About

Uju Anya is an associate professor of Second Language Acquisition at the Department of Languages, Cultures & Applied Linguistics at Carnegie Mellon University. Her scholarly work focuses on language learning and Black experiences in multilingualism, with primary fields of inquiry including critical applied linguistics, critical sociolinguistics, and critical discourse studies. Her research explores the multilingual journeys of African American students and how these experiences inform identity formation in new language learning contexts. Dr. Anya also brings expertise in diversity, equity, and inclusion in instructional practices and curriculum design, language study abroad, applied linguistics as a practice of social justice, intercultural communication, and service-learning in secondary and university-level language programs. She authored the book 'Racialized Identities in Second Language Learning: Speaking Blackness in Brazil,' which examines how students shape and negotiate identities in multilingual contexts and proposes multilingual approaches such as translanguaging and plurilingual practices as tools for effective language pedagogy. This groundbreaking work was the first single-authored sociolinguistic study to critically examine the African American experience in language learning and received the 2019 American Association for Applied Linguistics First Book Award. Dr. Anya holds a Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics from UCLA, an M.A. in Brazilian Studies from Brown University, and a B.A. in Romance Languages from Dartmouth College. Her areas of interest include critical applied linguistics, second language acquisition, critical sociolinguistics, critical discourse studies, and language diversity and cultural identity. She has been recognized with several awards, including the Penn State College of Education Outstanding Teaching Award in 2020 and the USC Rossier School of Education Faculty Teaching and Mentoring Award in 2015.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Gender studies
• Pedagogy
• Anthropology
• Linguistics
• Computer Science
• Philosophy
• History
• Psychology

Selected publications

• World languages for Black Linguistic Reparations

  Foreign Language Annals · 2024-04-09 · 23 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  Abstract This conceptual work highlights the history of Black erasure throughout the existence of world languages (WLs) as a field of study in the United States. It outlines the unique challenges faced by African descended learners who have and continue to pursue WL study in US classrooms. These include but are not limited to reduced local funding and programmatic expectations due to the remnants of anti‐Black educational policies, monolingual and imperial language ideologies prevalent in texts and pedagogical approaches, and generations of segregation in and outside of schools. Finally, this work proposes WLs serve as a site of Black Linguistic Reparations through, (1) the redistribution of resources in the field, (2) the repair of enacted WL teaching to meet the calls of ACTFL's standards for preparing students for communication in a pluralistic society, and (3) a recreation of the “world” as narrated through a global, rather than a white Western lens.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Examining Materials and Instruction in the Practice of Critical Race Pedagogy for World Language Teaching

  2024-09-06 · 3 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Racism is commonly portrayed as something only people who knowingly hate and discriminate do. In U.S. world language (WL) programs inclined toward multiculturalism and multiethnic exchange, many consider the topic irrelevant. The theoretical framework of critical race theory (CRT) and its evolution into critical race pedagogy (CRP) for instructional practice challenge this view by helping illustrate how racism goes far beyond individual bigotry to operate in normalized thinking and systemic inequity deeply woven into all our educational institutions and practices. Racism manifests in language education, for example, through raciolinguistic ideologies that lionize the bilingualism of White elite WL learners and problematize that of poor, racially minoritized students; through curricular silencing and erasure of non-dominant groups; and through the presentation of White, upper-class images and experiences as primarily representative of target language populations. This chapter discusses racism in WL programs and shows how curriculum, materials, and instructional practices exhibit the anti-Blackness found in our broader societies. It presents a post-hoc CRT analysis of findings from a participatory action research study in which Spanish language instructors examined the curriculum and instructional materials of an introductory level course at a predominantly White postsecondary institution. The chapter investigates the study results through a CRT perspective to show how problems of endemic racism and anti-Blackness—plus, opportunities to solve them—are missed when unexamined through this lens. Ultimately, the chapter describes steps in practicing critical race pedagogy for more effective and inclusive WL teaching (CRPWLT). Working with CRPWLT, language educators learn how to conduct a CRT-based assessment of their own curriculum, materials, and instructional practices. They also gain knowledge and tools to promote antiracism, equity-mindedness, and inclusivity in their programs and throughout the field.

