Reported parent-teacher dialogues on child language learning: voicing agency in interview narratives

ABSTRACT

This study investigates parent–teacher dialogues on child language learning as constructed in 19 interviews with migrant parents of Polish ethnolinguistic background, resettled in Norway and caring for young preschoolers and school-goers. Targeting reported speech as a linguistic resource for enacting agency in discourse, the focal interest is in tracing how the interviewed parents draw on this resource to enact and negotiate their agency vis-à-vis their children’s educators. The analysis reveals that the parents use reported speech as a strategic discursive tool to variably claim their agency across time and space. While L2 emerges as the most prominent theme of the dialogues, the participants also display a sense of ownership of the meaning-making processes involved in their children’s L1 development. Through constructions of concerted bilingual home-pre/school support, the parents thus propel their capacity to imagine their children’s membership in the host and home language communities to the fore.

KEYWORDS:

• Child language learning
• agency
• reported speech
• narrative
• home–school communication and collaboration

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Jarmila Bubikova-Moan http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0573-5124

Notes

1 Labov's (1972, 370) classic units of narrative analysis include: (1) Abstract – how does the story begin?; (2) Orientation – who/what does the story involve and where/when does it occur?; (3) Complicating Action – then what happens?; (4) Resolution – what finally happened?; (5) Evaluation – so what? and (6) Coda – what does it all mean?

2 While the current literature on agency is vast and its review is beyond the scope of this paper, Deters et al.’s (2015) edited volume on agency in second language learning represents but one source that not only bears witness to the continuing scientific appeal and centrality of agency in language studies but also showcases the diversity of approaches adopted therein.

3 Since narrators are unlikely to remember the exact words of others, Tannen (1981, 2007) has consistently argued against the term ‘reported speech’ as a misnomer and proposed the label ‘constructed dialogue/s’ as more analytically appropriate. The term ‘reported speech’ nonetheless seems to prevail in different strands of research (Buttny 1998; Miller 2014) and is also adopted in this study.

4 Lampropoulou (2012) can be consulted for a comprehensive review of literature on speech representation in discourse, particularly direct speech.

5 While the same corpus is used in another study currently in review, all analyses and findings in this study are unique.

6 Throughout this paper, I will refer to these educational spaces as pre/school(s).

7 For transcription conventions, see Appendix 2.

8 For Polish versions of the presented data, see Appendix 3.

9 All proper names in the presented data excerpts are pseudonyms.

Additional information

Funding

This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or non-profit sectors.