Patterns of sociolinguistic variation in teacher classroom speech

Abstract

This study investigates sociolinguistic variation in teacher classroom speech. Based on a spoken‐French corpus produced by 59 teachers while teaching secondary school students (aged approximately 14–17 years) in four Ontario localities, it examines five cases of variant alternations. First, the study uses two comparative corpora to establish the social marking of the variants in the wider community. Second, it examines the teachers’ repertoire and frequency of use of variants in light of their social markedness. The study shows that the teachers use the standard variants at rates above even those found in the speech of the highest social strata within the wider community. Despite this normalizing impact of the classroom, the teachers also use all the non‐standard variants found in the wider community. Further, the study examines the impact on the teachers’ variant choice exerted by their socio‐professional characteristics and the communicative functions they perform in the classroom. It shows that the teachers’ use of variants is influenced by their gender, the subject taught, and the communicative functions performed in the classroom in ways that are in line with the social markedness of the variants in the wider community.

Style in a school community—“Ne” deletion in French preschool

“…The four teachers studied (who were recorded for a total of 14 h, producing 1768 negation contexts) selected more standard variants in child-directed speech than in adult-directed speech, and this was true for both variables examined: the negative particle ne and the use of tu before a vowel. As in Mougeon and Rehner (2019), this higher selection of standard variants in professional speech compared with everyday spoken French did not prevent the speakers from using ordinary, albeit monitored, French, with an overwhelming presence of nonstandard variants in their discourse. This research also concluded that inter-teacher variability was high and that teachers' stylistic adaptation in child-directed speech was particularly prevalent in utterances expressing reprimands and prohibitions (Buson & Nardy, 2020).…”

“…This is a context where several adults from varied social backgrounds and with different levels of education work and interact together on a daily basis, and where many children experience their first extended socialization and are exposed to permanent, prevalent variation, depending on who is speaking to them and in what situation. We saw in the previous section that school French is intended to be more formal than ordinary French and that teachers tend to monitor their speech with pupils (Bigot & Maillard, 2014;Buson & Nardy, 2020;Mougeon & Rehner, 2015, 2019. For this reason, our first hypothesis is that the teachers and classroom assistants in our corpus will use a more monitored style and therefore produce more ne in their child-directed speech than in their adult-directed speech.…”

“…The rate of bipartite negation reaches 16.4% in that context, decreasing to approximately 5% in more personal and interactive speech, such as interaction with individual students. The authors note, however, that overall the teachers’ speech follows the same patterns of variation as their wider linguistic community (with, e.g., a gender effect and an socioeconomic status (SES) effect) (Mougeon & Rehner, 2019). The school context therefore seems to have a normalizing impact on speech, even though the teachers do also, at the same time, use all the nonstandard variants attested in the wider community.…”

“…We saw in the previous section that school French is intended to be more formal than ordinary French and that teachers tend to monitor their speech with pupils (Bigot & Maillard, 2014; Buson & Nardy, 2020; Mougeon & Rehner, 2015, 2019). For this reason, our first hypothesis is that the teachers and classroom assistants in our corpus will use a more monitored style and therefore produce more ne in their child‐directed speech than in their adult‐directed speech.…”

Research on the cultivation and evaluation system of effective teaching ability of college teachers’ classrooms based on artificial intelligence algorithm

“…Facing the increasingly competitive environment, the competition for survival of colleges and universities will also become more and more intense [7]. For schools to survive and teachers to stand on the podium, they must strive to improve the teaching level and teaching quality of schools and strive to improve the business level of teachers [8]. There should be a sense of crisis, urgency, and responsibility to update educational thinking, master the laws of education, study teaching reform, and improve teaching.…”