"The Daily Grunt":The resurgence of the deficit model of language competence in children

It is a long-standing and commonly held belief in the UK and elsewhere that the use of elite forms of language reflects superior intellect and education. Expert opinion from sociolinguistics, however, contends that such a view is the result of middle-class bias and cannot be scientifically justified. In the 1960s and 1970s,such luminaries as Labov (1969) and Trudgill (1975) were at pains to point out to educationalists, with some success, that this 'deficit 'view of working-class children's communicative competence is not a helpful one. However, a close reading of recent think-tank reports and policy papers on language and literacy teaching in schools reveals that the linguistic deficit hypothesis has resurfaced and is likely to influence present-day educational policy and practice. In this paper I examine in detail the findings, claims and recommendations of the reports and I argue that they are biased, poorly researched and reflect the vested interests of certain specialist groups, such as speech and language therapists and companies who sell literacy materials to schools. I further argue that we need to, once again, inject the debate with the social dimensions of educational failure, and we need to move away from the pathologisation of working-class children's language patterns

“We’re not in a club now”: a neo-Brown and Levinson approach to analyzing courtroom data

Discursive approaches to analyzing politeness often eschew Brown and Levinson's theory of politeness as being too dependent on speech act theory and Gricean pragmatics. However, in this analysis of a courtroom interaction I will show how some of the concepts from Brown and Levinson's theory, such as face-threatening behaviour and positive and negative politeness, can provide us with a vocabulary with which to talk about dynamic situated interaction. These are combined with reference to the norms of behaviour in the context of situation, as well as an appreciation of how meaning is defined as negotiated by participants as they interact. In the interaction under question here I show how the meaning of these utterances can be observed in the data themselves by looking at the sequence and take-up of turns at talk and by commenting on the relationship between the form of the utterances and the context in which they are uttered. In this way, some of the most useful concepts from Brown and Levinson are applied to the data from a constructivist perspective

Facework in a pair-programming session

Improved communication is part of the agile solution to the problems we have in developing software. It has been shown that some development practices restricted feedback within teams because empirical studies suggest that a significant portion of the software maintainer's time is required to understand the functionality of the software to be maintained. Muller and Padberg demonstrated that when developers work together as tightly knit pairs this changes as their productivity and feelgood increase. In this paper we report on observations of developers programming as a pair. We see that the management of face is an important factor in attempts to reciver the meaning of code

Journal of Politeness Research: Introduction

This issue marks the 10th year anniversary of the Journal of Politeness Research: Language, behaviour, culture. Ten years ago, founding Editor-in-Chief Christine Christie established the journal as an "international and multidisciplinary forum for research into linguistic and non-linguistic politeness phenomena" (Christie 2005: 1). Under her editorial guidance, the journal published a great number of papers which embodied this founding principle. In 2010, Derek Bousfield and Karen Grainger took over the editorship and in 2013 Karen Grainger became the sole Editor-in-Chief, and the Journal of Politeness Research has grown and matured further under the stewardship of Bousfield and Grainger. Today, with the invaluable contributions of authors and reviewers, and the continuous support of the journal's readership, editorial team and advisory board, the journal remains a flagship for and a pioneer of research into all kinds of politeness phenomena. To celebrate this 10th year anniversary, it is worth reviewing in detail what has been achieved so far, and to take a look at promising future developments of politeness research

Does Money Talk Equate to Class Talk? Audience Responses to Poverty Porn in Relation to Money and Debt

This chapter focuses on transcripts collected for the Benefits Street project at Sheffield Hallam University, which elicited audience responses to clips of poverty porn programming. We conducted four focus groups with members of the public from different social backgrounds across the north and Midlands of England and asked our participants what they thought of the representations of the working class that were shown on screen. Using techniques from corpus linguistics (specifically the use of semantic tagging software) and discourse analysis, we focus here on how our participants used terms associated with money and debt. Our analysis aims to ascertain whether talk of money in relation to benefits claimants actually equates to talk about their social class

Offering and hospitality in Arabic and English

This paper examines the conventional linguistic practices involved in everyday hospitality situations. We compare offers in Arabic and English and, rather than focusing on the differences between the ways interactants in these two cultures make offers, we challenge the notion that offering is in essence differently handled in the two languages. We argue instead that we should focus just as much on the similarities between the ways offers are made, since no two cultural/linguistic groups are diametrically opposed. Furthermore, no cultural or linguistic group can be argued to be homogeneous. Through a detailed analysis of four naturally occurring hospitality encounters, we explore the nature and sequencing of offering and receiving hospitality in each cultural community and discuss the extent to which offers and refusals are conventionalized in each language. In this way we hope to develop a more contextual discursive approach to cross-cultural politeness research. Drawing on Spencer-Oatey's notion of sociality face, we examine the conventions for being hospitable in order to appear sincere. A qualitative analysis of the data reveals that, while there are similarities in offering behaviour in both English and Arabic, in Arabic, the interactional moves of insisting and refusing are slightly more conventionalized. This however does not constitute a radical difference between the offering norms of these two cultural groups

Of babies and bath water: Is there any place for Austin and Grice in interpersonal pragmatics?

