Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-t5tsf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-15T02:28:00.224Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

What's so improper about fractions? Prescriptivism and language socialization at Math Corps

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 January 2015

STEPHEN CHRISOMALIS
STEPHEN CHRISOMALIS*
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology, Wayne State University, 3019 F/AB, 656 W. Kirby Detroit, MI 48202, USAchrisomalis@wayne.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Mathematical prescriptivism is a language ideology found in school mathematics that uses a discourse of rationality to proscribe language forms perceived as illogical or inefficient. The present study is based on a three-year ethnographic investigation of Math Corps, a community of practice in Detroit, Michigan, in which prescriptive language in the classroom is used both to highlight beneficial algorithms and to build social solidarity. Although motivated by the analogy with English orthographic reform, prescriptivism at Math Corps avoids potentially harmful criticism of community members of the sort often experienced by African American students. A playful linguistic frame, the prescriptive melodrama, highlights valued prescriptions, thereby enculturating students into the locally preferred register, the ‘Math Corps way’, which encompasses social, moral, linguistic, and mathematical practices and norms. A sociolinguistic and anthropological perspective on prescriptivism within communities of practice highlights positive alternatives to the universalizing prescriptions found in other English contexts. (Prescriptivism, language ideology, mathematics education, community of practice, Math Corps, linguistic anthropology, language socialization)*

Type
Articles
Information
Language in Society , Volume 44 , Issue 1 , February 2015 , pp. 63 - 85
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Adams, Thomasenia Lott (2003). Reading mathematics: More than words can say. The Reading Teacher 56(8):786–95.Google Scholar
Agha, Asif (2003). The social life of cultural value. Language and Communication 23(3):231–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Basso, Keith (1979). Portraits of ‘The Whiteman’: Linguistic play and cultural symbols among the Western Apache. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Bauman, Richard (1975). Verbal art as performance. American Anthropologist 77(2):290–311.Google Scholar
Bourdieu, Pierre (1991). Language and symbolic power. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Bucholtz, Mary (1999). “Why be normal?”: Language and identity practices in a community of nerd girls. Language in Society 28(2):203–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cameron, Deborah (1995). Verbal hygiene. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Cheshire, Jenny (1998). Double negatives are illogical. In Bauer, Laurie & Trudgill, Peter (eds.), Language myths, 113–22. Harmondsworth: Penguin.Google Scholar
Chrisomalis, Stephen (2013). Greatness in the Math Corps family: Integrating ethnographic, corpus, and cognitive approaches to a cultural model. Language and Communication 33(3):155–66.Google Scholar
Davis, Daniel (2002). The language myth and mathematical notation as a language of nature. In Harris, Roy (ed.), The language myth in Western culture, 139–58. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon.Google Scholar
Edwards, Thomas; Kahn, Steven; & Brenton, Lawrence (2001). Math Corps summer camp: An inner city intervention program. Journal of Education for Students Placed at Risk 6(4)411–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fordham, Signithia (1999). Dissin' “the standard”: Ebonics as guerrilla warfare at Capital High. Anthropology and Education Quarterly 30(3):272–93.Google Scholar
Fordham, Signithia, & Ogbu, John (1986). Black students' school success: Coping with the “burden of ‘acting white’ ”. The Urban Review 18(3):176–206.Google Scholar
Goffman, Erving (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.Google Scholar
Goffman, Erving (1974). Frame analysis: An essay on the organization of experience. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Halliday, MichaelKirkwood, Alexander (1976). Anti-languages. American Anthropologist 78(3):570–84.Google Scholar
Johnson, Sally (2002). On the origin of linguistic norms: Orthography, ideology and the first constitutional challenge to the 1996 reform of German. Language in Society 31(4):549–76.Google Scholar
Johnstone, Barbara; Andrus, Jennifer; & Danielson, Andrew E. (2006). Mobility, indexicality, and the enregisterment of “Pittsburghese”. Journal of English Linguistics 34(2):77–104.Google Scholar
Lampland, Martha, & Leigh Star, Susan (2009). Standards and their stories: How quantifying, classifying, and formalizing practices shape everyday life. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Lave, Jean (1988). Cognition in practice: Mind, mathematics and culture in everyday life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Lave, Jean, & Wenger, Etienne (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Macaulay, Ronald (1975). Negative prestige, linguistic insecurity, and linguistic self-hatred. Lingua 36(2):147–61.Google Scholar
Milroy, James (2001). Language ideologies and the consequences of standardization. Journal of Sociolinguistics 5(4): 530–55.Google Scholar
Milroy, James, & Milroy, Lesley (1991). Authority in language: Investigating language prescription and standardisation. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Nunes, Terezinha; Dias Schliemann;, Analucia & William Carraher, David (1993). Street mathematics and school mathematics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Ogbu, John (1978). Minority education and caste: The American system in cross-cultural perspective. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Ogbu, John (2003). Black American students in an affluent suburb: A study of academic disengagement. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Ottenhoff, John (1996). The perils of prescriptivism: Usage notes and the American Heritage Dictionary. American Speech 71(3):272–84.Google Scholar
Pace, John (1978). A rational approach to fractions. The Two-Year College Mathematics Journal 9(3):154–58.Google Scholar
Rayner-Canham, Geoff, & Zheng, Zheng (2008). Naming elements after scientists: An account of a controversy. Foundations of Chemistry 10(1):13–18.Google Scholar
Remlinger, Kathryn (2009). Everyone up here: Enregisterment and identity in Michigan's Keweenaw Peninsula. American Speech 84(2):118–37.Google Scholar
Rothstein, Linda (1995). The transfermium wars. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 51(1):5–6.Google Scholar
Safire, William (1980). On language. New York: Times Books.Google Scholar
Sherzer, Joel (1987). A discourse-centered approach to language and culture. American Anthropologist 89(2):295–309.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Strunk, William, & Brooks White, Elwyn (1959). The elements of style. New York: Macmillan.Google Scholar
Tajima, Atsushi (2004). Fatal miscommunication: English in aviation safety. World Englishes 23(3):451–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Truss, Lynne (2003). Eats, shoots, and leaves. New York: Gotham Books.Google Scholar
Venezky, Richard (2004). In search of the perfect orthography. Written Language and Literacy 7(2):139–63.Google Scholar
von Mengden, Ferdinand (2010). Cardinal numerals: Old English from a cross-linguistic perspective. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Wenger, Etienne (1998). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar