If you’re writing a story, for example, about something that you did with your grandmother speaks Spanish, you, as the author, can decide to use Span… - Nelson Flores

I’m not suggesting that white middle-class and upper-class people don’t have a rich cultural practices that they engage in. The issue is that all communities have rich cultural and linguistic practices that they engage in, and that’s something that the word gap discourse completely ignores. It completely ignores decades of anthropological research that documents the rich cultural and linguistic practices of all communities, and supposes that the practices of one is somehow objectively more quality than others.

what Hart and Risley and many people who propose the word gap do is that, they take practices that have typically been associated with middle-class, upper-middle-class affluent white populations, and, surprise, surprise, they decide that those are quality. Um, which, of course, is not an objective statement, um, and, one could argue, is actually a racist statement, to claim that a particular cultural background is higher-quality than the other.

Whenever we talk about social and academic language today, that’s really the legacy that we’ve inherited – a legacy of semilingualism, of suggesting that there’s something illegitimate about the language practices of racialized bilingual students.