This paper discusses a particular strand of interpersonal pragmatics that may be known as ‘discursive’ pragmatics and attempts to delineate what is entailed in such an approach. Some scholars may characterise it as placing emphasis on participant evaluations, others may foreground the analysis of contextualised and sequential texts, while still others consider it to include both of these. In general, though, discursive pragmatics often seems to involve a reaction to, and a contrast with, so-called Gricean intention-based approaches. In this paper I argue that, far from discarding the insights of Grice, Austin and others, a discursive approach to interpersonal pragmatics should embrace those aspects of non-discursive pragmatics that provide us with a ‘tool-kit’ and a vocabulary for examining talk-in-interaction. At the same time, I will argue that the shortcomings of the speaker-based, intention- focused pragmatics can be compensated for, not by privileging hearer evaluations of meaning, but by taking an ethnographic and, to some extent, ethnomethodological approach to the analysis of naturally-occurring discourse data. By providing a critique of Locher and Watts’ (2005) paradigmatic example of a discursive approach to politeness and then a sample analysis of interactional data, I demonstrate how a combination of insights from Gricean pragmatics and from ethnomethodology allows the analyst to comment on the construction and negotiation of meaning in discourse, without having recourse to notions of either intention or evaluation

"The daily grunt": middle class bias and vested interests in the 'Getting in Early' and 'Why Can't They Read?' reports.

It is a long-standing and commonly held belief in the UK and elsewhere that the use of elite forms of language reflects superior intellect and education. Expert opinion from sociolinguistics, however, contends that such a view is the result of middle-class bias and cannot be scientifically justified. In the 1960s and 1970s,such luminaries as Labov (1969) and Trudgill (1975) were at pains to point out to educationalists, with some success, that this 'deficit 'view of working-class children's communicative competence is not a helpful one. However, a close reading of recent think-tank reports and policy papers on language and literacy teaching in schools reveals that the linguistic deficit hypothesis has resurfaced and is likely to influence present-day educational policy and practice. In this paper I examine in detail the findings, claims and recommendations of the reports and I argue that they are biased, poorly researched and reflect the vested interests of certain specialist groups, such as speech and language therapists and companies who sell literacy materials to schools. I further argue that we need to, once again, inject the debate with the social dimensions of educational failure, and we need to move away from the pathologisation of working-class children's language patterns

A Taxonomy and Results from a Comprehensive Review of 28 Maternal Health Voucher Programmes

It is increasingly clear that Millennium Development Goal 4 and 5 will not be achieved in many low- and middle-income countries with the weakest gains among the poor. Recognizing that there are large inequalities in reproductive health outcomes, the post-2015 agenda on universal health coverage will likely generate strategies that target resources where maternal and newborn deaths are the highest. In 2012, the United States Agency for International Development convened an Evidence Summit to review the knowledge and gaps on the utilization of financial incentives to enhance the quality and uptake of maternal healthcare. The goal was to provide donors and governments of the low- and middle-income countries with evidenceinformed recommendations on practice, policy, and strategies regarding the use of financial incentives, including vouchers, to enhance the demand and supply of maternal health services. The findings in this paper are intended to guide governments interested in maternal health voucher programmes with recommendations for sustainable implementation and impact. The Evidence Summit undertook a systematic review of five financing strategies. This paper presents the methods and findings for vouchers, building on a taxonomy to catalogue knowledge about voucher programme design and functionality. More than 120 characteristics under five major categories were identified: programme principles (objectives and financing); governance and management; benefits package and beneficiary targeting; providers (contracting and service pricing); and implementation arrangements (marketing, claims processing, and monitoring and evaluation). Among the 28 identified maternal health voucher programmes, common characteristics included: a stated objective to increase the use of services among the means-tested poor; contracted-out programme management; contracting either exclusively private facilities or a mix of public and private providers; prioritizing community-based distribution of vouchers; and tracking individual claims for performance purposes. Maternal voucher programmes differed on whether contracted providers were given training on clinical or administrative issues; whether some form of service verification was undertaken at facility or communitylevel; and the relative size of programme management costs in the overall programme budget. Evidence suggests voucher programmes can serve populations with national-level impact. Reaching scale depends on whether the voucher programme can: (i) keep management costs low, (ii) induce a large demand-side response among the bottom two quintiles, and (iii) achieve a quality of care that translates a greater number of facility-based deliveries into a reduction in maternal morbidity and mortality