Abstract
Students are remarkably diverse, and thus no one label can accurately capture their heterogeneity. Yet that does not stop teachers and researchers from labeling. It may be that we use labels such as ESL-even if they do not match students' profiles-to provide us with a shared shorthand by which we can talk about learners. But even if our reasons are well-intentioned, we need to consider that, in the process of labeling students, we put ourselves in the powerful position of rhetorically constructing their identities, a potentially hazardous enterprise. At worst, a label may imply that we sanction an ethnocentric stance. At the very least, it can lead us to stigmatize, to generalize, and to make inaccurate
predictions about what students are likely to do as a result of their language or cultural background. Even if we cannot eliminate all problematic terms, we can interrogate the casual and seemingly innocent ways in which we use them.