This study addresses how bilingual students and instructors construct and negotiate discourses about language and language-related social positions through different kinds language use in and outside the heritage language (HL) classroom. The project focuses on one group of students who took an entry-level Spanish HL course in 2010. Data include ethnographic observations and video recordings of class sessions throughout the semester, filmed interviews with the students and the instructor, observations and recordings of students’ language use in social contexts outside of class, course materials, and writings produced by the students for the class. The study takes the perspective that identities and ideologies are dynamic and embodied within the repeated, purposeful types of interaction in which people engage in their daily lives, and can be constructed, contested and negotiated using a variety of meaning-making resources (Bucholtz and Hall 2004b, Young 2009). The analysis takes an ethnographic approach (Blommaert 2005) and draws from the linguistic anthropological notion of language ideologies (Kroskrity 2004), a sociolinguistic approach to stance (Jaffe 2009b), and narrative analysis (De Fina 2003). The study data show that when orienting toward the pedagogical objective of acquiring grammar and vocabulary, the students and the instructor represent institutional ideologies, such as the notion of a superior ‘standard’ variety of Spanish, and construct relations of authority with respect to these discourses through resources such as repair and epistemic stance. The instructor displays a complex set of stances in the classroom, mediating between an authoritative role associated with her institutional position on the one hand and a stance of alignment with the students on the other. Reflecting the instructors’ stancetaking, the students negotiate their orientation to the institutional context on a moment-to-moment basis in classroom interaction. They ascribe expert and novice roles to each other through resources such as repair, but they do not always claim the roles ascribed to them by their co-participants. Although the expert/novice stances displayed by the students reflect an ideal monolingual identity ascribed by the instructor and an over-simplified view of language characteristic of traditional language instruction, the students challenge these institutional discourses through linguistic performance and the reframing of other voices. In other moments of interaction, the students and the instructor orient toward the goal of alignment, reflecting discursive practices from outside of the classroom, and institutional ideologies appear to be less relevant. When interacting with Spanish-speaking family members and co-workers outside of the classroom, the students use language in creative ways to construct identities that conflict with the monolingual identity ascribed within the institution. However, while they demonstrate competence in constructing these identities in contexts that are familiar to them, some students express concerns about how others will perceive them when they use language in less familiar contexts. Many of the students view the HL courses as an important stepping-stone toward full participation in Spanish-speaking communities outside of their hometowns and immediate families. The conclusions discuss a disconnect between pedagogical practices and the discursive practices in which the students participate in their daily lives and hope to participate in the future, and end with a proposal for HL teaching that addresses these differences. / text

In this dissertation, I investigated the top-down implementation process of a dual language bilingual education (DLBE) program in over 60 schools in a large urban school district in Texas to identify language ideologies and issues of language policy and policy implementation according to local participating educators. Drawing on a language policy framework and research in linguistic anthropology to define language ideologies, I employed a multi-method approach (survey (n=323 educators), interview (n=20 DLBE teachers) and observation (n=3 DLBE teachers)) to measure and better understand language ideology and its significance for local language policy. Analysis revealed ideological tension and multiplicity, within and across educators, within single statements and overtime. For example, during interviews most teachers expressed additive views towards bilingualism, but subtractive views towards non-standard variations of each language. Similarly, several teachers articulated additive ideologies towards bilingualism while articulating the relative greater importance of English language acquisition. These ideological tensions operated in distinct ways at the classroom level. One teacher strictly followed the DLBE policy in her classroom to support bilingual/biliteracy development, but she also discouraged certain students and families from participating in the program because of their non-standard language practices. This dissertation complicates traditional understandings of the role of language ideologies within language policy implementation. Much research in our field discusses bilingual programs and program implementation in dichotomous terms (i.e. subtractive/additive). In contrast, I demonstrate how the multiplicity and complexity of language ideologies must be considered when trying to discuss the ideological struggle involved in implementing pluralist bilingual programs within an English dominant society. I present four potential models to conceptualize and analyze ideological tension as well as a discussion on the relationship between language ideologies and local language policy. Implications for teacher education, DLBE policy and future research are considered. / text

Culture integrates more than ideology and tradition. These cultural elements are supplementary factors that unite under certain conditions to assist in the development and understanding of what is right, wrong and/or expected within a group. Ideology specifically has been found to influence and construct societal norms, and play a vital role in the conscious and subconscious interactions of individuals. These ideologies (superficial and non-superficial) have implications for the interpersonal interactions between individuals within and between the same cultural groups, as well as implications for organizational and professional development within academic and professional settings. This study will examine culture and ideology through an investigation of environment and its relationship to ethnic identity development. In addition, the study will investigate the possible relationship between ethnic identity and perceptions of credibility. Findings suggest that culturally related materials in an academic setting are not related to strength of ethnic identification with regard to ethnic identity- behavior; yet ethnic identity- achievement may be slightly related to school environment. Further, ethnic identity and school environment are not influential in the perception on credibility of people of divergent skin-tones. The research explores practical and theoretical implications, discusses the limitations of evaluating skin-tone of African Americans, and suggests proposals for future research. / text

