of the status quo by the subordinated.

The sharpest and most sustained contestation in the sample came from one of two African American participants, who wrote of SE: “That flat yet melodic way the news anchors speak. There is actually no SE,” before adding, “I think any White face speaking English is above scrutiny. All English speakers use SE. But if you look Brown your English use is hyperscrutinized.” This definition first appears to affirm SE's existence through the familiar metapragmatic model of the news anchor (Wolfram, 1991), only to deprive the construct of ontological substance in the following sentence, reframing the entire apparatus as a function of racialized scrutiny, not linguistic fact. This raciolinguistic critique (Flores and Rosa, 2015) exemplifies the diachronic dimension of contestation present in the sample, directed at the historical genealogy and root causes of SE and AE, alongside a synchronic dimension directed at the ongoing process by which these constructs are produced and policed in real time.

The construct Mahalingappa, 2024 terms “linguistic critical consciousness” names with precision what these most pointed critiques already exhibit in embryonic form. Sevilla and Malone, 2026, in a parallel study of multilingual Latina educators, use the construct of “raciolinguistic ideological clarity” to describe a comparable capacity, arrived at through lived experience rather than explicit instruction, to identify and resist the hierarchies embedded in SE- and AE-adjacent professional-language expectations, a parallel that further corroborates this article's argument that the sociolinguist within precedes, and need not wait on, programmatic intervention Masson and Van Geel, 2024., examining how pre-service ESL teachers conceptualize plurilingualism, similarly surface the raciolinguistic assumptions candidates carry into their preparation, reinforcing the value of treating those incoming conceptions as data in their own right.

These constructs are kin, not equivalents. Mahalingappa, 2024 linguistic critical consciousness and Sevilla and Malone, 2026 raciolinguistic ideological clarity are each theorized as capacities of multilingual educators of color, cultivated through lived racialized experience, while CMLA (Van Gorp et al., 2023) names an awareness that preparation aims to develop over time. The sociolinguist within is distinguished on two axes: it is surfaced through cold elicitation, before any coursework positions these constructs, across an unselected cohort; and it is defined against a documented policy vacuum, read as what preservice teachers supply where the TPEs stay silent.

Taken as a set, these instances of contestation, alongside the themes of variability, fluidity, and the languaging of identity documented in the SE analysis above, undermine the constructs of fixity and purity that organize monoglossic conceptions of language from two complementary directions at once. Where the raciolinguistic and class-based critiques attack the historical legitimacy of SE and AE as categories, the more nuanced appeals to variation and fluidity attack the very process by which any such category could be stabilized in the first place, regardless of its historical origin. Read together, the two levels of critique constitute a more than incidental foundation on which a programmatic Critical Language Awareness curriculum, of the kind this article argues for in the discussion, could be built directly, rather than imposed from outside the preservice teachers’ own existing repertoire of critique.

What teachers know — and think — about the policy that governs them

A final, shorter strand of the questionnaire data addressed participants’ awareness of the TPE policy itself. Most elementary-level participants reported at least generic knowledge of the TPEs’ meaning and function; secondary-level participants were more evenly split. Where knowledge was reported, instructors in other courses and discussions within the multicultural foundations course itself were named as the primary sources of awareness, rather than direct engagement with the policy text. Among participants who positively identified the TPEs, understanding tended toward the generic: some named them as the object of evaluation in a teaching portfolio, others as a tool for improving teaching skill, and a smaller number as a structuring guide for credentialing coursework.

A smaller number of participants were openly critical. One described the TPEs as repetitive, amounting to little more than “be a good teacher,” and called for them to incorporate “more social justice, more everything.” Another characterized them as “bureaucratic/educational legalese about what teachers should be doing (in some oddly idealized space),” predicting that compliance would require constructing “lightly fictionalized narratives” to demonstrate alignment with the policy's stated goals. Such early instances of contestation, voiced before participants had completed even a full course of credentialing study, suggest that some preservice teachers arrive already disposed to establish alternatives to the ideological and implementational scope the TPEs presume to set. Read alongside the policy ambiguity documented in the policy context analysis, this finding suggests that the friction between SE and AE as policy constructs and the critical awareness already evident in preservice teachers’ own language is an existing condition of teacher preparation, not merely a pedagogical opportunity, one this article turns to in the discussion that follows.

From awareness to action: mobilizing the sociolinguist within

Taken together, the policy analysis and the findings reveal this same ideological friction operating at both levels. The TPEs’ conceptual ambiguity functions as a genuinely double-edged condition. On one hand, the absence of a glossary, the inconsistent enumeration of student subgroups, and the unexamined assumption that SE and AE name stable, bounded varieties together favor a hegemonic, default interpretation, one easily absorbed without critical scrutiny by a preservice teacher moving quickly through a credentialing program. On the other hand, that same ambiguity leaves room, a crevice of unmonitored interpretive space (Flores and Schissel, 2014), for the contestation documented throughout the findings. The TPEs do not resolve the question of what SE and AE are; in their silence, they cede interpretive ground, and the data presented here suggest that a meaningful number of preservice teachers are prepared to occupy that ground critically instead of passively.

