Academic Language: Appropriateness, Ability, and Authority

Any viable theory of academic language must thus account for both language’s capacity for change and its tendency to sediment. By drawing on Agha’s (2003) theory of enregisterment, and by viewing language as inseparable from human action, I aim to capture both of these aspects of the nature of language. Specifically, based on the theories reviewed above, several interrelated principles emerge: (1) Insofar as language is a form of action, academic language can be defined in terms of the academic actions that it accomplishes, and to accomplish these actions, it works with other symbolic resources across multiple

communicative modes, which also need to be analyzed (see Bucholtz, forthcoming; Goodwin & Alim, 2010; Haneda, 2014a; Kress, 2011); (2) Since what gets recognized as an

“academic” action may change or vary according to disciplinary, interactional, and

ethnographic contexts, academic language cannot, as recent work (e.g., Kern et al., 2015) has begun to argue, be neatly extracted from its contexts of use; (3) Given variations of local contexts, ethnographic or emic definitions of academic language need to be given attention; (4) Because processes of enregisterment involve the sedimentation of habits and perceptions of speech through indexical speech chains, emic understandings of the academic language register will likely draw on more broadly circulating definitions, genres, and ideologies; (5) Because processes of enregisterment are also somewhat flexible and dynamic, what counts as academic language can and does change within and across particular settings; and (6)

Considering that (academic) language, as a form of action, is an expression of agency, and considering also that enregisterment processes involve the linking of linguistic forms to social personae through indexicality, analyses of academic language are fundamentally social

analyses of people, and as such, analysts must foreground language users instead of only discussing language uses.

These understandings form the foundation of the three-part framework that guides my analysis throughout this study. I argue that academic language produces “academic”

meanings not simply because it referentially points to advanced conceptual knowledge and other objects constituted as “academic,” but because it allows users to index acts, activities, stances, and qualities that in turn indirectly index academic identities through sedimented— though by no means permanently settled—ideological links to social personae. That is, what makes a given use of language or other semiotic resources “academic” is not only that it refers to academic knowledge or that it bears the structural hallmarks of academic language, such as embedding, nominalization, or the use of the declarative mood (see Chapter 2), but also that it allows users to take particular stances, embody particular styles, and thus build particular identities—identities that can and do shift from one interactional moment to another. This definition makes it clear that academic language, far from being an “objective” or “neutral” way of understanding the world (as dominant discourses hold), is fundamentally social and is bound up with subjective as well as political processes.

Specifically, the framework I propose here defines academic language as context- specific uses of semiotic resources that help users index ideologies and identities related to appropriateness, ability, and authority. Accordingly, in this study I examine how semiotic resources enregistered as “academic” can help language users accomplish any one or more of three interrelated actions: (dis)aligning themselves with an ideology of appropriateness; positioning themselves as having a high level of academic ability or intelligence; and taking stances of authority relative to others. It is important to note that these three dimensions of the indexical meanings of academic language use are overlapping and often work together in

processes of social reproduction, though at times they work relatively independently and can be distinguished from one another. For this reason, each of my findings chapters (Chapters 5, 6, and 7) foregrounds one particular dimension while also acknowledging ways in which each dimension overlaps with others. Also important to emphasize is that this framework is not only deductive but also inductive. That is, the three dimensions of my framework are reflective not only of theories articulated in literature on academic language, but also of my ethnographic observations that these particular ideologies and identities were especially salient in Room G at Beachside Elementary School. Given its partly inductive nature, the framework outlined here may apply in different ways when used in different ethnographic settings, or it may not apply well at all, which points to the need for an ethnographic

approach to understanding processes of enregisterment (see Chapter 8 for further discussion of these issues).

At the same time, the salience of appropriateness, ability, and authority is not unique to Room G. Rather, all three have long been acknowledged as central components of what is valued within mainstream (and hegemonic) schooling practices (see, e.g., Collins, 2003; Heath, 1983; Varenne & McDermott, 1998). Yet seldom have they been brought together in an explicit way within a single analytic framework, and to my knowledge they have not yet brought together as a lens for examining academic language. This dissertation’s framework thus sheds new light on how the language practices and linguistic forms that are typically valorized as academic are intimately connected with the reproduction of broader practices and ideologies within schools and society. It also puts the spotlight on learners’ identity construction processes (rather than only looking at macrosociological identity categories), thereby portraying them as people always in the process of becoming (Freire, 2000), both socially and academically.

B. How is (Academic) Language Learned?