Rymes (2008) distinguishes between two categories (ethnographic and semiotic) and three types of LS research (language socialization in education settings,
ethnographically focused linguistic anthropology in educational settings, and semiotically focused linguistic anthropology in educational settings). According to Rymes (2008), ethnographic research in the Hymsian tradition does not “have a systematically articulated or unified set of methods for studying signs and linguistic form” (p. 31). While ethnographic research focuses on documenting communicative practices and speech events a semiotic approach “centers on how sign systems, including grammar, classify human experience as culturally relevant and how such forms are deployed flexibly in interaction to create new forms of culturally relevant action” (p. 31). Rymes (2008) addresses the combination of semiotically informed discourse analytic methods embedded in ethnography with the following statement:
This foundational concern for investigating both normative features of language use and their creative deployment, while rooted in the semiotic tradition, has also permeated later LS work…and this is a point of connection that has fruitfully been carried forward into recent research on LS in educational setting (e.g., Wortham, 2005). (p. 32)
The current study works in this semiotic and ethnographic tradition and extends its use to a classroom setting with L2 English speakers. In this study I explore normative practices (cultural and linguistic) for scientific inquiry in one classroom community, and I describe how three focal participants use linguistic resources to signify their alignment with
various local identity models.
Bucholtz and Hall (2004) identify four semiotic processes that are employed by individuals and collectivities in order to construct and signify social identities:
indexicaility, practice, ideology, and performance. These processes represent the how in identity construction and although they are interrelated, this research centralizes students’ use of indexicality and practice.
3.3.1 Indexicality
Indexicality is “the semiotic operation of juxtaposition, whereby one entity or event points to another” (Bucholtz & Hall, 2004, p. 378). Silverstein (1976) developed a theory of indexicality in order to account for the nonreferential meanings conveyed in all languages. Silverstein (1976) draws on C.S. Peirce’s notion of icons, indexes, and
symbols (the trichotomy of signs). Silverstein (1976) claims “nonreferential indexes, or pure indexes, are features of speech which, independent of any referential speech events that may be occurring, signal some particular value of one or more contextual variables” (p. 29). Silverstein continues with, “such indexes as do not contribute to the referential speech event signal the structure of the speech context” (p. 30).
Silverstein (1976) develops his theory of indexicality by providing examples of gender indexes in Koasati (a Muskogean language in the southeastern U.S.), deference indexes in Javanese, and pronouns in English. Silverstein (1976) also notes that “there is a general creative or performative aspect to the use of pure indexical tokens of certain kinds, which can be said not so much to change the context, as to make explicit and overt the parameters of structure of the ongoing events” (p. 34). Thus, a person’s use of
particular linguistic features (i.e., indexicals) during interaction signal to his interlocutor the frame of reference or context, and the corresponding social roles or identities, that speakers perceive themselves to be engaged in constructing.
3.3.2 Practice
Bucholtz and Hall (2004) explain that, “through sheer repetition, language, along with other social practices, shapes the social actor’s way of being in the world, what Bourdieu calls habitus” (p.377). Although this dissertation primarily examines students’ indexical work during physics lab tasks, the goal of this dissertation is to understand students’ socialization pathways. Although the pathways under investigation here temporally end at the end of the school year, elements of these pathways are
intertextually linked to students’ overall trajectories of affiliation or disaffiliation with science disciplines. Thus, when we consider the significance of students’ trajectories of participation and social identification in one science class, we hypothesize that their practices on this timescale (one school year) will contribute to each student’s overall ways of being (what Bourdieu terms habitus). When we consider the language
socialization of L2 learners as an act of appropriating a new identity, we see that we hold for these learners the expectation that they will appropriate linguistic features and
communicative practices of the expert to index their newly evolving expert habitus.
3.3.3 Identifying Linguistic Practices
Students draw on a vast array of resources to construct local science classroom identities. Bucholtz, Barnwell, Skapoulli and Lee (2012) found that two female
undergraduate students in a chemistry lab positioned the third group member as not a science person in part through their reference to this group member as Bill Nye the Science Guy. Bucholtz et al. (2012) demonstrate the unpredictability of the linguistic resources that participants employ to create social roles in the context of a chemistry lab. In my own data, a conversation about hair ended up serving as a proxy for racial and linguistic categories. Students drew on these categories to draw social boundaries when working in a physics lab (see Chapter 5). Eckert (2008) extends this notion of
unpredictability into the domain of variationist sociolinguistics, and she argues that, “the meanings of variables are not precise or fixed but rather constitute a field of potential meanings – an indexical field, or constellation of ideologically related meanings, any one of which can be activated in the situated use of the variable” (p. 453). Although I entered the field presuming that lexical items related to science and various stance-taking
behaviors would play a role in the construction of local identities, I could not have predicted the identities themselves or the sets of communicative resources that came to index these local identities. As a result of the inability to (concretely) identify particular linguistic features for analysis before entering the field, discourse analysts rely on various systematic approaches to identify relevant linguistic practices in context.
Hanrahan (2006) and Brown et al. (2005) provide readers with matrices that show how they approached analyzing their discourse data. Gee (2011) provides novices with seven groups of guiding questions (based on the seven building tasks of discourses) to answer when analyzing discourse. However Gee (2011) reminds readers that, “real analyses, differently in different cases, concentrate more on some of the building tasks we have discussed than on others; they use some tools of inquiry more thoroughly than
they do others” (p. 149). Gee (2011) maintains that no one study can analyze all relevant aspects of discourse. In her book, Classroom Discourse Analysis, Rymes (2009)
describes four types of linguistic resources (turn-taking, contextualization, genre, and framing) that can be used across three dimensions of discourse (social context, interactional context, and individual agency). Despite providing the most developed account of students’ socialization trajectories to date and authoring the very concept of socialization trajectories, Wortham (2006) did not provide a detailed explanation of his methods of data analysis. As a result, I began my initial analysis of discourse using a data analysis matrix I developed from Rymes (2009), which was informed by the trajectory- based approaches of Wortham (2006) and Bucholtz et al. (2012). However, the
publication of, Discourse Analysis Beyond the Speech Event (Wortham & Reyes, 2015) provided a newly described and more useful approach to analyzing discourse both within and across speech events in my data.
3.3.4 Discourse Analysis Beyond the Speech Event
Wortham and Reyes (2015) outline an approach to within and across event
discourse analysis. Both processes (within and across) are reflexive and require revisiting previous steps throughout the analysis procedure. Within event discourse analysis
proceeds with mapping narrated and narrating events (relating who is present and participating in the conversation to what is actually being said and by whom), selecting indexicals and identifying relevant context, configuring indexicals, construing indexicals, and identifying positioning and social action in the narrating event. When applied to across event discourse analysis, this approach consists of selecting linked events and
mapping narrated events, selecting indexicals and identifying relevant cross-event contexts, delineating cross-event configurations of indexicals, construing indexicals and tracing the shape of a pathway, and identifying emerging cross event actions and
processes (see Table 1.2 in Wortham & Reyes, 2015. pp. 22-23). This process explains how Wortham (2006) traced the socialization trajectories (i.e., pathways) of Tyisha and Maurice as they became outcasts and as Maurice subsequently constructed an “in the middle” position (not an outcast, not a promising student). This approach to discourse analysis served as a model for my analysis.