Social Class in Applied Linguistics

David Block

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317974833
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

In this ground breaking new book David Block proposes a new working definition of social class in applied linguistics.

Traditionally, research on language and identity has focused on aspects such as race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, religion and sexuality. Political economy, and social class, as an identity inscription, have been undervalued. This book argues that increasing socioeconomic inequality, which has come with the consolidation of neoliberal policies and practices worldwide, requires changes in how we think about identity and proposes that social class should be brought to the fore as a key construct.

Social Class in Applied Linguistics begins with an in-depth theoretical discussion of social class before considering the extent to which social class has been a key construct in three general areas of applied linguistics- sociolinguistics, bi/multilingualism and second language acquisition and learning research. Throughout the book, Block suggests ways in which social class might be incorporated into future applied linguistics research.

A critical read for postgraduate students and researchers in the areas of applied linguistics, language education and TESOL.

1

SETTING THE SCENE

Introduction: some quotes and a life story

It is acceptable to show up sexism – as it is to show up racism – because to eliminate sexual and racial bias would pose no threat to the existing social order: capitalist society could thrive perfectly well without sexual discrimination and without racial discrimination. But it is not acceptable to show up classism, especially by objective linguistics analysis … because capitalist society could not exist without discrimination between classes. Such work could, ultimately, threaten the order of society.

(Halliday, 1990: 17)

Class matters. Race and gender can be used as screens to deflect attention away from the harsh realities class politics exposes. Clearly, just when we should all be paying attention to class, using race and gender to understand and explain its new dimensions, society, even our government, says let’s talk about race and racial injustice. It is impossible to talk meaningfully about ending racism without talking about class. Let us not be duped.

(hooks, 2000: 7)

Unfortunately, educational discourse on the ‘left’ has been awash in ‘postmodern’ platitudes that sublimate class and valorize uncritical and fetishized notions of ‘difference’ while marginalizing socialist alternatives to the social universe of capital.

(McLaren and Scatamburlo-D’Annibale, 2004: 47)

These are three comments about the lack of class thinking in different domains of society and academia that I have come across in my reading over the past several years. The Michael Halliday quote is taken from his position paper on the present and future of applied linguistics, circa 1990. In this paper, Halliday comments on how social class is missing as a key construct in applied linguistics research on issues ranging from language policy to language teaching. He positions applied linguistics as complicit in the maintenance of the status quo of socioeconomic stratification worldwide because of the lack of attention to economics and ultimately class politics and practice in different societies around the world. Meanwhile, in a book published some 10 years after the appearance of Halliday’s article, bell hooks writes about how, in American society at the end of the twentieth century, there was little or no discussion of inequality in the US in terms of class. A feminist social critic who has written extensively about race and gender in contemporary American society, hooks here criticises how the emphasis on these two key identity inscriptions can make activists complicit in the ongoing exploitation of the working and lower classes of American society, independently of the race and gender of the individuals and collectives concerned. In the third and final quote, critical educationalists Peter McLaren and Valerie Scatamburlo-D’Annibale argue that in educational research, those who position themselves as ‘left’ have abandoned socialist principles in favour of a ‘postmodern’ sensibility, which rightfully focuses on inequality in terms of race and gender, but which seems oblivious to the economic realities and class-based stratification existent in twenty-first-century societies around the world.

This book is, in its foundations, about social class as a construct and my argument throughout will be that it is a construct which is highly useful to those who wish to make sense of the social realities of twenty-first-century societies, and especially for those who wish to do so within the general realm of applied linguistics. In making this point, I will take a critical realist position, which I outline later in this chapter, a position aligning me with Helen Meskins Wood, who writes that ‘[t]he absence of explicit class “discourses” does not betoken the absence of class realities and their effects in shaping the life-conditions and consciousness of the people who come within their field of force’ (Wood, 1998: 97). As hooks writes, ‘class matters’, and those who wish to comment on and act against inequality in contemporary societies would do well to embrace this reality. Nevertheless, it has not always been thus, that is, I have not always thought about society or even my own life in class terms. Indeed, growing up in the southeast Texas city of Houston in the 1960s, I do not recall ever being exposed to the notion of social class in an explicit manner, neither do I recall ever hearing anyone say that people should talk more about social class, as Halliday, hooks and McLaren and Scatamburlo-D’Annibale have suggested. In this sense, I suppose my upbringing was not unlike that of many white middle class Americans in the post-World War 2 era. As they moved into the 1960s, white middle class Americans were relatively optimistic about the future and if they did take note of inequality in the US, they tended to put it down to the deficiencies in the character of those who had not been successful.

