Abstract
Research on academic discourse socialization (Duff 2010) examines how students learn to participate successfully in schooling and how the practices of teachers and peers socialize students (sometimes implicitly and other times explicitly) to take part in a school- or classroom-specific discourse community. A multidirectional process, socialization is far from straightforward, with all interlocutors in a given speech event socializing each other into a set of roles. However, in recent years, a renewed focus on “academic language” and the “word gap” has emerged (see Flores and Rosa 2015, Valdés 2004, and Cushing 2022 for critiques), along with neoliberal programs for teaching students how to master academic discourse genres (Urciuoli 2003, 2016), as though a student’s academic success relied on his/her language use alone, independent of its uptake by peers and teachers. Providing an alternate framework to this, linguistic anthropologists and discourse analysts have approached research on academic discourse socialization via concepts such as the speech chain (Agha 2003, Wortham & Reyes 2015), which draws on circulating macrosocial discourses about race, sex, and language in the analysis of highly situated speech events as they occur between specific individuals over time in a single school, highlighting that academic success/failure is a contingent process. On the other hand, and from a different methodological viewpoint, corpus linguists have examined a posteriori what types of language have come to be used in academic settings over time, via more quantitative methods (e.g., T2K-SWAL Corpus, Biber 2006), as a means of learning about the development of spoken and written academic registers. This paper argues that corpora and ethnography are both important tools and methods for (1) understanding how certain registers come to occupy particular roles in academic settings and (2) how we can avoid reifying the concept of “academic language” as a standalone skillset.
This paper illustrates and analyzes one phenomenon of academic discourse socialization and academic registers in Italian secondary schools—the use of discourse markers—by drawing on findings from two methodologically distant research paradigms: linguistic ethnography and corpus linguistics. The authors combine data from three learner corpora collected in Italian and German lower and upper secondary schools in the multilingual province of Bolzano/Bozen with ethnographic fieldnotes and classroom recordings from three Italian upper secondary schools and two Italian middle schools in central and northern Italy. These combined data from both written and spoken modalities (including traditional secondary school genres such as the tema and the interrogazione) allows for an examination of the communicative modalities in the secondary school classroom and their resemiotizazion when content from one modality is communicated in another modality (e.g., from written to oral or vice versa, see Voghera 2019). Thus this paper proposes a means for thinking not only about how orality finds its way into writing (Prada 2016, Roggia 2010) but also the reverse: the data we present illustrates students’ tendency to use oversophisticated discourse markers, particularly connectives, in both written and oral displays of knowledge, perhaps as a means of keying a register that is associated with academic success. Rather than simply labeling the language used by the students as oral language influenced by written modalities, however, this paper proposes framing the phenomena of hypercorrection or oversophisticated language use by students as a conscious, agentive strategy that is ratified by their peers and teachers as desirable and correct. While corpora provide a large selection of texts by which to study this phenomenon, the ethnographic perspective complements corpus analysis with contextual information and, crucially, the perspectives of the students themselves on what it means to use the tema/interrogazione register.
Bibliography:
Agha, A. (2003). The social life of cultural value. Language & Communication, 23(3–4), 231–273. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0271-5309(03)00012-0
Biber, D. (2006). University Language. In Scl.23. John Benjamins Publishing Company. Retrieved November 20, 2022, from https://benjamins.com/catalog/scl.23
CUSHING, I. (2022). Word rich or word poor? Deficit discourses, raciolinguistic ideologies and the resurgence of the ‘word gap’ in England’s education policy. Critical Inquiry in Language Studies, 1–27. https://doi.org/10.1080/15427587.2022.2102014
Duff, P. A. (2010). Language Socialization into Academic Discourse Communities. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 30, 169–192. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0267190510000048
Flores, N., & Rosa, J. (2015). Undoing Appropriateness: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and Language Diversity in Education. Harvard Educational Review, 85(2), 149–171. https://doi.org/10.17763/0017-8055.85.2.149
Prada, M. (2016). NUOVE DIAMESIE: L’ITALIANO DELL’USO E I NUOVI MEDIA (CON UN CASO DI STUDIO SULLA RISALITA DEI CLITICI CON BISOGNARE). Italiano LinguaDue, 8(2), Article 2. https://doi.org/10.13130/2037-3597/8503
Urciuoli, B. (2003). Excellence, leadership, skills, diversity: Marketing liberal arts education. Language & Communication, 23(3–4), 385–408. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0271-5309(03)00014-4
Urciuoli, B. (2016). The compromised pragmatics of diversity. Language & Communication. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2016.07.005
Valdés, G. (2004). Between Support and Marginalisation: The Development of Academic Language in Linguistic Minority Children. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 7(2–3), 102–132. https://doi.org/10.1080/13670050408667804
Voghera, M. (2019), Modalità parlata e scritta in classe, in B. Moretti / A. Kunz / S. Natale / E. Krakenberger (a cura di) (2019), 417-432.
Wortham, S. E. F., & Reyes, A. (2015). Discourse analysis beyond the speech event. Routledge.