“They ain’t using slang”: Working class students from linguistic minority communities in higher education

• The socio-symbolic functions of academic language are examined in relation to a group of working class undergraduate university students from linguistic minority communities in the UK on an academic writing programme.
• Ascribed and inhabited identities related to academic language, heritage languages and vernacular English are examined in relation to each other.
• It is found that the institution ascribes an identity to linguistic minority students as remedial users of academic language and that this is not conducive to the development of a more positive relationship to academic language.
• It is found that working class linguistic minority students inhabit a range of alternative identity positions to negotiate their ascribed institutional identity. These identities are more or less conducive to the development of the students’ relationship with academic language.

An impact of globalisation on higher education has been an increase in diversity in the student population in universities in English dominant settings. The increasing diversification has impacted on the linguistic ecology of higher education, resulting in a wide range of linguistic repertoires among the student body. In some institutions, particularly those situated in urban areas, the multilingual classroom may well be the norm. Bi/multilingual university students form a heterogeneous group, encompassing temporary sojourners and members of linguistic minority communities resident in the host country. These students’ linguistic, cultural, ethnic and social class backgrounds impact on their knowledge and experience of using academic language in higher education. In this article, I examine academic language in relation to a group of working class undergraduate university students from linguistic minority communities in the UK. I focus on the ‘socio-symbolic functions’ (Morek and Heller, this issue) of academic language for the participants in the context of an academic writing programme. I consider their ascribed institutional identity, as remedial users of academic language, and their inhabited identities as bi-dialectal users of English, native speakers of English and as multilingual subjects. I discuss how the participants’ ascribed institutional identity erased their bidialectal and multilingual capital and argue that higher education needs to attend to the inhabited identities of working class linguistic minority students in efforts to foster the development of their relationship to academic language.