In “The Myth of Non-accent,” Lippi-green challenges the belief that there is a neutral or standard accent by arguing that languages vary and change over time, that reflect our social identities and experiences. I really like the concept of “sound houses” and how much it captures how our sound houses become mirrors of social worlds. As much as linguistic identities evolve naturally, structures and systems of oppression keep privileging the same white linguistic lens. Often this limited linguistic lens harms the most vulnerable groups in schools such as Emergent Bilinguals. For instance, Cummins’ distinction between BICS and CALP exposes inequalities within education more specifically towards Emergent Bilingual students. When it comes to the confusion of BICS with CALP, understanding how this can affect Emergent Bilingual students such as having deficiencies, often results in school systems placing these students in inappropriate placement that emphasize how much damage this misconception can do by placing them in a lower or a higher class level. In my experience, when I was in the ESL program in my middle school, after one semester of classes, they transferred me to regular and advanced classes and one intermediate ESL English class which in the long-term did more harm than good. Back then my English was proficient when it came to the BICS level but was still very much in a development process when it came to the academic level. I did not have much additional support in my advanced classes which complicated my academic situation. I ended up falling behind or not doing well academically because I did not understand some of the vocabulary. This experience was clearly influenced because of my inadequate placement where confusing my conversational level to my academic one created a more precarious condition of my learning.
Lastly, the Cummins’ and Flores reading made me think a lot about teacher-student interactions and how much these experiences can shape students' access to their academic repertoire and their linguistic identities. When Cummins was talking about how instruction should emphasize context- embedded tasks rather than isolated grammar, it made me question how much "contextualized” can vary for each teacher based on their background knowledge and how much value they place in academic language. Also, the dichotomy between “academic” and “non-academic” made me realize the role of the state of school system in imposing academic language that often forces teachers into gatekeeping languages and denying students the ability to use their full linguistic repertoire that would ultimately also validate their identity in the classroom.