  PublisherDOI

• Yes, aspiring linguist, what you're doing is linguistics

  2024-09-23

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter directly addresses aspiring linguists, who may feel out of place in the field, reminding them that our field is vast and interdisciplinary, and any work with language structures, policies, artifacts, languaging practices and problems at its core belongs in linguistics. The chapter reassures aspiring linguists that they also belong in linguistics even if they, like their work, are underrepresented as members of groups that the field has historically excluded. To bolster this case for inclusivity and belonging in linguistics – both in terms of scholarship and membership in the field – the chapter presents the example of its US-based author, who overcame self-doubt, ethno-racial isolation, and attacks against the legitimacy of her research in applied linguistics, to produce foundational, award-winning scholarship that contributed much needed research on systemic racism in our field and brought greater attention to the understudied and too frequently unsupported population of African American world language learners.

  PublisherDOI

• Leveraging transdisciplinary expertise to develop a task-based Spanish curriculum to combat anti-blacknessin the United States

  TASK Journal on Task-Based Language Teaching and Learning · 2023-12-31 · 2 citations

  article

  Preview this article: Leveraging transdisciplinary expertise to develop a task-based Spanish curriculum to combat anti-blackness in the United States, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/task.00021.cos-1.gif

  PublisherDOI

• The Unbearable Whiteness of Communicative Competence Research: A Commentary on “Undoing Competence: Coloniality, Homogeneity, and the Overrepresentation of Whiteness in Applied Linguistics”

