“It’s better language”: The social meanings of academic language in an elementary classroom

Corella, Meghan

doi:10.1080/15427587.2021.1935955

Cited by 5 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…As is typically the case in ethnographic participant observation, my role in Room Z was a hybrid one. Ms. Martin and her students knew me as one of several adult classroom volunteers (often referred to as "teachers" by Ms. Martin) and also as a researcher interested in academic language, the focus of the larger study for which the data analyzed here were generated (see, e.g., Corella, 2020Corella, , 2022. In this volunteer-researcher role, I engaged in ethnographic participant observation 2-4 days per week throughout the year during language arts and math activities, and at times during other activities (e.g., recess, art).…”

Section: Theoretical Perspective: Gestural Socializationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…She also encouraged students to perform OHP in the manner shown in Figure 1A toward peers as a way of being "helping" others by "reminding" them of the listening norms if there were breaches, especially if a breach was "distracting" to the gesturer. Thus, rather than directly indexing the casual, solidarity-building stances and identities conventionally associated with the idiom "give me five", in Ms. Martin's gestural socialization practices, the OHP gesture, its "give me five" emic label, and the listening practices to which they referred indexed relatively high investment in affectively serious, compliant stances toward the teacher's discourse and toward semiotic practices enregistered (Agha, 2003) as "academic", an enregisterment intertwined with raced, gendered, and classed ideologies of appropriateness (see also Corella, 2020Corella, , 2022.…”

Section: Ms Martin's Gestural Socialization Of E Cient Scholarly Conductmentioning

confidence: 99%

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“Talk to the hand”: handling peer conflict through gestural socialization in an elementary classroom

Corella

2023

Front. Commun.

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Although researchers of language and communication have become increasingly interested in both embodiment and conflict in recent years, little is known about how elementary students use embodied actions modeled by their teachers as they engage in peer conflicts. This paper addresses such questions, focusing on the “quiet coyote” gesture and the “open hand prone” gesture, two emblems commonly used as classroom management strategies in elementary grades. Building on work in language socialization, gesture studies, and other areas of discourse analysis, I propose what I call a gestural socialization perspective for analyzing the nuanced ways the US second-grade children in this study use and socialize one another to use these gestures, as well as other semiotic resources, to handle peer disputes. An ethnographically informed, multimodal discourse analysis centering on a multiracial group of girls reveals how students' gesture practices draw on their teacher's gestural socialization practices while also diverging from them, especially with regard to gestural form, stance object, intended recipient, and accompanying metapragmatic commentary. These aspects of the participants' appropriations of the “open hand prone” and “quiet coyote” emblems, together with their use of gestural innovations, metagestures, and other semiotic resources, allow them to take more oppositional stances than those made relevant by the teacher's practices. Through these multimodal stances, students take a hands-on approach to starting, continuing, and closing peer disputes on their own terms. Overall, the study highlights how participants' handling of disputes often subverted a local emphasis on conflict avoidance, efficiency, and appropriateness and the developmentalist, neoliberal, and standard language ideologies underpinning these norms. The paper closes with a discussion of implications for research and pedagogy, emphasizing the importance of closely attending to the multimodal, interactionally emergent, and culturally situated nature of conflicts among children and people of all ages.

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Section: Theoretical Perspective: Gestural Socializationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Ms Martin's Gestural Socialization Of E Cient Scholarly Conductmentioning

confidence: 99%

“Talk to the hand”: handling peer conflict through gestural socialization in an elementary classroom

Corella

2023

Front. Commun.

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“…Echoing Vossoughi et al (2021), this centering of student goals moved the learning occurring beyond typical learner-or teacher-centered models to one of partnership, or joint language-learning activity. Indeed, while studies document the worrisome ways in which academic language instruction may devalue the language-and identities-that students bring to the classroom, we use this analysis to problematize the assumption that academic language instruction can only serve normative functions (Baker-Bell, 2020;Corella, 2021;Flores & Rosa, 2015).…”

Section: Implications For Instructionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Specifically, scholarship makes visible the ways in which some academic language instruction devalues learners’ out-of-school language practices through a misguided focus on “appropriate,” “correct,” or standardized language, often reifying the teaching of idealized, white, mainstream “standardized English” (Baker-Bell, 2020; Flores & Rosa, 2015). This, in turn, can reify linguistic hierarchies by situating academic language as entirely distinct from outside-of-school language, which is a view frequently internalized by students (Corella, 2021; Lewis, 2021; Phillips Galloway et al, 2015). These approaches make synonymous academic language and standardized language and define its learning narrowly as mastery of conventions with little regard for fostering flexible or critical language use.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Pedagogy of Possibility: Proleptic Teaching and Language Learning

Galloway

Meston

2022

Journal of Literacy Research

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We charted how one educator's use of proleptic language—or language that invoked students’ imagined future identities as if they are fully realized in the present—situated students in communities of academic and professional practice, both within the tangible community of the classroom and within those intangible communities consisting of college students, litigators, music producers, and activists which her students aspired to join. Students demonstrated transformative agency in aligning, resisting, and reinterpreting these proleptic bids, which appeared to create opportunities for students to engage in authentic uses of academic discourse as well as to develop critical rhetorical flexibility—or skill in using all language resources flexibly and critically as a part of participation in an array of social contexts. We suggest that the use of proleptic talk transforms the tenor of academic language instruction by centering students’—rather than teachers’—goals for language learning and by recognizing learners’ past, present, and future selves.

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“They're Like Slash”: Multimodality and Embodied Agency in Students' Critical Engagements with Texts

Aragón,

Corella,

Lang

2024

Reading Research Quarterly

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Despite recent calls to more fully incorporate multimodal perspectives into literacies research, there is still limited scholarship examining how students critically engage in reading activities by drawing on embodied practices. Racially and linguistically minoritized students are particularly disadvantaged by dominant logocentric and developmentalist approaches, which privilege oral and written discourse and often position these students as less capable of performing complex literacy practices. Drawing from three independent ethnographic studies, our multimodal interactional analysis examines how students of a range of ages and raciolinguistic backgrounds use embodied actions and other semiotic resources to agentively navigate text, task, and ideological constraints in activities involving reading and analyzing texts. Our analysis demonstrates the crucial role of students' embodied practices in expanding upon and challenging the constraints of literacy activities, focusing particularly on how students leveraged epistemic stance‐taking, embodied affective responses, and embodied forms of argumentation to negotiate and co‐construct meaning. Through a focus on embodied agency, this paper presents and applies an interactional perspective on the embodied nature of literacy activities; shows how students' creative mobilizations of embodied and other semiotic resources contribute to their critical readings of texts; and offers pedagogical and methodological implications for ways educators and researchers can attend to the intricacies of students' embodied sense‐making in literacy activities.

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“It’s better language”: The social meanings of academic language in an elementary classroom

Cited by 5 publications

References 27 publications

“Talk to the hand”: handling peer conflict through gestural socialization in an elementary classroom

“Talk to the hand”: handling peer conflict through gestural socialization in an elementary classroom

Pedagogy of Possibility: Proleptic Teaching and Language Learning

“They're Like Slash”: Multimodality and Embodied Agency in Students' Critical Engagements with Texts

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