However, as the decade unfolded white Americans of a more liberal mindset, like my parents, also showed an awareness of the serious racial divide in America between African Americans and whites. I recall how as I grew up during the 1960s (I was four when the decade began and 14 when it ended), the civil rights movement dominated the media and had an effect on my emergent views about right and wrong, and politics in general. And like so many Americans then (and to this day), I tended to see issues of inequality and difference exclusively in terms of race and ethnicity (gender would be added as an important site of inequality and difference as the decade progressed). Social class, as a way of understanding how people lived, was seldom if ever invoked as social class, and it tended to appear indirectly in expressions like ‘people like us’ and ‘people like that’ rather than through the kind of indicators I shall discuss in detail in Chapter 2 of this book.

The middle class neighbourhood in which I lived from the age of seven was a small development of about 120 homes, nestled between one of Houston’s ubiquitous bayous and the University of Houston campus, just south of downtown Houston. It was located relatively far from schools, which meant that my educational options could go in any of three directions. For elementary school, I was sent south of where I lived. At the time, I probably took for granted that everyone in the school was white, and I did not notice that some of my classmates were, like me, from middle class families and others, those who lived in the area immediately surrounding the school, were working class. I also did not notice that a good proportion of the middle class children were, unlike me, Jewish. This may have been because I was raised in a conscientiously agnostic household in which religion was seldom discussed. During my elementary school years, class differences were constantly right in front of my eyes, for example in the streaming of students (middle class kids tended to dominate the top set) and above all, in the different ways that we lived our lives away from school.

As regards the last point, I recall that when one Saturday I went to visit a classmate, I noticed that his house was much smaller than the one I lived in, that it was far more spartanly furnished than the one I lived in and that the food offered to me at lunchtime, while abundant, was of a lower quality (e.g. beef with a great deal of fat on it) than that which I normally ate in my house. I noticed that these people spoke an English that would have been corrected in my house (e.g. frequent use of ain’t and double modals) and, above all, that there was racist language about African American people, which would not have been allowed by my liberal parents. The boy’s father worked in construction and when I met him, I noticed how he was physically much more imposing than my own father and how he wore blue jeans and a white t-shirt, not the normal work attire of the public relations officer of a university.

On another occasion, I visited another classmate’s home, this time for the birthday party of a girl who lived in an upper middle class area located about a mile from the school. This area was, at the time, where a good proportion of Houston’s Jewish community lived because their entry into certain affluent areas in the western part of the city was limited by the systemic anti-Semitism of that time. I recall noticing during my visit that my classmate’s home was far larger than the one in which I lived, that the furnishings seemed far more ornate and that both parents were well dressed and spoke in a very educated manner. As in the first case, I was, without realising it at the time, once again in contact with subtle social class markers, such as education, housing, food, dress, language and so on. I certainly noticed these differences, which explains why I can remember them to this day; however, I had no clear way to understand them as ‘socioeconomic stratification’ or even ‘social class’.

In coming years, ‘white flight’ came into my life. In its earliest usage, ‘white flight’ was a term used to describe the large-scale migration taking place in the 1950s and 1960s of white Americans (Americans of European ancestry) from inner city neighbourhoods experiencing an influx of African American residents, to racially homogeneous (white) suburban neighbourhoods, away from the inner city.¹ It occurred rapidly in South Houston in the 1960s as a huge section of the city changed demographically from being predominately white to being predominately African American. In my elementary school, the middle class white children (including the majority of the more upper middle class Jewish children) began to disappear, although I do not recall being aware at the time that it was primarily the middle class children or wealthier Jewish children who were leaving the school. In autumn 1967 I began the sixth grade, my last year of elementary school. By this time my class was roughly 50 per cent African American and 50 per cent white, and my teacher was African American. And the vast majority of both the African American children and the white children now lived in the area immediately surrounding the school and were from families with parents holding blue collar jobs. This was confirmed very clearly when I spent a day with one of my African American classmates. I had a very similar experience to the one with my white classmate several years earlier in that the house, the family environment, the food and the language spoken (except for the racist language, which in this case was absent) were all very similar, and it should be added, different from what I would have experienced at home. However, given thinking in vogue at the time (1967), I probably attributed these differences to race and not social class.

