Supporting Asian American Multilingual College Students Through Critical Language Awareness Programming

ABSTRACT Critical language awareness (CLA) encourages teachers and students to examine language as social practice and reflect on ideologies and power dynamics embedded within language use. In this article, the authors—both instructors in an Asian American Native American Pacific Islander Serving Institution (AANAPISI) federal grant project at a university in New York City—describe how we integrated a CLA framework to create an Asian American Studies class that uses culturally sustaining pedagogies to affirm student linguistic identities and demystify academic research practices. Specifically, we analyzed a project where we introduced the term linguistic landscapes (LL) and asked students to visit Asian American ethnic enclaves to examine linguistic signage. While implementations of CLA have been based in K-12 instruction, university writing courses, and teacher education courses, this paper presents a successful example of a project based in CLA used in credit-bearing university courses, specifically, in an Asian American Studies program.