Stanton Wortham

Mapping participant deictics: A technique for discovering speakers' footing

Abstract This article presents a systematic technique for uncovering interactional patterns in conversation. While an indefinite number of verbal and paralinguistic cues can potentially establish interactional structure, one type of form often plays a central role. Deictics systematically index aspects of the context, and these forms often sketch out the framework of an interactional event. This article discusses and illustrates the methodological usefulness of one type of deictic in particular — participant deictics, or ‘personal pronouns’. It analyzes five minutes of a classroom conversation, and shows how systematic attention to participant deictics helps uncover the interactional dynamics. The paper ends by considering the limitations of this methodological technique.

Interviews as interactional data

Interviews are designed to gather propositional information communicated through reference and predication. Some lament the fact that interviews always include interactional positioning that presupposes and sometimes creates social identities and power relationships. Interactional aspects of interview events threaten to corrupt the propositional information communicated, and it appears that these aspects need to be controlled. Interviews do often yield useful propositional information, and interviewers must guard against the sometimes-corrupting influence of interactional factors. But we argue that the interactional aspects of interview events can also be valuable data. Interview subjects sometimes position themselves in ways that reveal something about the habitual positioning that characterizes individuals or groups. We illustrate the potential value of this interactional information by describing “payday mugging” stories told by interviewees in one New Latino Diaspora town. (Interview data, narrating events, transference)

Analyzing language policy and social identification across heterogeneous scales

ABSTRACT Attempts to improve education often change how language is used in schools. Many such efforts aim to include minoritized students by more fully including their languages. These are often met with resistance not so much about language but more about identity. Thus processes of social identification are implicated in efforts to change language in education. If we are to understand how identity and language policy interconnect, we must analyze how stability and change are produced in each. This requires attention to macro-level patterns and to micro-level practices. But a two-scale account—micro instantiation of macro categories and micro changes shaping macro structures—does not adequately explain identity and language policy. This article focuses on educational language policy implementation, how language use and social identification change in an evolving policy context. We argue that change and stability in language policy implementation must be explained with reference to heterogeneous resources from multiple timescales—beyond micro and macro—as these resources establish and change social identities. We review recent research using multiple timescales to understand social processes like identification and policy implementation, and we illustrate the use of such a scalar account to describe the social identification of one student in a sixth grade classroom in Paraguay in the midst of a major national educational language policy change. We show how a persons identification as a new kind of minority language speaker involved heterogeneous resources from various spatiotemporal scales. We argue that analysis of the heterogeneous resources involved in social identification is essential to understanding the role that these processes play in cultural, pedagogical, and language change.

Conflicting Ideologies of Mexican Immigrant English Across Levels of Schooling

This article explores how language ideologies—beliefs about immigrant students’ language use—carry conflicting images of Spanish speakers in one New Latino Diaspora town. We describe how teachers and students encounter, negotiate, and appropriate divergent ideologies about immigrant students’ language use during routine schooling practices, and we show how these ideologies convey different messages about belonging to the community and to the nation. Although the concept of language ideology often assumes stable macrolevel beliefs, our data indicate that ideologies can vary dramatically in one town. Elementary educators and students had a positive, “bilinguals-in-the-making” ideology about Spanish-speaking students, while secondary educators used more familiar deficit accounts. Despite their differences, we argue that both settings tended toward subtractive schooling, and we offer suggestions for how educators could more effectively build upon emergent bilinguals’ language skills and practices.

Shifting Identities in the Classroom

How does this exchange between a teacher and a 14-year-old student contribute to the student’s social identity? Knowing that the student is a working-class African-American girl, and that the teacher is a middle-class European-American man, we might construe this as a powerful teacher silencing a disempowered student. Widely circulating categories of identity, like ‘working class’ and ‘African American’ are in fact crucial resources that people use, and that operate through people, as they identify themselves and others. This fragment could, of course, be uncharacteristic for the teacher and the student, and there could be mitigating circumstances. If this sort of event recurred, however, we could plausibly argue that the student is being identified as ‘bad’ because this fits with a widely circulating model of identity that includes ‘resistant,’ ‘disruptive’ students who are disproportionately African American and working class.