Junior high school, composed of three grades for children 12–15 years of age, meant going to a new school. It also meant that I was in another type of classed environment, but again without a means of understanding my life in terms of social class. The school was located in a traditional southeast Houston working class neighbourhood where there were good number children from Irish, Italian and other European backgrounds mixed with a rapidly growing Latino population from Mexico. Here I became conscious of the clearly articulated manifestations of tough working class masculinities, which were more often than not about ways of dress, walking and talking and activities like smoking cigarettes, all in combination with a general lack of interest in school activities. At times, these masculinities led to confrontations between groups and during my time at the school, I witnessed several fights involving ‘Irish’ and ‘Mexican’ boys (as they would have been labelled at the time). However, I was not generally in direct contact with such goings on as the school’s streaming policy meant that I was placed in classes with students who were more academically oriented (although unlike my elementary school, this school had a very low proportion of middle class students).

The third stage of my schooling took place in two schools, one attended in 10th and 12th grade, in which I was a member of a miniscule white minority (when I graduated in 1974, I was one of five white students among a student body of some 2,000 African American students), and the other, which I attended in the 11th grade, the Houston High School of the Performing and Visual Arts, where the racial and ethnic makeup of the students body was proportional to the demographics of Houston at the time. The latter was far more of a middle class school than any other that I had attended, while the predominantly African American school was similar in some ways to my junior high school in that there were very few middle class children and I was streamed into classes with other academically oriented students, which, in this case, meant just about all of the middle class students who attended the school. It was quite clear that my classmates were members of what amounted to a separate community within the school when it came to their dedication to their studies and their participation in extracurricular activities (e.g. cheerleading, academic clubs, the school newspaper). Most of them had parents working in the professions and at home there was the expectation that they would attend a good university on finishing high school.

Meanwhile, the vast majority of students in the school were from working class households struggling to retain this class position or from poorer households in which a single parent (usually a mother) was often unemployed and received some form of assistance from the government. Here once again I encountered working class toughness in all of its manifestations and there was often a violent tension just under the surface as ongoing school events unfolded. And although I was a marginalised from most of this tension by virtue of my skin colour and my attendance in high stream classes, I was on occasion reminded of the precariousness of the life conditions of a good number of my schoolmates. For example, I witnessed a fair number of fights among students (boys and girls) during breaks or after school. And on other occasions, I would hear about shocking events taking place away from school, such as the time I learned that one of my classmates in Homeroom² would no longer be coming to school because the previous evening he had been shot and killed while attempting to rob a convenience store.³

Throughout these school years, I was also experiencing social class in my immediate friendship and family circles. My neighbourhood-based friends were all white males from similar middle class backgrounds and as we moved into adolescence we had a fair few things in common, even if we all went to different high schools. During these years, drug use and musical tastes converged and we all were big fans of various strands of British rock music. Confirming the notion that identity is as much about disaffiliation as it is about affiliation and that one often engages in the ‘practice of defining one’s identity through a contrast with a stigmatised other’ (Sayer, 2005: 54), my friends and I distinguished ourselves clearly from white working class culture which in many parts of the city was associated with country music (which we all despised), cowboy-style dress (a sartorial abomination for us), short hair (at a time when our long hair indexed ‘coolness’) and reactionary (i.e. which we would have called ‘redneck’⁴) lifestyles (which we rejected outright).⁵ Other friends I made through my school attendance, primarily African American males, were not interested in British rock music, but they did affiliate to other aspects of my lifestyle, such as smoking marijuana, playing basketball and an identification with inner city life, including African American culture. And they certainly shared my wholesale rejection of country music, cowboy-style dress and redneck culture, all associated with the white working class (and indeed, whites of all class positions). However, it should be noted that their social class position, which was generally middle class or upper working class (e.g. my best friend’s ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of tables
• Prologue
• 1 Setting the scene
• 2 What is social class?
• 3 Social class in sociolinguistics
• 4 Social class in bi/multilingualism research
• 5 Social class in second language acquisition and learning
• Epilogue
• Appendix 1: Goldthorpe’s class categories
• Appendix 2: NS-SEC analytic classes, operational categories and subcategories 2010
• Appendix 3: Transcription conventions
• References
• Index