Abstract
The ethnography of communication (Gumperz & Hymes 1972) and the linguistic anthropology of education (Wortham 2008) afford educational linguists additional concepts and methods for studying language in education. The methods from these fields, embodied especially coherently in classroom discourse analysis (Rymes 2016), allow educational linguists to dissect multiple layers of language-in-use in schools. For instance, Gee’s (1991) nested concepts of big-D Discourse and small-d discourse—with the former referring to policies, identities, and “ways of being in the world” (p. 142), and the latter referring to the everyday “conversations, stories, reports, arguments” (ibid) which construct and sustain the former—afford teachers and researchers alike a useful heuristic for thinking about linguistically inclusive and culturally responsive education.
Borrowing the big/small distinction from Gee (1991), this paper presents an analysis of big-L Language (i.e., ‘lingue’ such as Italian or Arabic) and small-L language (i.e., ‘linguaggi’, social registers, rhetorical styles, gestures) in video-recordings of two lessons in urban Italian middle schools over the course of the 2022-23 school year. The first lesson, about the Atlantic slave trade, raises questions about how rhetorical devices, (non)inclusive terminology, and personal deixis (all instances of small-L language) may have had an impact on the inclusiveness in this “non-linguistic” subject. The second, in which students are introduced to Dante Alighieri’s Inferno, affords a consideration of how the introduction of Vulgar Latin (big-L Language) afforded metalinguistic commentary, multimodal teaching, and the exploration of connections between language and ideology. These analyses have implications for teachers, teacher-trainers, curriculum designers, intercultural mediators, and researchers.
Gee, J. P. (1991). Social linguistics and literacies: Ideology in discourses. London: Falmer.
Gumperz, J. J., & Hymes, D. H. (1972). Directions in Sociolinguistics: The Ethnography of Communication. Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Rymes, B. (2016). Classroom Discourse Analysis: A Tool For Critical Reflection, Second Edition. Routledge.
Wortham, S. (2008). Linguistic Anthropology of Education. Annual Review of Anthropology, 37(1), 37–51.