Our Language: (Re)Imagining Communities in Ukrainian Language Classrooms

ABSTRACT

Drawing upon video recordings from two fifth-grade Ukrainian classrooms and interviews with children four years later, this paper examines these classrooms as sites for socializing learners into an imagined community of Ukrainian speakers, the extent to which children took up identities as members of this community, and the potential effect of this identification on willingness to learn and use Ukrainian. Microanalysis of classroom interaction illustrates how teachers drew upon prevailing discourses of language and nation in ways that both presupposed and sought to create children’s membership in an imagined national community whose core practices included affiliation with Ukrainian as “our language.” However, interview data reveal that while children readily aligned with this imagined community and voiced its language ideologies, they positioned themselves as peripheral members or alternatively reimagined an alternative, multilingual Ukrainian community.

KEYWORDS:

• classroom discourse
• discourse analysis
• ideologies
• imagined communities
• language socialization
• revitalization

Notes

1. Ukrainian and Russian are similar syntactically, but differ in phonology and lexicon. For a more detailed discussion, see Bilaniuk (2005).

2. A gymnasium is a selective public school that offers intensive instruction in certain subjects.

3. All names are pseudonyms.

4. Ukrainian research assistants produced rough transcriptions of all recorded data. I subsequently reviewed the recordings and produced more detailed transcripts and English translations using the transcription conventions outlined below. Transliteration follows the Slavic Linguistic Transliteration System. Transcription conventions (Endnote 4)[  Talk overlaps with prior utterance(0.5)  Time elapsed (in tenths of a second)(.)  Micropause (less than 0.1 second):  Elongated sound-Cut-off sound Underline Strong stress.  Falling intonation,  Falling-rising intonation?  Rising intonation((comment))  Comment by the transcriber

5. Ukrainian was the medium of instruction at both schools, but there was no restriction on language choice outside of class, and I never saw any child chastised for speaking Russian in private conversations.

6. This apocryphal story is well known in Ukraine; it was related to me by several individuals, I have seen it in print, and versions occasionally surface on online forums.

7. All interview quotations are my translations from the original Ukrainian.

8. The no [but] is Russian (Ukrainian is ale). Use of Russian discourse markers was common in these interviews and reflects these young people’s hybrid language practices.