“It’s better language”: The social meanings of academic language in an elementary classroom

ABSTRACT

Despite an increased interest in academic language in recent years, critical and sociopolitical perspectives in this area of scholarship remain scarce. This paper presents brings such perspectives to the study of academic language by proposing a framework that highlights its situated social meanings through a focus on social identities and language ideologies. An ethnographically informed discourse analysis of a second-grade student’s interactions with peers and adults shows how she used language locally understood as “academic” as a resource for positioning herself as authoritative, intellectually able, and appropriately behaving. Her constructions of these identities tended to reproduce hegemonic ideologies of language, class, race, gender, sexuality, the body, and emotionality, although at times her practices unsettled other dominant discourses, such as adult–child hierarchies. The theoretical and pedagogical implications of these findings and the proposed framework are discussed, with an emphasis on the need for critical language scholars and educators to continue countering oppressive language ideologies by attending to the social meanings of academic language.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Elena, Ms. Martin, and all the students in Room Z for all they have taught me about language and education. I would also like to thank Mary Bucholtz, Jin Sook Lee, Richard Durán, and Diana Arya for their very helpful insights about previous versions of this work. Finally, I am grateful to Desiree Basl, Kimberly Chen, Nicole Donaldson, Aimee Giles, Melia Leibert, Ellen Ouyang, Diana Phan, Francesca Sen, and Alex Rubio for their invaluable help with logging and coding the data.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Throughout this analysis, I use pseudonyms to obscure participants’ identities. I also use invented names instead of actual local terms for classroom-specific practices, routines, and student groups.