This finding bears directly on the question of teacher agency raised throughout the conceptual framework. If teachers are, as Menken and García, 2010 argue, the final arbiters of language policy implementation regardless of how a policy is codified in text, then the ideological resources teachers bring to that arbitration matter enormously. The data examined here suggest those resources are not uniformly deficit-oriented, nor are they uniformly critical; rather, they are heterogeneous, frequently coexisting within the same individual, as the “ideological dance” in the findings makes clear. A preservice teacher capable of recognizing the racialized history of SE in one sentence and rationalizing its exclusion of African American English Vernacular in the next is neither simply uninformed nor simply enlightened. This coexistence is, this article argues, the more accurate and actionable description of where preservice teachers stand, and a more promising starting point than either a deficit model, which treats preservice teachers as empty of relevant knowledge, or an idealized model, which assumes that critical awareness, once glimpsed, is secured. This reading is corroborated by Van Gorp et al., 2023 finding that the emergence of CMLA among preservice teachers depends heavily on prior experience as much as on coursework: because the data examined in the findings were elicited before this particular cohort had encountered any sustained coursework on SE, AE, or the TPEs, the contestation documented there is plausibly attributable to exactly the kind of pre-programmatic experience Van Gorp and colleagues identify as a driver of CMLA, rather than to any instructional intervention this study can claim credit for. The sociolinguist within, in other words, precedes the syllabus.

The implications for sociolinguistic justice, and for what teacher preparation programs concretely do with this finding, are considerable. Bucholtz et al., 2014 propose linguistic valorization, the promotion of awareness and appreciation of linguistic variation and the systematicity, complexity, and cultural value of one's own and others’ ways of using language, as a foundational goal of sociolinguistic justice work, alongside linguistic access, the opportunity to learn the language varieties associated with sociopolitical power without that opportunity requiring the devaluation of one's existing repertoire. Translated into practice, this means a credentialing course can treat preservice teachers’ own contested, sometimes contradictory definitions of SE and AE, of exactly the kind catalogued in the findings, as a starting text for guided critical inquiry rather than as raw material to be corrected and replaced: a science candidate's functional redefinition of AE becomes the occasion for a discussion of disciplinary literacy that does not require students to first acquire a separate “academic” code; a participant's naming of SE's racialized substrate becomes the entry point for explicit instruction in raciolinguistic ideology rather than a stance the instructor must introduce from scratch. Programs that build on participants’ existing capacity for linguistic valorization in this way can simultaneously prepare candidates to support students’ access to varieties of institutional power, without asking candidates to first unlearn the critical insight they walked in with.

Mobilizing this capacity, rather than treating it as a byproduct of incidental classroom discussion, would require programs to make Critical Language Awareness a programmatic goal, with concrete footholds in course design and field placement rather than a single unit appended to an existing syllabus.

Recent scholarship on preservice and in-service teacher preparation reinforces both the promise and the difficulty of this transition, and points toward what programmatic mobilization of the sociolinguist within might concretely look like in practice. Venegas-Weber and Thompson, 2025, in a case study of bilingual BIPOC teacher candidates, document how translanguaging stances can develop into professional identities that leverage multilingual assets directly in content-area instruction such as science, suggesting that the kind of critical awareness documented in the findings can, under the right programmatic conditions, mature into sustained instructional practice rather than remaining a one-time disclosure on a questionnaire. Lyon et al., 2025 integrated biliteracy and disciplinary learning framework offers one concrete model for what such programmatic conditions might look like at scale: rather than relegating language awareness to a single foundations course of the kind from which this article's data were drawn, their redesign distributes translanguaging-informed practice across the secondary content methods sequence, a structural answer to this study's single-course, single-institution limitations, and a direct template for the kind of distributed, multi-course mobilization this article's findings point toward. At the same time, Mahalingappa et al.' 2025 intervention study and Metz, 2024 account of practicing teachers under anti-critical-race-theory legislation together caution that this transition is neither automatic nor uniformly supported: institutional resistance, a crowded and content-saturated credentialing curriculum, and, in some contexts, explicit political pressure against the teaching of race and language together can constrain teachers’ willingness to sustain critical stances they may have voiced readily in a single survey response. Metz's teachers, fearful but still teaching critical content, model exactly the kind of sustained, quietly determined agency that this article's preservice teachers will need if their early contestation is to survive contact with a classroom of their own, which is precisely why programmatic support, not reliance on individual teacher resolve, is the more durable lever available to teacher preparation.

