Sex and Covert Prestige

by Trudgill 70s

In Norwich, as one goes down the social class ladder, instances of -in increase and instances of -ing decrease. But at each stratus, more males use -in than females.

In Norwich, women over-report their use of status-ful forms and men under-report them. In general, people form Norwich under-report more than Labov's New York informants.

A cultural approach to male-female miscommunication

by Maltz and Borker, 1982.

Women and men are acculturated in different ways, and this difference in acculturation accounts for differences in their manners of communication.

Norm-makers, norm-breakers: uses of speech by men and women in a malagasy community

by Elinor Keenan 1974?

In Madagascar there are communities of Malagasy. Indirect speech styles are valued and associated with tradition.

Men generally use formal and indirect speech styles. Women are able to use direct styles and men bring along their wives if a complaint needs to be made or to ask for assistance from strangers.

by Schegloff

Don't call them interruptions. Call them overlap or simultaneous talk.

Hitches in the turn-taking may be marked by louder speech, higher pitch, or faster speech. SOmetimes speakers let their speech be long and dran-out to wait for the end of someone's simulaneous talk.

Post-resolution hitches are common and include nervousness (repetition), pauses and drawn-out speech.

• Overlapping Talk and the Organization of Turn-Taking for Conversation

• Emanuel A. Schegloff
• Language in Society, Vol. 29, No. 1 (Mar., 2000), pp. 1-63
  

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Bilingual Education

by Nessa Wolfson

1988

Many Americans do not speak English as a mother tongue. We have always been a pluralistic society. Bilingual education is a political issue.

Bilingual education was widespread in America until World War I, when English-only became a nationalistic policy point.

In 1963 middle-class Cuban refugees flooded Dade COunty, Florida. Their teachers taught them in Spanish. At Coral Way school, 50% Anglo and 50% Cuban, half the instruction was in each language. Both groups came out bilingual and biliterate. At this time the civil rights movement made being ethnic a point of pride and contributed to the political pressure to educate bilingual children fairly.

The federal govt passed laws intended to help bilingual children receive the schooling they needed. Unfortunately, the laws are vague.

There are different ideas as to what should constitute bilingual education:

1. Submersion. They should be taught only in English. They'll catch on, as "millions" of people did in the early years of teh twentieth century.
2. ESL. Instruction in English as a Second Language, although Lau v. Nichols found that ESL by itself could not be considered adequate. "Pull-out" classes stigmatize students.
3. Immersion. Early grades: target language. As fluency in English increases, instruction in mother tongue introduced. First was St. Lambert experiment in Canada: parents voluntarily pt their English-speaking children in French immersion program. Very successful. Unfortunately, doesn't work in America very well.
   
4. Transitional Bilingual Education. Instruction in the mother tongue during early years, with gradual increase of instruction in English. The hope is to "mainstream" ESL students by high school. The problem is that it's hard to find teachers who can teach in the native language of EVERY minority group. Also, some groups, like the Hmong, have no background in formal schooling.
   
5. Maintenance Bilingual Education. Purpose of bilingual education is to maintain ethnic identity, language and culture. Often inspires fear and anger in conservative people who fear minority succession.
   

While opponents of bilingual education are quite vocal, the majority of Americans support bilingual education. Opponents are usually older people.

The AIR report found that bilingual education did not change students' scores in language and math. There are numerous problems with methodology, however. Test scores themselves are not a measure of whether bilingual education lessened drop-out rates or helped students get jobs after schooling. It measures academic ability and not interpersonal language skills.

TESOL will always play an important part in bilingual education.

Review: African American English and the Composition Classroom

review by David west brown

praises the book in general, but has two caveats: register is a far more complicated issue than the authors make it out to be, and cite Hillocks and Smith 1986 as proof of that sentence-combining is useful in teaching grammar.

The book is fair and balanced, written for the layperson, and makes complex ideas accessible to teachers.

Gender and Sociolinguistic Variation

by Eckert

We cannot consider gender an independent variable, but must consider it in relation to other variations such as socioeconomic status, identity, and regional variation.

Eckert challenged Labov's generalization that women's speech is more conservative than men's by examining two groups of white teenagers at a Detroit high school. The groups were the jocks and the burnouts, who together accounted for about half the school's populations.

Eckert examined phonological variation among jock and burnout males and females. She found that there was a complex relationship between nonstandard vowels and identity, concluding that we cannot look at gender differences without examining the communities of practice in which the women and men use language.