Contextualizing Educational Prayer: A Sociolinguistic Investigation

• In Event: Making Sense of Innovations and Interventions in Catholic Pre-K–12 Schools

Abstract

What are the language resources for teachers who pray in a contemporary Catholic school classroom? This presentation explores the sociolinguistic features of a very particular type of prayer: educational prayer. Set within an interactional sociolinguistics, this paper conceptualizes educational prayer as a highly-flexible set of linguistic resources, captured within a special interactional frame marked by ambiguous boundaries which contains both prescribed formulaic linguistic properties and those which allow the performer to attend to real-time classroom exigencies. Drawing on interactional data from Catholic school classrooms in an American city and a Canadian town, this presentation delimits the contextualization of linguistic actions during prayer: how teachers indicate the connection between their words and the sociocultural frameworks which are relevant for that action.

Author

• Robert Jean LeBlanc, University of Lethbridge