Teaching in Two Languages: Plural Identities and Classroom Practice

by Alexandra Jaffe

Teaching in Two Languages is an ethnographic study of linguistic and social practices in a bilingual Corsican school. Drawing on traditions of research in linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistic studies of classroom discourse and power, the emphasis of this book is on the way the interactional order of the classroom engages with the wider social, political and sociolinguistic context. Alexandra Jaffe does not take 'bilingualism' to be a self-evident category or goal, but rather, looks at the way that school practices embody and promote particular images of what it means to be a bilingual person or society. Teaching in Two Languages is also centrally concerned with processes of social and linguistic change, and how the introduction of a minority language like Corsican into the school constitutes and potentially reconfigures social and linguistic identities and relationships. Both an landmark ethnography and a major contribution to theory, this book is essential reading for all those wanting to keep up to date with advances in bilingualism, multilingualism and sociolinguistics.

192 pages, Paperback

First published February 10, 2013