Applicants for U.S. citizenship must pass the naturalization test on U.S. history, government structure, constitutional principles, and basic English skills. Although no formal preparation for the exam is required, many immigrants, especially those with limited English proficiency, avail themselves of citizenship classes offered by community adult schools. Citizenship curricula at such schools, however, rarely have room for extensive English as a second language instruction, and teachers frequently resort to linguistic and discursive adjustments to make the course content on civics accessible to their students. This paper investigates one such adjustment—namely, narratives used to make abstract constitutional principles more concrete and relevant to the students' lives. Based on the analysis of narratives selected from 28 hours of videotaped classroom interaction, I argue that, in addition to serving as explanatory devices, narratives also reproduce a dominant U.S. ideology of individualism. They contribute to the construction of the U.S. as a nation where the rights of individuals are supreme and where individuals are seen as primary agents of historic change. Because these views are not culturally universal, teachers need to be aware of their own ideological positions and their possible effect on the students' understanding and acceptance of the course material.
This paper explores how speakers use direct reported speech (DRS) and indirect reported speech (IDRS) in conversational narratives to establish the importance of particular story characters to the plot and to display the interactional goal of the story. When the story is designed as being about a particular person, the speaker uses DRS to depict the character's behavior and qualities, thus marking the centrality of the character to the plot. When the story is designed as being about a non-human phenomenon (e.g., the quality of health care, the noise in the neighborhood, etc.), the narrator may use IDRS to mark characters as secondary or even tangential to the plot. By manipulating the grammatical resources of reporting someone else's talk, storytellers can also manipulate the centrality of the story characters to the interactional point of the narrative, or the story's "aboutness."
Issues in Applied Linguistics
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