Race, gender, & language on campus: Black British female students’ experiences of language at a predominantly White, elite university in the UK

This research focuses on the self-perceived linguistic experiences of Black British female undergraduate students at the University of Oxford. Such experiences of a British higher education institution have hitherto been under-researched. Through an online survey (n=14) and interviews with five participants, this study demonstrates the shared and diverse nature of the academic experiences of this group. Descriptive statistics from the quantitative survey data, alongside a thematic analysis of the qualitative survey data and interview transcripts, informed the results for this study. All participants discussed how certain members of the university expected them to express themselves with a specific type of academic language, which some students perceived as overly-complex and others as an expected feature of academia. In both examples, the students found that their language on campus altered accordingly and thus differed from the language they used at home. It was also reported that some participants changed their way of speaking in social spaces at Oxford University in order to fit in with their environment and perhaps to avoid ‘stereotype threat’. The way in which the participants related their language on campus to ideas about race and identity is significant. Fordham and Ogbu’s (1986) well-known burden of acting white hypothesis is discussed in this instance and analysed alongside their proposition of a Black oppositional collective identity. The unique experiences reported highlights how a critical pedagogy approach to education could elevate some of the challenges faced by this group, and subsequently shows how this could improve the educational experiences of other marginalised communities.