None of this diminishes the central claim advanced here, namely that the raw material for heteroglossic ideological and implementational spaces is already present among the preservice teachers entering California's credentialing programs. The potential for sustained work with these teachers to coalesce into something larger than individual classroom practice remains, as Flores and Schissel, 2014 put it, a bottom-up movement against monoglossic language ideologies capable of bringing about a more genuinely multilingual norm for all students. This article's contribution to that broader agenda is to locate one significant point of leverage for that movement in the deliberate recognition, validation, and extension of the sociolinguistic knowledge preservice teachers already carry with them into their first credentialing course, and in the concrete pedagogical moves, anchoring discussion in candidates’ own definitions, sequencing raciolinguistic framing early, and distributing language awareness across the program rather than isolating it in a single course, that translate that recognition into practice.

Closing the loop — and opening the question

This article set out to examine how preservice teachers interpret the language concepts embedded in California's Teacher Performance Expectations, and how linguistic ideologies are negotiated and enacted in teacher preparation programs more broadly. Its central contribution is a reframing: rather than treating preservice teachers as deficient in sociolinguistic knowledge and in need of cultivation from the ground up, the survey data suggest they arrive already equipped with a substantial, if unevenly distributed and internally contested, capacity for critical engagement with the constructs of Standard English and Academic English. This capacity, here termed the sociolinguist within, needs mobilization more than it needs construction.

This study carries clear limitations. The survey-based design captures definitions at a single moment, prior to sustained classroom engagement, and so speaks to the resources preservice teachers bring rather than to how those resources develop, or fail to, over a credentialing program. The sample was drawn from a single institution and a single course, taught by the researcher, a positionality that, as discussed in the methods section, shaped both the conditions of data collection and the interpretive lens applied to it. The findings are, accordingly, best read as suggestive of a pattern rather than a fully generalizable account of preservice teacher cognition.

That said, the patterns documented here, and their implications for teacher preparation, are plausibly transferable beyond this single site. Santa Clara County's superdiverse linguistic landscape frames this study, but it is increasingly the norm, not the exception, among the public universities and urban-adjacent regions that credential the bulk of California's, and the nation's, new teachers. The standard-language ideological constructs analyzed here, SE and AE, are embedded in teacher performance standards well beyond California's own TPEs, as the cross-contextual evidence reviewed in the conceptual framework confirms: Salazar Caro and Pérez, 2023 document the persistence of standard-language ideology among language teachers in Colombia, and Mandyata et al., 2024 document parallel dynamics in language-of-instruction policy in Zambia, both underscoring that the tension between monoglossic policy language and preservice teachers’ own critical resources is not unique to this one course, cohort, or state. Replication in other institutions and other contexts of linguistic superdiversity would be needed to establish the generality of these patterns directly.

Future directions follow naturally from these limitations. Deeper qualitative follow-up, through focus groups and interviews, would allow researchers to trace how the contested definitions documented in the findings evolve, consolidate, or fragment further as preservice teachers move through their programs and into their own classrooms. Longitudinal work could examine whether the critical awareness visible in cold-elicitation survey responses translates into sustained classroom practice of the kind documented by Venegas-Weber and Thompson, 2025, or whether it instead recedes under the institutional and political pressures that Metz, 2024 and the broader recent literature on teacher preparation continue to document. Such work would also answer De Costa and Van Gorp, 2023 call for CMLA research to move from pedagogical stance-taking toward more evidence-based instructional practice, since the question of which specific programmatic interventions, study abroad, translanguaging-infused coursework of the kind Zhang-Wu and Tian, 2023 describe, or the disciplinary integration Lyon et al., 2025 propose, most reliably mobilize an already-present sociolinguist within remains empirically open. Multi-site replication across institutions serving different superdiverse populations, in different states and under different policy regimes, would be a natural next step for testing the transferability proposed above. At the policy level, there remains a clear opening for TPE revision that would align the policy's language more closely with the heteroglossic praxis increasingly visible in the professional community, beginning with the simple, repeatedly flagged step of supplying a glossary that would make the policy's operative constructs available for the kind of critical scrutiny this article's participants were already, on their own initiative, attempting to apply.

This article closes, then, not with an answer but with a renewal of the questions that motivated it from the start: What is SE and AE? How are these constructs conditioning teaching and learning? Who participates in these processes of linguistic reproduction, and what do they already know? Teacher preparation programs willing to ask these questions continuously, and to treat their preservice teachers as already-knowing participants in the asking, stand to make the most of the sociolinguist within.

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Footnotes

Edited by: Patricia Arnaiz, University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain

Reviewed by: Mojtaba Mohammadi, Islamic Azad University, Iran

Linnie Greenlees, Texas Tech University, United States