Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-8bhkd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-02T22:04:42.817Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

9 - Critical Language Ethnography as a Community-Centered Research Paradigm

from Part II - Research, Assessment, and Program Evaluation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2021

By
Ariana Mangual Figueroa  and
Meredith McConnochie
Edited by
Caroline S. Clauss-Ehlers
Caroline S. Clauss-Ehlers
Affiliation:
Long Island University, New York
Get access

Summary

This chapter develops a critical language ethnography approach to community-based research. The authors propose that this approach can offer rich qualitative insights into those everyday interactions through which children and adults acquire and impart locally accepted norms for language use in their communities while also co-constructing social identities and collective practices that can resist and change oppressive structures. The chapter reviews ethnographic projects that work not only to depict the cultural underpinnings of community life but that also seek to disrupt those structural forces that produce inequities across communities. By integrating insights from the fields of Language Socialization (LS) and Critical Ethnography (CE), the authors seek to bring into conversation complementary subfields within anthropology, sociolinguistics, and education that share a commitment to community-centered research. The chapter is organized thematically around three themes of power, praxis, and positionality and it provides a critical case analysis to illustrate the ways in which a critical language ethnography can be used to analyze everyday interaction in communities.

Keywords

Language socializationcritical ethnographypowerpraxispositionality
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Community Psychology
Interdisciplinary and Contextual Perspectives
 , pp. 175 - 196
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Abu El-Haj, T. R. (2015). Unsettled belonging: Educating Palestinian American youth after 9/11. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Anzaldúa, G. E. (1999). La frontera/Borderlands: The new mestiza (2nd ed.). San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books.Google Scholar
Baquedano-López, P. (1997). Creating social identities through doctrina narratives. Issues in Applied Linguistics, 8(1), 27–45. Reprinted in A. Duranti (Ed.) (2001), Linguistic anthropology: A reader (pp. 343–358). Malden, MA: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Baquedano-López, P. (2004). Traversing the center: The politics of language use in a Catholic religious education program for immigrant Mexican children. Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 35(2), 212–232. doi.org/10.1525/aeq.2004.35.2.212CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baquedano-López, P., Alexander, R. A., & Hernandez, S. (2013). Equity issues in parental and community involvement in schools: What teacher educators need to know. Review of Research in Education, 37(1), 149–182. doi.org/10.3102/0091732X12459718Google Scholar
Baquedano-López, P., & Hernandez, S. (2011). Language socialization across educational settings. In Levinson, B. & Pollock, M. (Eds.), A companion to the anthropology of education (pp. 197–211). Malden, MA: Blackwell.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baquedano-López, P., & Kattan, S. (2008). Language socialization in schools. In Hornberger, N. & Duff, P. (Eds.), Encyclopedia of language and education, Vol. 8: Language socialization (pp. 161–173). New York: Springer/Kluwer Academic Publishers.Google Scholar
Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a theory of practice. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Bourdieu, P. (1980). The logic of practice. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Bourdieu, P., & Passeron, J. C. (1977). Reproduction in education, society, and culture. Beverly Hills, CA: SAGE Publications.Google Scholar
Bowles, S., & Gintis, H. (1976). Schooling in capitalist America. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Briggs, C. L. (1984). Learning how to ask: Native metacommunicative competence and the incompetence of fieldworkers. Language in Society, 13(1), 1–28. doi.org/10.1017/S0047404500015876CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cekaite, A. (2012). Affective stances in teacher–novice student interactions: Language, embodiment, and willingness to learn in a Swedish primary classroom. Language in Society, 41(5), 641–670. doi.org/10.1017/S0047404512000681Google Scholar
Cervantes-Soon, C. (2017). Juárez girls rising: Transformative education in times of dystopia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chomsky, N. (1985). Methodological preliminaries. In Katz, J. J. (Ed.), The philosophy of linguistics (pp. 80–125). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Cicourel, A. (1974). Interpretive procedures and normative rules in the negotiation of status and role. In Cicourel, A. (Ed.), Cognitive sociology: Language and meaning in social interaction (pp. 11–41). New York: The Free Press.Google Scholar
Duranti, A. (1997). Linguistic anthropology. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Dyrness, A. (2011). Mothers united: An immigrant struggle for socially just education. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Erickson, F. (2016). First, do no harm: A comment. Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 47(1), 100–103. doi.org/10.1111/aeq.12138CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Flores, N., & Rosa, J. (2015). Undoing appropriateness: Raciolinguistic ideologies and language diversity in education. Harvard Educational Review, 85(2), 149–171. doi.org/10.17763/0017-8055.85.2.149Google Scholar
