Beyond alef, be, pe: the socialisation of incipient ideology through literacy practices in an Iranian first-grade classroom

Abstract

This article examines the interrelationship between literacy and the socialisation of incipient ideology. We focus on one first-grade classroom in Tehran, Iran, as students and teacher engage in a complex literacy event centering on a lesson from the national reader, bekhaanim (Let's Read). In the course of this textually driven meaning-making activity, we observe how participants explore and respond to elements of school-based language use as it unfolds explicitly and implicitly. The three-part structure of the IRF (teacher initiation–student response–teacher feedback) serves as the primary vehicle through which explicit teaching of content and behavior occurs. However, it is also this structure that serves as the primary vehicle for implicitly constituted school-situated dynamics where first-grade Iranian boys are socialised into values of their society – values of respect and reverence for authority, friendship, brotherhood, and solidarity – while experiencing their first exposure to the literacy practices of spelling, reading, and writing.

Keywords:

• IRE/IRF
• language of schooling
• literacy practices
• talk-in-interaction
• ideology
• ta’lim and tarbiyyat

Acknowledgments

Note on the article title: Alef, be, pe refers to the first three letters in the Persian alphabet, corresponding generally to A, B, C.

Notes

This article is dedicated to the memory of Bahram. He was a wonderful father and teacher. The authors are indebted to him for his insightful observations throughout the development of this project.

1. The Persian alphabet is a slightly modified version of the Arabic alphabet, with variations affecting both consonants and vowels; it also has 32 characters, as opposed to 28 in Arabic (Thackston, 2009, p. xvii).

2. For the purpose of our analysis, we use the term ‘brotherhood’ to mean ‘fellowship and a sharing of common value systems’, without any intended emphasis on gender. While the group being investigated here is a class of boys taught by a female teacher, we are not in a position to make gender-based claims without additional data.

3. The CD was given to the authors by a colleague who is a first-grade public school teacher in Tehran. The authors had been working to arrange an onsite ethnographic study of early literacy events in Iran, which proved challenging. Our colleague provided the present video both as a current representation of an authentic first-grade classroom interaction and as an instance of public discourse.

4. All names used in this article are pseudonyms.

5. All public activities in Iranian society open with a short blessing that minimally includes the words or idea of benaameh khodaa ‘in the name of God’ – films, television programs, sermons, speeches, and class meetings.

6. The Persian subject pronouns for second-person address are similar in function to French tu (singular informal [s. inf.]) and vous (singular deferential/formal and general plural [pl.]). In Persian, the singular informal second-person pronoun is to and the singular deferential/formal or general plural pronoun is shomaa. Different from French, however, is the fact that shomaa can also be inflected with the plural morpheme haa such that the pronoun shomahaa unequivocally designates a plural addressee.

7. The placement of a letter within a word may affect the actual shape that it takes in cursive Persian. Some letters have variant shapes in word-initial and word-final position. Word-medially, there are specific rules with regard to which letters should be connected to contiguous letters and which should not. These rules and variants are crucial to learning how to read and write. Fe is one such letter that is written differently in each of the three environments; phonetically, there is no variation in pronunciation that takes place due to the varying environments or surface form.

8. TCU is an acronym for ‘turn constructional unit’. This concept, initially proposed by Sacks et al. (1974), refers to the smallest unit of talk-in-interaction that speakers use to build turns at talk. According to Sacks et al. (1974), a TCU can be a single word (i.e., a lexical TCU ‘Politics’), a phrase (i.e., a phrasal TCU ‘in the snow’), a clause (i.e., a clausal TCU ‘because we were late’), or a full sentence (i.e., a sentential TCU ‘It's insecurity, not confidence, that drives her’.). A conversational turn can be composed of a single TCU (as is the predominant turn type in students’ talk from these data) or multiple TCUs, with strings of individual units forming a single turn, as seen in Mrs Zand's talk.