Youth Cultures and Education

Educators, policymakers, and the public are often deeply interested in youth cultures and practices. Young people nowadays, we are told, behave in selfish, deviant, apathetic, irrational, creative, altruistic, engaged, tolerant, and various other, often-contradictory ways. Popular accounts label and characterize generations “X,” “Y,” and now “Z,” the “net” generation, the “Peter Pan” generation, the “silent” generation, and so on. Such accounts of youth often have little to do with youth themselves, but instead express adult concerns about the nature and trajectories of social groups. Some adult accounts of youth nonetheless also reflect legitimate hopes and worries for and about them. Educators should attend to widely circulating accounts of youth, because these often yield or buttress attitudes and policies that influence young people. If we take for granted misleading popular accounts of contemporary youth, we may fail to understand young people and treat them in counterproductive ways. On the other hand, insightful accounts of youth and attempts to understand their views can help educators work more successfully with them. Most popular conceptions of youth culture oversimplify. Many youth beliefs and practices change rapidly and draw on heterogeneous resources that move across the contemporary world. Because of migration, the ease of travel, and new media and communications technologies, youth culture crosses social and national borders, often yielding complex hybrids that include both components rooted in local histories and globally circulating forms. Despite this complexity, it is important for both scholars and educators to understand youth cultural practices. These practices infiltrate and mediate other important processes—appearing in schools, for instance, as distractions and sometimes as components of lesson plans, and deeply influencing students’ social and personal identities. Many youth practices also involve remarkable creativity and skill, and youth are often more motivated to engage in these

Pre-teen literacy and subsequent teenage childbearing in a US population

BACKGROUND While literacy is a key factor in health across the life course, the association of literacy and teenage childbearing has not been assessed in the US. STUDY DESIGN Prospective cohort study using standardized reading data from 12,339 girls in the seventh grade in the 1996-97 or 1997-98 academic years of the Philadelphia Public School System linked to birth records from the city of Philadelphia (1996-2002). RESULTS Less than average reading skill was independently associated with two and a half times the risk of teen childbearing than average reading skill (aHR 2.51, 95% CI: 1.67-3.77). Above average reading skill was associated with less risk (aHR 0.27, 95% CI 0.17-0.44). A significant interaction (p<.05) between reading skill and race/ethnicity indicated that Hispanic and African American girls had greater risk of teen-childbearing by literacy. CONCLUSIONS Literacy strongly predicts risk of teenage childbearing independent of confounders. The effects of literacy were stronger among girls with Hispanic or African American race/ethnicity.

Immigrant Spanish as Liability or Asset? Generational Diversity in Language Ideologies at School

Latino students’ educational success is central to America’s prosperity—in traditional immigrant destinations and in New Latino Diaspora locations, previously unfamiliar with Latinos. Implicated in this success is the reception young immigrants receive, especially the ways in which they are identified in schools. We describe findings from 6 years of ethnographic research in a high school and an elementary school in the New Latino Diaspora and describe divergent ideologies of Mexican-immigrant Spanish circulating in each context. We show how monoglossic language ideologies in the 2 schools frame teenage immigrants as deficient and younger immigrant children as proficient. These ideologies influence both elementary and high school decisions about how to serve immigrant students, and they shape students’ own language practices, which have implications for their learning opportunities and future trajectories. We argue that attention to these divergent language ideologies is necessary for understanding different educational outcomes across decimal generations of immigrant students.

Scattered Challenges, Singular Solutions: The New Latino Diaspora

The surging Hispanic and Latino population across the country has brought new education challenges and opportunities to rural and small town America.

The Production of Schoolchildren as Enlightenment Subjects

This article investigates children’s elementary school experiences, exploring how they become autonomous, rational individuals—the type of person envisioned in the European Enlightenment and generally imagined as the outcome of Western schooling. Drawing on ethnographic research that followed one cohort of Latinx children across five years, we examine how schooling practices change across the elementary school years in a context that foregrounds high-stakes testing. We describe how practices that focus heavily on testing mold children into autonomous, rational individuals while marginalizing those who don’t fit this model. Adhering to these practices and naturalizing the Enlightenment subject limits educators’ ability to serve students who resist the normative practices of schooling.