Categories and language choice in multilingual classrooms: the relevance of ‘teacher-hood’

Abstract

This paper introduces Membership Categorisation Analysis to the study of language choice in multilingual classrooms. Building on the argument developed in studies of bilingual talk in non-educational settings that language choice is a category-bound activity, it aims to investigate the extent to which categories are relevant to language choice and alternation acts in multilingual classrooms. The discussion is based on a case study of an induction classroom for newly arrived immigrant children in France where multiple languages are used in addition to French, the language prescribed by the school language policy. A Membership Categorisation Analysis of a corpus of interaction audio-recorded in this classroom shows that the category ‘teacher-hood’ (a term I propose to refer to ‘doing being’ the teacher) is relevant to language choice and alternation acts. More specifically, in this classroom, language choice acts are bound to the category ‘teacher-hood’ and the co-selective relationship between ‘teacher-hood’ and language choice is used by the classroom participants as a ‘practiced language policy’; that is, as a way to know what language(s) is appropriate in interaction. I further show how the classroom participants creatively play with the performance of ‘teacher-hood’ to allow multiple languages in interaction.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 18 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.