Fredericks, D. (2019). Working towards a humanizing research stance. In Warriner, D. S. & Bigelow, M. (Eds.), Critical reflections on research methods: Power and equity in complex multilingual contexts (pp. 110–123). Bristol, UK: Multilingualism Matters.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Continuum.Google Scholar
Freire, P. (2004). Pedagogy of indignation. New York: Paradigm Publishers.Google Scholar
García-Sanchez, I., & Orellana, M. F. (2006). The construction of moral and social identity in immigrant children’s narratives-in-translation. Linguistics and Education, 17(3), 209–239. doi.org/10.1016/j.linged.2006.07.001CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Garfinkel, H. (1964). Studies of the routine grounds of everyday activities. Social Problems, 11(3), 225–250. doi.org/10.2307/798722Google Scholar
Garrett, P. B. (2003). An “English Creole” that isn’t: On the sociohistorical origins of linguistic classifications of the vernacular English of St. Lucia. In Aceto, M. & Williams, J. P. (Eds.), Contact Englishes of the Eastern Caribbean (pp. 155–210). Philadelphia: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Garrett, P. B., & Baquedano-López, P. (2002). Language socialization: Reproduction and continuity, transformation and change. Annual Review of Anthropology, 31(1), 339–361. doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.31.040402.085352CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goffman, E. (1974). Frame analysis: An essay on the organization of experience. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Goffman, E. (1981). Forms of talk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
González, N., Moll, L., & Amanti, C. (2005). Funds of knowledge: Theorizing practices in households, communities, and classrooms. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Hamann, E. T. (2003). Reflections on the field: Imagining the future of the anthropology of education if we take Laura Nader seriously. Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 34(4), 438–449. doi.org/10.1525/aeq.2003.34.4.438Google Scholar
Heath, S. B. (1983). Ways with words: Language, life and work in communities and classrooms. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Hernandez, S. (2013). When institutionalized discourses become familial: Mexican immigrant families interpreting and enacting high stakes educational reform [Doctoral Dissertation]. University of California, Berkeley. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3gh3n8vsGoogle Scholar
Hill, J. H. (1998). Language, race and white public space. American Anthropologist, 100(3), 680–689. doi.org/10.1525/aa.1998.100.3.680CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hymes, D. (1964). Toward ethnographies of communication. American Anthropologist, 66(6), 1–34. doi.org/10.1525/aa.1964.66.suppl_3.02a00010Google Scholar
Hymes, D. (1972). On communicative competence. In Pride, J. & Holmes, J. (Eds.), Sociolinguistics (pp. 53–73). Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books.Google Scholar
Kulick, D., & Schieffelin, B. B. (2004). Language socialization. In Duranti, A. (Ed.), A companion to linguistic anthropology (pp. 349–368). Oxford, UK: Blackwell.Google Scholar
LeCompte, M. D., & Preissle, J. (1992). Towards an ethnology of student life in schools and classrooms: Synthesizing the qualitative research tradition. In LeCompte, M., Millroy, W., & Preissle, J. (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research in education (pp. 815–859). San Diego, CA: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Madison, D. S. (2004). Critical ethnography: Method, ethics, and performance. Los Angeles: SAGE Publications.Google Scholar
Mangual Figueroa, A. (2013). ¡Hay que hablar!: Testimonio in the everyday lives of migrant mothers. Language & Communication, 33(4), 559–572. doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2013.03.011Google Scholar
Mangual Figueroa, A. (2014). La carta de responsabilidad: The problem of departure. In Paris, D. & Winn, M. T. (Eds.), Humanizing research: Decolonizing qualitative inquiry with youth and communities (pp. 129–146). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications.Google Scholar
Mangual Figueroa, A. (2016). Citizenship, beneficence, and informed consent: The ethics of working in mixed-status families. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 29(10), 66–85. doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2014.974722Google Scholar
Márquez, P. C. (1999). The street is my home: Youth and violence in Caracas. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
McCarty, T. L. (2002). A place to be Navajo: Rough Rock and the struggle for self-determination in indigenous schooling. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
McConnochie, M., & Mangual Figueroa, A. (2017). “Dice que es bajo” (“She says he’s low”): Negotiating breaches of learner identity in two Mexican families. Linguistics and Education, 38, 68–78. doi.org/10.1016/j.linged.2017.02.005Google Scholar
Mökkönen, C. (2013). Newcomers navigating language choice and seeking voice. Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 44(2), 124–141. doi.org/10.1111/aeq.12011Google Scholar
