Language and Education

ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rlae20

Culturally sustaining approaches to academic

languaging through systemic functional linguistics

Sabrina F. Sembiante & Zhongfeng Tian

To cite this article: Sabrina F. Sembiante & Zhongfeng Tian (2021) Culturally sustaining
approaches to academic languaging through systemic functional linguistics, Language and
Education, 35:2, 101-105, DOI: 10.1080/09500782.2021.1896538

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09500782.2021.1896538

Published online: 25 Apr 2021.

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Language and Education
2021, VOL. 35, NO. 2, 101–105
https://doi.org/10.1080/09500782.2021.1896538

SPECIAL ISSUE INTRODUCTION

Culturally sustaining approaches to academic languaging

through systemic functional linguistics
Sabrina F. Sembiantea and Zhongfeng Tianb
a
Department of Curriculum, Culture, and Educational Inquiry, College of Education, Florida Atlantic University,
Boca Raton, FL, USA; bDepartment of Bicultural-Bilingual Studies, The University of Texas at San Antonio, San
Antonio, TX, USA

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

Historically, academic language (AL) has been a highly contentious and Received 3 December
debated construct, criticized because of its framing as a set of objective 2020
linguistic forms requisite in academic settings, as being more special- Accepted 24 February
ized and complex than non-academic registers, and prioritizing White 2021
linguistic practices. Educators in support of AL instruction view it as an KEYWORDS
inherent part of each academic discipline and, therefore, as a tool for Academic languaging;
equity and access that provides students entry into the curriculum and raciolinguistic ideologies;
enhances their chance of success in school. Both camps concur that a culturally sustaining
focus on teaching academic registers without scrutiny of their raciolin- practices; systemic
guistic implications may certainly sustain linguistic hierarchies of reg- functional linguistics
isters and reinforce deficit views of racialized communities’ language
practices. In response to this pressing debate described above, we
discuss the theoretical and pedagogical framework of Culturally
Sustaining Systemic Functional Linguistics as a means for centering
students’ cultural and language practices while heightening their crit-
ical language awareness around academic registers. The marriage of
CSP and SFL, embodied in CSSFL, presents an avenue to address raci-
olinguistic ideologies while engaging with our revised relationship and
conceptualization of academic languaging. This special issue provides
a productive space in which to explore the interconnection between
the theory and praxis of CSP and SFL and their applications across
instructional contexts.

Historically, academic language (AL) has been a highly contentious and debated construct,
criticized because of its framing as a set of objective linguistic forms requisite in academic
settings (e.g., Flores and Rosa 2015), as being more specialized and complex than non-ac-
ademic registers (e.g., MacSwan 2020), and prioritizing White linguistic practices (e.g.,
Flores 2020; Flores and Rosa 2015; Yancy 2008). AL has been indicted as “a subtle tool for
segregation and exclusion” (García and Solorza 2020, 13) because the very essence of its
prescriptive forms enregisters the diverse language practices of Latin* (Salinas 2020) bilin-
gual students as illegitimate and non-academic (García and Solorza 2020). These criticisms
extend to approaches towards the teaching and learning of academic language, labeling
these methods as hegemonic and linguistically stigmatizing (MacSwan 2020).

CONTACT Sabrina F. Sembiante ssembiante@fau.edu Department of Curriculum, Culture, and Educational Inquiry,
College of Education, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, FL, USA
© 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
102 S. F. SEMBIANTE AND Z. TIAN

On the other side of this debate are educators who support AL instruction, viewing it as
an inherent part of each academic discipline and, therefore, as a tool for equity and access
that provides students entry into the curriculum and enhances their chance of success in
school (Brisk and Tian 2019; Zwiers 2008). While there is no agreement on one definition
and manner of AL instruction, most contemporary subscribers of AL reject the idea that
this set of registers is objective, more specialized, or more complex than other registers
(Brisk and Zhang-Wu 2017). A 60-year old tradition of Systemic Functional Linguistics
(SFL; Halliday 1961), among other traditions of applied sociolinguistics (e.g., Content and
Language Integrated Learning [e.g., Lin 2016]) endeavors to consider how the contextual
demands of language impact how different registers shift and change according to the
purposes of their use. AL proponents largely agree that teachers are best equipped to support
students’ learning through an explicit language pedagogy that elucidates these contextual-
ized language choices while centering and building on students’ diverse linguistic resources
(e.g., Harman and Khote 2018; Bunch and Martin 2020).
Nevertheless, both camps concur that a focus on teaching academic registers without
scrutiny of their raciolinguistic implications may certainly sustain linguistic hierarchies of
registers, reinforce deficit views of racialized communities’ language practices, and nor-
malize prescriptive, colonizing standard languaging, resulting in further marginalization
of racialized, language-minoritized populations (e.g., Flores and Rosa 2015; Harman and
Burke 2020). And even dissenters of AL maintain the necessity of having students “engage
in linguistic practices deemed appropriate by mainstream society” (Flores and Rosa 2015,
167) and “manipulate language for specific purposes” (Flores 2020, 4). The ubiquity of AL
makes its existence important to acknowledge. In fact, every criticism or support of the
term has been written in an academic register. We propose that rather than ignoring, rela-
beling, or banishing the term, what should be contested are traditional conceptions of what
AL encompasses and who is legitimized in using it (Proctor, 2020). In lieu of AL as empirical
language practice, the rich, complex language resources that students bring to the classroom
should be recognized and harnessed during instruction. Students should be compelled to
use their language knowledge to forge connections between school and home experiences
(MacSwan 2020), to challenge inequalities and racial bias, and to raise awareness around
the intersections of language and power (Flores and Rosa 2015; Flores 2020). Moving away
from the term academic language as prescriptive and exclusive, we instead consider the
term academic languaging as the agentive, verbal action taken by language users who wield
their full linguistic repertoires in functional ways to support the dynamic communicative
and literary contexts of schooling (Proctor 2020; Proctor et al., 2020).
A shift in terminology, while indexing greater inclusivity, still doesn’t offer a solution
for disrupting the raciolinguistic ideology underlying “academic languaging”. In
response to this pressing debate described above, we offer up the theoretical and ped-
agogical framework of Culturally Sustaining Systemic Functional Linguistics (CSSFL or
CS SFL; Harman and Burke 2020) to provide a means for centering students’ cultural
and language practices while heightening their critical language awareness around
academic registers. CSSFL emerges from the pairing of Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy
(CSP; Paris 2012; Paris and Alim 2014) and SFL (Halliday 1978). CSP reframes the
purpose of education in a pluralistic society as sustaining and upholding the cultural
and linguistic affordances and strengths of students and their communities. To achieve
this goal, its tenets guide educators to witness and nurture the cultural and linguistic
 Language and Education 103

