Hypothetical reported speech as pedagogical practice in multilingual classrooms in India

Abstract

In classrooms in India where the instructional language is to be English, speakers use reported speech in Indian regional languages for pedagogical purposes, renegotiating the roles and statuses among languages in the multilingual setting. Reported speech is a form of indirect speech used when a speaker quotes another in a way that they voice the other speaker. Reported speech of hypothetical speakers presents moral arguments, negotiates roles of status and power, and can settle disputes, but few findings point to hypothetical reported speech for instruction in classrooms. Teachers who claim to use only English in their secondary school and college classrooms quoted hypothetical invented speakers using another language for humorous colloquial speaking commonly found outside of the classroom. The practice distances teachers from the content of their hypothetical reported speech to maintain their roles as authority figures in the English-only classrooms while imbuing languages with different values. Reported speech critiques and clarifies to build rapport with students by introducing humor to maintain classroom control, socialize student behavior, and introduce unsanctioned languages into lessons within broader societal linguistic expectations.

Keywords:

• Reported speech
• language ideologies
• educational sociolinguistics
• multilingualism
• India

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the late Dr. Marilyn Merritt for unwavering encouragement throughout the process of writing this article. I am also deeply grateful to my colleagues at Kenyon College for constructive feedback and for the teachers and students in the Indian educational institutions for allowing me into their classrooms.

Disclosure statement

The publication of this article presents no conflicts of interest.

Notes

1 The version of the International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration (IAST) for Marathi and Hindi transliterations includes my own modifications excluding diacritics, showing nasals by using the letter n, and using double vowels in the Roman script for vowel modifiers in Devanagari, following the conventions for writing that my interlocutors use.