Talking To Teachers About Social Dialects

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/98321/1/j.1467-1770.1971.tb00061.x.pd

The Several Logics of Quantification

Proceedings of the Eleventh Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1985), pp. 175-19

Labov in sociolinguistics: An introduction

This theme issue marks fifty years since the publication of William Labov's Social Stratification of English in New York City, the foundation study of variationist sociolinguistics. This Introduction offers the editors' rationale for the shape of the issue. We briefly survey the innovations and impact of the New York study, together with the subsequent development of the field by Labov and others. We then touch on several strands of Labov's contribution to sociolinguistics: language change, linguistic evaluation, methodological innovation, African American English, language and the individual, and language style. We conclude with a reflection on Labov's commitment to the study of language in society

Social Salience and the Sociolinguistic Monitor: A Case Study of ING and TH-fronting in Britain

This article examines the role of social salience, or the relative ability of a linguistic variable to evoke social meaning, in structuring listeners’ perceptions of quantitative sociolinguistic distributions. Building on the foundational work of Labov et al. (2006, 2011) on the “sociolinguistic monitor” (a proposed cognitive mechanism responsible for sociolinguistic perception), we examine whether listeners’ evaluative judgments of speech change as a function of the type of variable presented. We consider two variables in British English, ING and TH-fronting, which we argue differ in their relative social salience. Replicating the design of Labov et al.’s studies, we test 149 British listeners’ reactions to different quantitative distributions of these variables. Our experiments elicit a very different pattern of perceptual responses than those reported previously. In particular, our results suggest that a variable’s social salience determines both whether and how it is perceptually evaluated. We argue that this finding is crucial for understanding how sociolinguistic information is cognitively processed

Teaching Hispanic restaurant workers: Translanguaging as culturally sustaining pedagogy

In this article, we make a case for incorporating translanguaging pedagogy into the framework of Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy (CSP). Drawing on data from a one-year ethnographic study of an adult ESL program, we show how teachers believed in and attempted to create spaces for translanguaging and CSP, but in practice fell short. We conclude that translanguaging is most powerful when understood as a component of CSP but call for more research in this area.Accepted manuscrip