Linguistic Anthropology of Education
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LINGUISTIC ANTHROPOLOGY OF EDUCATION
INTRODUCTION
Linguistic anthropologists investigate how language use both presupposes and creates social relations in cultural context (Agha, 2006; Duranti, 1997; Silverstein, 1985). Theories and methods from linguistic anthropology have been productively applied to educational research for the past four decades. This chapter describes key aspects of a linguistic anthropological approach and reviews research in which these have been used to study educational phenomena. Readers should also consult the chapter by Betsy Rymes on Language Socialization and Linguistic Anthropology of Education, in Volume 8 of the Encyclopedia, for a review of linguistic anthropological research in the language socialization tradition. Almost all education is mediated by language use. The linguistic and paralinguistic signs that compose educational language use have both referential and relational meanings. When educators and learners speak and write, they signal things, not only about the subject matter they are learning, but also about their affiliations with social groups, both inside and outside the speech event. These affiliations, some of which are created in educational events and institutions, can shape students’ life trajectories and influence how they learn subject matter. For both theoretical and practical reasons, then, educational researchers need to understand how language use both creates and presupposes social relations during educational activity. Linguistic anthropology provides a useful set of tools for studying how educational language use creates social relations (Wortham and Rymes, 2003). As implied by its name, linguistic anthropology is an interdisciplinary field—a recognized subdiscipline within American anthropology that also draws on linguistics (e.g., Eckert, 2000), qualitative sociology (e.g., Goffman, 1981; Mehan, Villanueva, Hubbard and Lintz, 1996), cultural anthropology (e.g., Street, 2005) and European “linguistic ethnography” (e.g., Blommaert, 1999; Rampton, 2005). Linguistic anthropologists study how signs come to have referential and relational meaning as they are used in social and cultural contexts. In doing so, they draw on four key concepts, comprising what Silverstein (1985) has called the “total linguistic fact”—that is, four aspects of language use that must be analyzed to understand how linguistic signs have meaning in practice—form, use, ideology and domain. M. Martin-Jones, A. M. de Mejia and N. H. Hornberger (eds), Encyclopedia of Language and Education, 2nd Edition, Volume 3: Discourse and Education, 93–103. #2008 Springer Science+Business Media LLC.
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S TA N T O N W O RT H A M
Linguistic anthropologists use linguists’ accounts of phonological, grammatical, and other systematically distributed categories of language form. Unlike formal linguists, however, linguistic anthropologists are not primarily interested in how forms have meaning apart from contexts of use. Instead, they study how linguistic signs come to have both referential and relational me
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