8 - Language in and out of the classroom

Summary

This chapter focuses on language socialization and how nations and educational systems interact with speech communities through formal aspects of language policy. Knowing and learning how to communicate is the essence of social and cultural life for children in any society. They learn how to navigate their speech communities through caretakers who teach children how to speak, when to speak, where to speak and how to think about their speech community and language(s). This chapter describes the relationship between speech community belief and values, and educational policy. It explores youth language in public and urban settings, educational and literacy issues, and controversies including important debates on African American English (AAE) in US schools.

Language standards

While members of non-dominant speech communities often acknowledge and incorporate the standard language, they seldom have access to the social knowledge associated with it. It is during the teaching of literacy, math, science, art, etc. that educational institutions also institutionalize a language standard as the dominant and prestige variety as it socializes children to the norms of cultural and communicative hegemony (cf. Briggs 1986). Educational institutions not only convey specific and specialized knowledge, but also the assumption that the prestige variety is more valuable than that acquired in the conversations and activities of those who do not characterize the dominant language (e.g. Bourdieu and Passeron 1977; Woolard 1985). In fact, Bourdieu writes: “Integration into a single ‘linguistic community’, which is a product of the political domination that is endlessly reproduced by institutions capable of imposing universal recognition of the dominant language, is the condition for the establishment of relations of linguistic domination” (1991: 46).