The Social Meanings of Academic Language in Elementary Peer Interactions

• In Event: Moscone Center North Roundtable Session 8
  In Roundtable Session: Deconstructing Language Ideologies: Students' and Teachers' Practices and Perspectives

Abstract

Although critical and ideological perspectives have gained visibility within language education over the past several decades, they remain marginal and markedly ‘alternative’ (Mirhosseini, 2018). Such is the case within scholarship on academic language (AL), an area of research which, as MacSwan (2018) argues, has contributed to the return of deficit perspectives in language teaching over the last twenty years through an implicit reinforcement of standard language ideology, or the view that the language of socio-economic elites is inherently more complex and correct than other varieties. This ideology underlies much AL research in the sense that AL is usually implicitly or explicitly defined as distinct from, and superior to, so-called “social” or “everyday” language (see Bunch, 2014; Poza, 2016). Two other interrelated assumptions informing much AL scholarship are that it is easily separable from its social contexts of use (see Haneda, 2014; Heller & Morek, 2015) and that social issues of ideology and identity are therefore of little to no relevance to the study of AL (see Heller & Morek, 2015).

Drawing on recent work critical of these assumptions (Bunch, 2014; Heller & Morek, 2015; Kern, Lingnau, & Paul, 2015) and their implications for students—particularly raciolinguistically marginalized students (Flores & Rosa, 2015; Poza, 2016)—this ethnographic discourse analytic study offers an alternative framework that highlights the ideological and interactional meanings of AL by defining it as context-sensitive yet agentive uses of semiotic forms linked to ideologies and identities related to appropriateness, intellectual ability, and authority. I apply this framework to an ethnographically informed interactional analysis (Bucholtz & Hall, 2008) of peer interactions drawn from a collection of hundreds of hours of video- and audio-recorded interactions in a linguistically diverse second-grade classroom in California. I focus particularly on how participants used semiotic resources locally enregistered (Agha, 2003) as “academic” in their construction of social identities and relationships. Findings show that AL served as a salient interactional resource in the construction of a wide range of identities—from “smart” student to “cool” student to “good partner”—insofar as AL forms and practices helped speakers position themselves as more able, more authoritative, and/or more aligned with appropriateness norms than interlocutors. These acts of positioning often reinforced academic and social hierarchies among peers, although occasionally they momentarily unsettled these hierarchies. The analysis also demonstrates how students’ uses of and metalinguistic comments about AL were undergirded by standard language ideology as well as a range of ideologies of class, race, and gender. Ultimately, this study shows that far from being a neutral, universal, or discrete set of linguistic forms and features (see Flores & Rosa, 2015), AL is thoroughly intertwined with local and more macro-level social identities and ideologies in ways that underline the need for more consideration of language ideologies in AL research.

Author

• Meghan Corella, The University of British Columbia