  Language Learning · 2022-11-09 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  During my second year as a doctoral student in applied linguistics, I discussed my interest in exploring the language learning experiences of African American students with one of my professors—a foundational scholar in second language acquisition. He was pleased that I had settled on a topic of inquiry but also asked why I was limiting myself to such a niche concern instead of conducting research with universal relevance. He then advised me to do work that would relate to everyone's language learning experience. However, applied linguistics research that had been extrapolated to inform the field's understanding of everyone's experience was not based on study populations that included everyone. Highly influential theories that had spearheaded entire fields of inquiry on aptitude, attitudes, and motivation in second language acquisition were based primarily on studies of white middle-class North Americans who are a relatively small group, but upon whose experiences applied linguistics have conferred universal relevance. White study participants have been treated as default human beings whose unique experiences have generated theory considered applicable to all. Whereas theory derived from Black participants has remained peripheral and only relevant to that particular population because, unlike their white counterparts, Black people are not everyone. In their article “Undoing competence: Coloniality, homogeneity, and the overrepresentation of whiteness in applied linguistics,” Flores and Rosa have tackled the hegemonic whiteness of applied linguistics, specifically as it has manifested itself in the concept of communicative competence. They have meticulously outlined how the ontological and epistemological foundations of applied linguistics have reified colonial logics that position white populations as normative, not just in demographic overrepresentation but also in how white perspectives, positions, interests, ideologies, and other particularities have been universalized in dominant institutions and value systems. They have challenged scholars to interrogate, and ultimately, dismantle our notions of competence, which are derived from our field's prioritization of whiteness (or adjacency to whiteness) as the ultimate arbiter of proficiency, accuracy, appropriateness, standardness, and other criteria that applied linguists use in determinations of linguistic expertise. The authors have discredited the idea that applied linguistics research can objectively determine what communicative competence entails because perceptions of said expertise come filtered through a white listening subject (Flores & Rosa, 2015), and universal standards for production are benchmarked against the practices and preferences (e.g., linguistic homogeneity) of this very specific languager. They have reminded scholars how raciolinguistic ideologies (Flores & Rosa, 2015) position nonwhite groups like low-income African American and Latinx students as linguistically incompetent due to racist stigma and illegitimacy attached to their marginalized practices (e.g., linguistic heterogeneity). Flores and Rosa have also engaged a raciontologies framework (Rosa & Díaz, 2020) to show how ideologies and discourses of the inherent linguistic deficits of racially marginalized people have been imposed on their racialized bodies—which are not and cannot be white—resulting in their inability to ever be perceived as adequately measuring up to dominant standards, no matter how closely they linguistically reproduce or approximate whiteness. Reading this article, I am validated in my experience as a Black scholar in applied linguistics grappling with the unbearable whiteness of the field. I feel justified in having vocally rejected as white supremacist the discourse of universals that have almost exclusively highlighted niche white populations (e.g., middle and upper class Hispanophones of European descent), their experiences, traditions, languaging practices, and cultural artifacts as the standard representations of speakers of a world language while erasing Black and indigenous populations that also constitute principal cultural agents (Anya, 2017, 2021) in those speech communities. However, Flores and Rosa have done more than just reinforce the previously held convictions of other critical scholars. They show applied linguistics how the field can grow by moving beyond the theoretical palliatives of accommodation and appropriateness in how they have approached the languaging practices of racially minoritized populations such as the African American students whom I center in my scholarship. They have helped applied linguists to recognize that even those who fight against the racist framing of Black students as suffering from linguistic poverty or languagelessness due to the delegitimization of any practices in which they engage still wage that battle tacitly accepting ideologies of communicative competence tethered to normative whiteness in applied linguistics. Thus, the construct of communicative competence may accommodate Black people on an individual basis when they are perceived to be languaging appropriately in homogenous, whiteness-normed school and elite professional contexts but will never consider Black language appropriate for those contexts, nor will it meaningfully include Black people's linguistic wholeness rooted in community practices perpetually deemed communicatively incompetent. What Flores and Rosa have given applied linguists in their justifications for undoing competence is a very hard pill to swallow. But they have served it with a spoonful of sugar. They have welcomed applied linguistics to liberate itself from the bounds of communicative competence—a construct severely limited by its attachment to whiteness and homogeneity—along with the assumption that the goal of language learning and teaching should be the development of communicative competence, especially because upholding norms and standard bearers of competence also entails identifying practices and exemplars of incompetence. They have cited ideas on what success in language preservation means to members of indigenous communities and not white outsider linguists, the unique practices and linguistic innovations of US Latinxs, how members of the African diaspora learn to speak Blackness, and other examples of new articulations of languaging. Doing this, they have invited applied linguists to “shift the locus of enunciation” of applied linguistics outside the white idealized languager whom researchers have overwhelmingly centered. In their hopeful proposal, Flores and Rosa have shown applied linguists a path to orient their work toward the modes of perception and communicative practices of racially, culturally, and linguistically minoritized people, collaborating with whom the field can grow in very promising, exciting new theoretical and conceptual understandings of how humans language.

  PublisherDOI

• The taquito hot seat: Socializing monolingual bias through error correction practices in a Portuguese language classroom

  Foreign Language Annals · 2021-10-01 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Portuguese language students in the United States typically also speak Spanish, and Portuguese programs, influenced by ideologies of linguistic purism, ceaselessly battle against its interference. This article describes a qualitative study of the treatment of Spanish utterances—called taquitos by participants—in a beginner‐level Portuguese class. It presents the classroom as a space of language socialization where students are apprenticed into a culture of strict language separation that demonstrates our field's monolingual bias. Microanalysis of videorecorded classes shows how error correction practices socialize students into upholding monolingual immersion through constant vigilance and mobilization against taquitos . Gaze, body orientation, and gestures as attention markers reveal a taquito hot seat that marginalizes and places Spanish‐speaking students in intense negative focus for not producing Portuguese in “uncontaminated” forms. Given the harm such practices may cause, the article urges the field to examine our rigid insistence upon artificial classroom monolingual immersion and promote flexible, strategic translanguaging for more effective world language pedagogy.

  PublisherDOI

• 2 When the Foreign is Familiar: An Afro- Dominican-American Woman’s Experience Translanguaging Race, Ethnicity and Cultural Heritage Learning Portuguese in Brazil

  Multilingual Matters eBooks · 2021 · 8 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Gender studies
  • Sociology

  2 When the Foreign is Familiar: An Afro- Dominican-American Woman’s Experience Translanguaging Race, Ethnicity and Cultural Heritage Learning Portuguese in Brazil was published in Language Learning in Study Abroad on page 43.