dexterity of students, not by simply adding to the existing curriculum, but crafting
curriculum to reflect students’ selves and communities (Alim and Paris 2017). By har-
nessing students’ multidialectal, multilingual, culturally and linguistically varied rep-
ertoires as part of the curriculum, CSP offers a means for combatting and shifting
dominant, White, middle class, “standard” monolingual English narratives (Alim and
Paris 2017).
To this, SFL situates language as a meaning-making resource encompassing a range of
linguistic choices that are employed responsively to the social, communicative purposes of a
context. SFL’s theoretical and analytical lens offers a way to unpack the linguistic resources
necessary for comprehending and producing texts across cultures, genres, registers, and sit-
uations (e.g., Gibbons 2006; Macken-Horarik 2002; Rothery and Stenglin 1994). By focusing
on how language is organized, SFL-informed instruction promotes students’ metalinguistic
awareness and, thus, agency to question, create, and engage critically with how knowledge is
generated and construed through language (Harman 2017). The marriage of CSP and SFL,
embodied in CSSFL, presents an avenue to address raciolinguistic ideologies while engaging
with our revised relationship and conceptualization of academic languaging. This special
issue provides a productive space in which to explore the interconnection between the theory
and praxis of CSP and SFL and their applications across instructional contexts. Under the
guiding light of CSSFL, authors combine notions of design-based research, teacher-researcher
collaboration, multimodality, multiliteracies, and translanguaging to disrupt traditional ori-
entations towards AL and to essentialize culturally sustaining practices.
Harman and her team first present a conceptual framework of CSSFL in science based
on their long-term collaboration with middle and high school science teachers from two
school districts in the Southeastern U.S. Their framework consists of three interrelated
dimensions: language development, knowledge development, and cultural sustenance to
support multilingual students’ science learning by incorporating their full cultural and
linguistic repertoires and their communities. Then Mizell examines how two pre-service
teachers take up the framework of CSSFL in a Southeastern U.S. graduate language education
course. He chronicles how CSSFL helps teachers learn to develop humanizing relations and
recognize the importance of register shifting, language equity, and using multimodal
approaches. In general, CSSFL prompted the teachers to (re)think what it meant to be
actively anti-racist and decolonial.
In the third article, Humphrey documents how one in-service Australian teacher devel-
ops a reflexive multiliteracies pedagogy to scaffold young multilingual learners’ science
learning in writing via professional learning conversations informed by CSSFL. She specif-
ically finds that the focus on SFL metalanguage enhances the teacher’s culturally sustainable
practice to help her students achieve equitable engagement and outcomes. Lastly, Cavallaro
and Sembiante examine the design and implementation of CSSFL-informed lessons taught
to a small group of emergent bilinguals in a middle school intensive reading classroom
(part of an ESOL program) in South Florida, U.S. They adopt a design-based research
approach which contains iterative, multiple plan-act-evaluate-reflect phases. The findings
reveal what CSSFL-informed and curriculum-aligned lessons might embody and how it
facilitates students’ community building, shared experiences, use of translanguaging and
multimodal practices to heighten metalinguistic awareness. The special issue closes with a
commentary by Luciana de Oliveira who discusses the salient findings and implications of
this work and points out future directions for research in the field.
104 S. F. SEMBIANTE AND Z. TIAN

Debates around AL are productive in that they promote reflection, reconsideration,

revision, and the creation of new, more responsive pedagogical approaches. The shared goal
of all educators, regardless of which side of the AL debate they affiliate with, is to ensure
that students’ languages and cultures are legitimized in schools while learning to successfully
navigate and participate in schooling and, eventually, work (Brisk and Tian 2019). CSSFL
is a product of this debate, and it provides spaces for new directions of research that promote
more equitable, sustaining, and validating ways of enhancing students’ cultural and language
repertoires. In service of that goal, it is crucial that we don’t allow ideological or sociocultural
battles to separate educators from the important work of facilitating students’ language
development and having the explicit language pedagogy to do so.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

ORCID
Sabrina F. Sembiante http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9948-5268
Zhongfeng Tian http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0233-0284

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