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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 1440

Part of Plenary lectures (Other abstracts in this session)

(When) do teachers make a difference?

Authors: Poplack, Shana
Submitted by: Poplack, Shana (University of Ottawa, Canada)

With urbanization comes increased access to education, and a prime mandate of the educational enterprise is to curb, if not reverse, community-based linguistic variation and change. Yet non-standard forms abound in spoken vernaculars. In Quebec French, many are involved in vigorous change in progress, so that for urban youth today, stigmatized variants are basically the norm in various areas of the grammar. Why have these rogue forms persisted in the face of centuries of prescriptive stigma? And why have their unacknowledged contexts of usespread to the detriment of those prescribed in grammars? The tendency is to blame the conduits of linguistic prescription – teachers and schools. But this underestimates the power of the speech community to propagate and reinforce vernacular norms.

In this talk I explore these issues through an ongoing project whose goal is to assess the competing roles of community and school in abetting language change and maintaining the standard. Illustrating with a number of morphosyntactic variants which differ in terms of stigma, salience, prescriptive specificity and social meaning, we compare actual language use of French teachers and high school students in school and out, as well as with the community norm on the one hand, and the prescribed norm on the other.

Results show that while teachers sometimes hew to prescriptive norms, two factors conspire in their failure to adopt them wholesale: prescriptive indeterminacy (over when and how to employ the forms) and strong community constraints (against overly salient standard forms). Students, on the other hand, whether in school or out, virtually always align themselves with the community norm, regardless of variable, variant, teacher stance, teacher production, or degree of associated stigma. Only very occasionally, with specific variables in specific in-school contexts, do they display any sensitivity to the standard. These findings confirm the primacy of the peer group in setting and reinforcing linguistic norms, and raise questions about the efficacy of the school in transmitting the standard.