Moore, L. C. (2009). In communicative competency … in the field. Language and Communication, 29(3), 244–253. doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2009.02.006CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Moore, R. E. (2001). Endangered. In Duranti, A. (Ed.), Key terms in language and culture (pp. 60–63). Malden, MA: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Nader, L. (1969). Up the anthropologist: Perspectives gained from “studying up.” In Hymes, D. (Ed.), Reinventing anthropology (pp. 284–311). New York: Pantheon Books.Google Scholar
Nash, J. (1993). We eat the mines and the mines eat us: Dependency and exploitation in Bolivian tin mines. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Noblit, G. W., Murillo, E. G. Jr.., & Flores, S. Y. (Eds.). (2004). Postcritical ethnography in education. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.Google Scholar
Ochs, E. (1979). Transcription as theory. Developmental Pragmatics, 10(1), 43–72.Google Scholar
Ochs, E. (1988). Culture and language development: Language acquisition and language socialization in a Samoan village. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Ochs, E. (1996). Linguistic resources for socializing humanity. In Gumperz, J. J. & Levinson, S. C. (Eds.), Rethinking linguistic relativity (pp. 407–437). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Ochs, E. (1999). Socialization. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 9(1–2), 230–233.Google Scholar
Ochs, E., & Schieffelin, B. (1984). Language acquisition and socialization: Three developmental stories and their implications. In Shweder, R. A. & LeVine, R. A. (Eds.), Culture theory: Essays on mind, self, and emotion (pp. 276–320). New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Ochs, E., & Schieffelin, B. (2008). Language socialization: An historical overview. In Duff, P. & Hornberger, N. H. (Eds.), Encyclopedia of language and education (2nd ed.; pp. 2580–2594). New York: Springer.Google Scholar
Orellana, M. F. (2009). Translating childhoods: Immigrant youth, language, and culture. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.Google Scholar
Palmer, D., & Caldas, B. (2015). Critical ethnography. In King, K., Lai, Y., & May, S. (Eds.), Research methods in language and education: Encyclopedia of language and education (pp. 381–392). Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing.Google Scholar
Patel, L. (2013). Youth held at the border: Immigration, education and the politics of inclusion. New York: Teachers College Press.Google Scholar
Paugh, A. (2005). Multilingual play: Children’s code-switching, role-play and agency in Dominica, West Indies. Language in Society, 34(1), 63–86. doi.org/10.1017/0S0047404505050037Google Scholar
Phillips, S. (2001). Participant structures and communicative competence: Warm Springs children in community and classroom. In Duranti, A. (Ed.), Linguistic anthropology: A reader (pp. 302–317). Malden, MA: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Quantz, R. A. (1992). On critical ethnography (with some postmodern considerations). In LeCompte, M. D., Millroy, W. L., & Preissle, J. (Eds.), The handbook of qualitative research in education (pp. 447–505). New York: Academic Press, Inc.Google Scholar
Rosa, J. (2018). Looking like a language, sounding like a race: Raciolinguistic ideologies and the learning of Latinidad. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Rymes, B. (2008). Language socialization and the linguistic anthropology of education. In Duff, P. & Hornberger, N. (Eds.), Encyclopedia of language and education, Vol. 8: Language socialization (2nd ed.; pp. 1–14). New York: Springer/Kluwer Academic Publishers.Google Scholar
Rymes, B. (2010). Classroom discourse analysis: A focus on communicative repertoires. In Hornberger, N. H. & McKay, S. L. (Eds.), Sociolinguistics and language education (pp. 528–546). New York: Multilingual Matters.Google Scholar
Schegloff, E. A. (1996). Turn organization: One intersection of grammar and interaction. In Ochs, E., Schegloff, E. A., & Thompson, S. A. (Eds.), Grammar and interaction (pp. 52–133). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Schegloff, E. A. (2007). Sequence organization in interaction: A primer in conversation analysis (Vol. 1). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Slobin, D. I., & Welsh, C. A. (1973). Elicited imitation as a research tool in developmental psycholinguistics. In Ferguson, C. & Slobin, D. (Eds.), Studies of child language development (pp. 485–497). New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.Google Scholar
Sterponi, L. (2007). Clandestine interactional reading: Intertextuality and the double-voicing under the desk. Linguistics and Education, 18(1), 1–23. doi.org/10.1016/j.linged.2007.04.001Google Scholar
Vasquez, O. A., Pease-Alvarez, L., & Shannon, S. M. (1994). Pushing boundaries: Language and culture in a Mexicano community. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Wong Fillmore, L. (2000). Loss of family languages: Should educators be concerned? Theory into Practice, 39(4), 203–210. doi.org/10.1207/s15430421tip3904_3CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wortham, S. (2005). Socialization beyond the speech event. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 15(1), 95–112. doi.org/10.1525/jlin.2005.15.1.95Google Scholar
Zentella, A. C. (2005). Premises, promises, and pitfalls of language socialization research in Latino families and communities. In Zentella, A. C. (Ed.), Building on strength: Language and literacy in Latino families and communities (pp. 13–30). New York: Teachers College Press.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×