Jenny Cook-Gumperz

Language as culture in U.S. anthropology: Three paradigms. Commentaries. Author's reply

The study of language as culture in U.S. anthropology is a set of distinct and often not fully compatible practices that can be made sense of through the identification of three historically related paradigms. Whereas the first paradigm, initiated by Boas, was mostly devoted to documentation, grammatical description, and classification (especially of North American indigenous languages) and focused on linguistic relativity, the second paradigm, developed in the 1960s, took advantage of new recording technology and new theoretical insights to examine language use in context, introducing new units of analysis such as the speech event. Although it was meant to be part of anthropology at large, it marked an intellectual separation from the rest of anthropology. The third paradigm, with its focus on identity formation, narrativity, and ideology, constitutes a new attempt to connect with the rest of anthropology by extending linguistic methods to the study of issues previously identified in other (sub)fields. A...The study of language as culture in U.S. anthropology is a set of distinct and often not fully compatible practices that can be made sense of through the identification of three historically related paradigms. Whereas the first paradigm, initiated by Boas, was mostly devoted to documentation, grammatical description, and classification (especially of North American indigenous languages) and focused on linguistic relativity, the second paradigm, developed in the 1960s, took advantage of new recording technology and new theoretical insights to examine language use in context, introducing new units of analysis such as the speech event. Although it was meant to be part of anthropology at large, it marked an intellectual separation from the rest of anthropology. The third paradigm, with its focus on identity formation, narrativity, and ideology, constitutes a new attempt to connect with the rest of anthropology by extending linguistic methods to the study of issues previously identified in other (sub)fields. Although each new paradigm has reduced the influence and appeal of the preceding one, all three paradigms persist today, and confrontation of their differences is in the best interest of the discipline.

Making space for bilingual communicative practice

Abstract This paper argues that bilingual communication should not be conceived of as something distinct from everyday communicative interaction. Monolingual and bilingual children do not differ in what they do with language, but in how they do it. Whereas monolinguals rely on style switching and voicing, bilinguals employ these strategies in addition to their bilingual resources. Code-switching for bilinguals serves as an indexical strategy which functions much like other similar discourse level processes. We will demonstrate that classroom peer group talk creates an interactional space in which students are free to use all their bilingual resources. Such a safe space provides them an opportunity to talk about grammatical and comprehension issues. Code-switching becomes a resource which allows children to deal with their school tasks by applying their own peer group communicative knowledge (Gumperz, Cook-Gumperz and Szymanski 1999).

Situated Instructions: Language Socialization of School Age Children

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses language socialization of school age children. The possibility of communicating in several different modalities simultaneously makes agreement on the meaning of messages an open set of possibilities. The chapter discusses the way children learn the social uses of language, given that their experience of language in action presents a model of imperfect communication. In terms of early language development, it is assumed that language acquisition intrinsically entails an acquisition of knowledge of social processes. The chapter presents reports on some findings from an experiment made with 5th grade children, of both sexes in the San Francisco Bay area. It also presents the way the children structured their performance of the instructional task in such a way that a temporally adequate account is given. In the case of the face-to-face interaction, the need for the verbal message to provide this adequacy was not as great as in planned or recollected actions; the action unfolds and need only be guided, often in a post facto manner.

Re-examining Bernstein: Class, codes, and language in a multilingual/multicultural world

The 1960s Britain that gave birth to the Beatles as well as British cultural studies was still considered as predominantly a mono-cultural, monolingual society split by traditionally marked class divisions. Even though changes in the structure of educational opportunity had begun to erode class differences through the broadening of access to education over the preceding decade, and even though post-colonial immigration had begun to bring cultural heterogeneity, Britain remained a predominantly white, class-based society (Halsey 1980, 1995). Social class divisions were manifest in most aspects of daily life including most forms of public discourse. Basil Bernstein’s achievement was to propose as early as the 1950s that these discourse differences themselves resulted in the differentiated social experiences of class. His writings introduced the notion of language difference into the debate over the consequences of educational opportunity and its propensity for social change (Bernstein 1958, 1959, 1972). The intellectual climate of these debates forms a necessary background for reading Bernstein’s theorizing and for his early empirical investigations. From today’s perspective Basil Bernstein is known as one of the seminal figures in early sociolinguistics whose work played a part in setting an agenda for the new discipline (Cazden, John & Hymes 1974; Gumperz & Hymes 1972; Dittmar 1976). While what are now regarded as dominant sociolinguistic paradigms had originated in the US, Bernstein’s focus on language as a cultural force was mediated through his more European concern with the problems of the perpetuation of a class divided society. At the time Bernstein was writing many linguists and sociolinguists tended to take a largely descriptive approach to issues of social difference, by looking at the variability of specific features of language and relating these to a priori social