UCLA

This dissertation is a an ethnographic study of Black and Latina/o youth communication at Willow High School, an urban secondary school in a Southern Californian neighborhood I call Tajuata. Drawing on tools from the Ethnography of Communication tradition I explored how Black and Latina/o youth engaged in transcultural communicative activities with one another. That is, I sought to capture the language practices that these youth deployed within and across racial, ethnic, linguistic, and social boundaries in their English Language Arts classrooms. The ways in which these diverse youth used language to communicate are highlighted to consider how sociocultural language and literacy researchers can re-imagine what counts as language for Black and Latina/o youth in urban schooling contexts, and how educators can build on the linguistic virtuosity of these youth in school.

Through the 2010-2011 academic year I observed four English Language Arts courses taught by three different teachers. Through participant observation methods and audio recordings of classroom interactions I documented the linguistic repertoires of Black and Latina/o youth in their English Language Arts classrooms. The following questions guided my study: (1) What are the regularities and variances in the linguistic repertoires of Black and Latina/o youth at Willow High School? (2) How are the linguistic repertoires of Willow High School youth taken up? Are they taken up in ways that expand or constrict their linguistic repertoires? And (3), What language ideologies are explicitly and implicitly indexed through Black and Latina/o youths' communicative activities?

I used ethnographic research tools to understand the everyday communicative practices, or the expanding linguistic repertoires of Black and Latina/o youth in four English Language Arts classrooms at Willow High School. Specifically I drew on the Ethnography of Communication methodological tradition that calls for supplementing traditional ethnographic fieldwork with audio or video recordings of naturally occurring talk of participants. I also drew on Cultural Historical Activity Theoretical (CHAT) perspectives which complement an Ethnography of Communication method, since language is viewed as the premier tool for mediating learning and development.