“We can speak we do it our way”: Linguistic ideologies in Catalan adolescents’ language biography raps

The article reports on workshops aimed at developing students’ plurilingual repertoires through language biography raps as opportunities for self-reflexivity and social critique. The workshops are part of a larger socio-educational project targeting adolescent school dropout. The audio-visual products of the workshops – raps produced by adolescents in their English, intertwined with other linguistic resources in their repertoires – are analysed for local processes of identity production and linguistic ideologies. The analysis suggests that Hip Hop, as a popular, non-institutionalised culture, allows for counter-narratives of teenagers’ plurilingualism and their everyday language experiences. The students’ raps interrogate linguistic ideologies in education as detached from popular culture and their local, urban communities. By and large, the students’ linguistic performances are non-standard, playful and linguistically fluid, contrary to the norm in mainstream educational contexts. The Hip Hop based intervention thus provided a space for transgression from traditional notions of language education compatible with Critical Hip Hop Language Pedagogies (CHHLP) and pedagogies of plurilingualism.