  PublisherDOI

• Critical Race Pedagogy for More Effective and Inclusive World Language Teaching

  Applied Linguistics · 2021 · 81 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Sociology
  • Political Science

  Abstract To address racial inequity and the exclusion of African Americans in applied linguistics, second-language acquisition, and world language (WL) education, our field must reckon with social justice problems of racism and anti-Blackness. Theoretical frameworks of critical race theory (CRT) and critical race pedagogy (CRP) elucidate how such injustices are perpetuated, plus, propose solutions for them. This article discusses racism and anti-Blackness in WL curriculum, materials, and instructional practices. It presents a post-hoc CRT analysis of findings from two studies: (i) an ethnographic study examining Spanish curriculum and instructional practices at two minority serving postsecondary institutions and (ii) a participatory action research collaboration with Spanish instructors examining curriculum at a predominantly white institution—both studies linked by how they reveal endemic racism and anti-Blackness in WL programmes. Ultimately, this article addresses how African Americans can more authentically and successfully participate in WL programmes. It introduces to the field a proposal of CRP for more effective WL teaching to promote practices in antiracism, equity-mindedness, and inclusivity for greater retention and success of Black students.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• African Americans in World Language Study: The Forged Path and Future Directions

  Annual Review of Applied Linguistics · 2020 · 65 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Linguistics

  Abstract This article examines the history of African Americans in the academic study of world languages and presents an overview of inquiry on the topic. The paper focuses on the impact of race in second language acquisition (SLA) as exemplified through the experience of black students in language education and study abroad. It discusses objectives, policies, instructional priorities and strategies, conditions, and materials related to how black students have in the past, are currently, or should be engaged in language learning. The article examines the path forged by African Americans in world language study, signals gaps in the present body of knowledge, and suggests future directions for investigations into this important topic in the field of applied linguistics and SLA for ARAL 's 40th anniversary.

  PublisherDOI

• Race and Ethnicity in Teacher Education

  The TESOL Encyclopedia of English Language Teaching · 2018-01-18 · 6 citations

  other1st authorCorresponding

  The impact of social identities like race and ethnicity is not restricted to experiences outside the English language classroom. It can be seen, for example, through the racism and ethnic bias inherent in the stereotypical white image and reified status of the native English speaker, which contributes to discrimination against teachers of color and the unjust hierarchies normalized and reproduced through teacher education in TESOL. A critical approach to understanding race and ethnicity is necessary to address racism and ethnic bias, and coursework and training on critical pedagogy for English language classrooms should be instituted in preservice preparation and in‐service professional development programs. Training activities, materials, and curriculum should model the same critical practices and methodologies being taught in the program to raise awareness of inequities and to support the key role that teacher education plays in combating racism and ethnic bias in TESOL.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Aris Moreno Clemons

  Oxford University Press (United Kingdom)

  1 shared

• Tasha Austin

  University at Buffalo, State University of New York

  1 shared

• Netta Avineri

  1 shared

• Déborah Gómez

  Florida Memorial University

  1 shared

• Lucien Brown

  Pennsylvania State University

  1 shared

• Matthew D. Coss

  Michigan State University

  1 shared

• Wenhao Diao

  Pennsylvania State University

  1 shared

• Melissa Baralt

  Florida International University

  1 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Applied Linguistics

  University of California, Los Angeles

• M.A., Brazilian Studies

  Brown University

• B.A., Romance Languages

  Dartmouth College

Awards & honors

• Penn State College of Education Outstanding Teaching Award (…
• American Association for Applied Linguistics First Book Awar…
• ACTFL/Middlebury Research Forum Invited Scholar (2019)
• USC Rossier School of Education Faculty Teaching and Mentori…
• Centro Latino for Literacy Manos Amigas Volunteer of the Yea…