Discourse and Social Class

[John Clark]

Bruce,

Enclosed is an abstract of my work apropos your query. If you're
interested in more, let me know.  John

John Taggart Clark
clarkjt at gusun.georgetown.edu
301-571-8971

"CAN ANYONE SAY WHAT IS REASONABLE?":
PROMOTING, ACCOMMODATING TO, AND RESISTING ELITE RHETORICAL INQUIRY
IN A HIGH-SCHOOL CLASSROOM.

John Taggart Clark, Georgetown University

ABSTRACT

This study presents a microethnographic linguistic analysis of how
working-class African American high school students resist and accommodate
to the efforts of a teacher to apprentice these students into using
elite-aspiring rhetorical inquiry. The study: 1) describes two distinct
inquiry styles used in the class, and proposes that the two styles are
representative of larger social differences in rhetorical discourse; 2)
analyzes how the social actors utilize these differences in discourse
style to communicate class and ethnic alignments in face-to-face
interaction.

The teacher, an African American law student, promoted an inquiry style
that privileges the exchange of abstract, speculative, and vicarious
information in which rhetors assume an objective stance in discussing
situations in which concrete people are either absent or abstracted. The
students, on the other hand, sought to conduct inquiry based on real
world, concrete, empirically demonstrated and personally experienced
instances of human behavior related, preferably, in anecdotal form. The
study shows how the local social actors' teaching practices,
accommodations and resistances construct: the teacher's
abstract/speculative inquiry style as outgroup ("White") and
elite-aspiring; the students' concrete/empirical style as authentically
African-American; and the teaching and learning of the
abstract/speculative style as a hegemonic social process.

The significance of this study is threefold. First, it supports and
expands earlier descriptive studies of ethnicity and class-based
persuasive discourse. Second, it provides a linguistic and
microethnographic focus to the macroethnographic notion of resistance,
showing how social structures are instantiated and creatively reproduced
in face-to-face interaction. Finally, the study supports and expands
findings that suggest that, for speakers of the African American
Vernacular, not learning elite-aspiring ways with words has much to do
with students deliberately refusing to embrace a way of talking that puts
one's own standing as an authentic African American into question.