Language choice, social institutions, and symbolic domination

Abstract

The study of language choice and code-switching can illuminate the ways in which, through language, social institutions with ethnolinguistically diverse staff and clients exercise symbolic domination. Using the example of French-language minority education in Ontario (Canada), this article examines the ways in which ethnic and institutional relations of power overlap or crosscut, forming constraints which have paradoxical effects. In an analysis of two classrooms, it is shown how an ideology of institutional monolingualism is supported or undermined by program structure, curriculum content, and the social organization of turn-taking, and how individuals use language choices and code-switching to collaborate with or resist these arrangements. The effect of these processes is to contain paradoxes and to produce new relations of power within the school. (Symbolic domination, choice of language, code-switching, French/English language contact, social institutions, Canada)

‘Being the Teacher’: Identity and Classroom Conversation

“…Although there is some evidence that the pattern is associated with poor progress in language learning (Nystrand 1997) and restrictive teacher practices (Lin 2000), class level and motivation may be important factors here, as at least one study indicates (Heller 1995), and in the absence of a clearer picture it seems legitimate to seek ways of exploiting the structure to positive effect -the pedagogic equivalent of beating swords into ploughshares. This is the direction that current research into teacher-student interaction seems to be taking and the remainder of this section considers this response, arguing that although it represents a significant advance on our understanding of the discourse opportunities arising from the structure, there is an attendant danger that this will serve only to reinforce its ubiquity and leave unaddressed the more forbidding challenge of finding ways of engaging in ‗classroom conversation', hence missing a valuable opportunity to extend the range of interaction types practised in the classroom.…”

The Interactional Production of Race and Religious Identity in an Urban Catholic School

“…Practically, my use of linguistic anthropology of education draws on a core concept for describing linguistic practice, indexicality (Wortham, 2003), in order to capture and frame interactional data. To understand the back and forth of classroom conversation, we must look beyond the interaction (the "speech event") in talk itself to see the distribution of socially relevant categories in historically-developed institutional orders (Heller, 1995). What comes to count as knowledge (or a contribution to knowledge) participates in social inequality through the construction of socially meaningful categories.…”

“…Thinking of identity as contextually constructed by scales and hierarchies (Stornaiuolo & LeBlanc, 2014, "Catholic" appears to be the superordinate identity with the most symbolic capital in this interaction, followed by "Christian", and lastly "atheist", all of which is complicated by racial discourse. Heller (1995), after Bourdieu, calls this kind of interaction "symbolic domination," "the ability of certain groups of to maintain control over others by establishing their view of reality and their cultural practices as most valued… as the norm" (p. 373). Where Charles intends to invoke a vision of the world where one can move between hardened religious groups, the Vietnamese American boys work to place him in a distinct category (which indexes negative value in their vision of reality).…”

Foreign Language Identity and its Relationship with Travelling and Educational Level

“…Giles andJohnson (1981, 1987) developed Tajfel's idea into an ethnolinguistic identity theory by suggesting language as a prominent marker of social identity. Sociolinguists such as Gumerz (1982) and Heller (1987Heller ( , 1995Heller ( , 1999Heller ( , and 2001 extended the idea to the establishment of shared and unshared memberships by willfully adopting a given language to signal the type of membership.…”