Abstract
Curricularization is the process by which specific elements of natural language are rendered teachable, learnable, and assessable skills for the purposes of schooling. A mixed methods analysis of discourse and texts from ethnographic and corpus linguistic projects illustrates how curricularization occurs by examining the central role of teachers’ metapragmatic commentary in the local definition of so-called ‘academic language’ in Italian secondary schools. To do this, we focus on student language use during theinterrogazione ‘oral exam’, and other oral displays, and how the appropriateness of this language is explicitly or implicitly evaluated by teachers. Specifically, we examine the use and uptake of discourse markers tipo ‘like’ and praticamente ‘practically, basically’, as a means of understanding how local forms of ‘academic language’ come to be enregistered – that is, linked to the social identity of the successful student – and then curricularized – that is, taught as discrete skills to be mastered.