Language, literacy, and uses of identity.

Abstract

This sociolinguistic research project examines the language and literacy identities of four African-American women across three generations of one family. I integrated research in language, literacy, and educational psychology to investigate the following question: What are the language and literacy identities of my participants? To answer this question, I focused on four variables: (1) Literacy (e.g., reading and writing skills); (2) identity (e.g., language beliefs and goals); (3) speaker (e.g., education and age); and (4) linguistic (i.e., 22 salient morphological, phonological, and syntactic features of African-American English). I used qualitative (e.g., participant observation) and quantitative (e.g., questionnaires) research methods to synthesize and triangulate the data from speech samples in various contexts, literacy samples, information on goals, beliefs about language and literacy, and interviews. I centered my analyses on: (1) a Language and Literacy Identity model I am developing; (2) three rhetorical ideologies I synthesized from the literature on literacy and standard English; and (3) linguistic data from speech samples in informal (i.e., kitchen talk) and formal (i.e., interview talk) contexts. I found that the sociocultural and historical contexts of the participants helped define their language and literacy identity. Also, the various entities within their sociocultural and historical contexts (e.g., family, community, and work) were integrated with the goals and possible selves that emerged within them. As a group, their language significantly differed between the kitchen talk and interview talk contexts for all three linguistic categories. Moreover, internal variation within the AAE the participants spoke and beliefs about correct and incorrect speech grounded in the ideological perspectives I outline were points of contention for some of the participants. Overall, I share the stories of four African-American women expressed in their own language through extensive use of narratives. I examine their ideological perspectives about language and literacy including the ontology of those ideologies. I also provide a view of how our experiences and cultures shape our views of ourselves and our world.