The effects of language policies on the symbolic value of the linguistic repertoire merit consideration in needed studies of the consequences of language status planning. Since achieving political autonomy within Spain in 1979, Catalonia has instituted a number of policies, particularly in education, to enhance the status and use of Catalan. A matched guise test was conducted among students in Barcelona in 1980 and again in 1987 to gauge changes in attitudes toward Catalan and Castilian. Conflict between positive status and negative solidarity values of Catalan for nonnative speakers found in 1980 appears to be resolved in 1987. Three aspects of public language policy have attenuated ethnic constraints against nonnative use of Catalan, but further changes in social relations may be necessary to alter patterns of language choice. (Language attitudes, language policy, Catalonia)

Nonstandard language varieties typically become social markers of the social groups that use them. Through this connection, the varieties reflect commonly held stereotypes of those groups from the perspective of outsiders, as well as symbolize group membership for their speakers. This study employs the matched guise technique to compare attitudes toward Appalachian English and Standard American English held by speakers of both language varieties. Most studies of nonstandard language varieties have shown an acceptance by nonstandard speakers of dominant negative stereotypes of their groups. By varying content of speech samples evaluated, this study suggests that speakers of Appalachian English partially accept low status evaluations of their dialect, but reject other negative stereotypes of their speech community in terms of integrity and social attractiveness of its members. In particular, results suggest significantly higher evaluations of male speakers of Appalachian English that are shared by Standard English speakers. (Appalachian English, speech community, language variety, language markers, language stereotypes, dialects, social status)

This article is a conversation-analytic investigation of the forms of organization that allow specific items of classroom discourse – words, phrases, up to whole turns at talk – to be altered by subsequent items. Central to the article is an analytic distinction between self-correction and other-correction, that is, between repair sequences in which the speaker of the initial item (the “trouble source”) makes the correction and instances in which this is performed by one of her or his interlocutors (cf. Jefferson 1974; Schegloff et al. 1977). The classroom case is analytically interesting both for its own sake and also on account of research speculations that other-correction should be more frequent in adult-child talk than in other genres of conversation. However, in order to provide an analysis of the problem sensitive to the particularities of the classroom, it is necessary to look not merely at corrections, but at the larger repair trajectories in which they occur. These trajectories consist of corrections plus their prior initiations, the latter being means by which speakers mark out some item as requiring correction. Once the social identities of teacher and student are mapped against self-and other-forms of initiation and correction, it is possible to discern some of the structural preferences of classroom discourse along the general axis of repair. The materials are taken from geography lessons in Australian high school classrooms. (Repair and correction, question and answer, clue-giving, expansion sequences, modulation, classroom discourse, everyday language use, Australian English, conversation analysis, sociology of education)

Under certain circumstances, contextualization cues become powerful means of achieving social order. The social organization of a daily group meeting in an American primary grade classroom is closely examined. Participants recurrently generate certain contexts within the meeting in varying sequence from day to day. Transitions from one to another regularly occur smoothly and unremarkably as interaction unfolds. On some occasions, however, this does not happen. Order breaks down, and the teacher and students implicitly negotiate what the context will be. On the surface, these contrasting patterns seem to arise unpredictably as students choose either to “behave” or “misbehave.” That is how the teacher accounts for them. Nevertheless, a closer analysis shows that they are explainable with reference to some subtle contextualization cues that the teacher, without being consciously aware of it, routinely provides but occasionally omits at context boundaries. Students routinely act on the presence and absence of these cues, which thus become a tacit, jointly constructed means of discourse regulation and social control. Their inadvertant “omission” becomes a recurrent source of interactional trouble. (Context, contextualization cues, classroom discourse, ethnography of speaking)