Nicaragua has undergone several major upheavals in the last three decades that have fundamentally shaped and reshaped society. The Sandinista government (1979-1990) ended with the election of Violeta Chamorro in 1990 that ushered in 16 years of neoliberal government. In 2006 former president and leader of the current Sandinista Party, Daniel Ortega, was reelected to the presidency. At every step, education has been an essential component of the struggle to shape the state according to certain ideological precepts. Each administration has produced its own educational reforms that are ostensibly in the name of improving quality, but more precisely about developing schools consistent with the philosophy of the ruling classes. In this study, I seek to examine the Nicaraguan educational system as a site of multiple global and local processes that interact to produce lived experiences for teachers and students in and out of the classroom. In examining the most recent iteration of educational reforms and their effects in the communities of San Marcos, Estelí and Bluefields, I ask the questions: What role or function does education play in society? How does it “work” to (in most cases) normalize certain values, ideas and beliefs? And what forms do resistance and acquiescence to these processes take in an educational system like that of Nicaragua that has numerous internal and external forces attempting to condition it in contrasting ways? Major themes that emerge from the research include the prominence of social, historical and geographical factors that people use to fashion their language and perceptions of the world and the dominant influence of local power relations in conditioning people’s behaviors and actions. Analysis of responses to the current educational reform efforts demonstrates that local social connections and networks are paramount to studies of ideology and hegemony. The overriding message from Nicaragua is that chronic underfunding and constant reform have weakened the ability of the educational system to disseminate ideas, beliefs and values, particularly when they run counter to those of other powerful institutions in society. / text

Cupisnique culture was first identified by Rafael Larco Hoyle in the 1930s through his encounter with an early ceramic style in the Cupisnique Quebrada on the north coast of Peru. Since that time, the ceramic styles, region and time period to which the term ‘Cupisnique’ pertains have remained loosely defined, associated with northern Peru and the Middle Formative Period (1200-900 BCE). The interpretation of Cupisnique culture has further relied on research at the highland site of Chavín de Huántar and a presumed Chavín style horizon. Cupisnique visual materials, however, provide a rich corpus from which to advance analysis of this cultural tradition. In this dissertation, I group the chapters into two parts – background information and substantive material analyses. In Part I, I begin with a concise history of Cupisnique studies, which review permits to establish the objectives and methodology of the investigation. The latter includes archaeological and visual approaches to Cupisnique culture, as well as the geographic, environmental and ecological conditions pertinent to northern Peru. In Part II, I present the results of archaeological fieldwork at the Cumbemayo Canal, near the city of Cajamarca, Peru. Based on the field research, I examine the impact of coastal Cupisnique culture into this north highland region, and I discuss the symbolic role of monumental water management and the creation of a ritualized landscape. The intricate design of the Cumbemayo Canal segues conceptually to the exploration of a larger visual system. Based on a defined corpus of ‘Classic’ Cupisnique stirrup spout bottles, I venture a comprehensive examination of prominent themes, motifs and scenes in Cupisnique iconography. I argue that the latter comprises a reticular visual program that serves to instantiate a complex and developing ideological system. Given the common visual motifs, the tenets of this ideology consist in concepts of capture, sacrifice and fertility, interwoven through a structure of symbolic dualities. In the conclusion, I demonstrate how this proposed Cupisnique ideology conceptually fits with the development of social complexity in northern Peru through and following the Formative Period in the Andes. / text

This dissertation explores verbal interactions in mock trial competitions at a US law school, in order to explore the ways that law students are taught the proper ways of speaking like advocates in adversarial speech settings. Learning to prevail in adversarial settings entails the use of conversational linguistic features whose primary function is pragmatic rather than referential. The proper use of these pragmatic markers enables lawyers to achieve desired effects in legal interaction and impression management, while maintaining intact the denotational content of their utterances. This dissertation examines in depth the feedback-mediated practices through which law students learn to use three prominent pragmatic markers in mock trials: tag questions, the declarative falling intonation, and using reported speech to cite legal authority. The metapragmatic discourses that constitute these practices socialize law students to use pragmatic markers in light of their ability to sway institutional decision-makers to favor their interpretation of the facts. The dissertation argues that these metapragmatic discourses articulate an institutional technology for the management of competing claims to propositional truth. How they justify the use of these pragmatic markers reveals, furthermore, that these technologies of truth are dialogic. Pragmatic markers allow legal advocates to project social voicing contrasts in adversarial settings, allowing them to associate the utterances of their courtroom rivals with the voice of dubious social characters, reducing the propositional value of their claims to truth. An analysis of metapragmatic discourses thus reveals the dialogic dimensions of the language of the law that relate language, agency, and power in the verbal constructions of institutional knowledge. It clarifies the ways that law students, as legal advocates, learn to incorporate broadly circulating ideologies of linguistic differentiation in their legal discourse.

This dissertation research examines the political significance of plazas in ancient Maya society from the Late Preclassic period through the Terminal Classic period (ca. 150 B.C.- A.D. 900). I consider plazas not as by-products of temples and palaces, but as political arenas in which different social actors created and transformed social realities and values. My primary question is how power relations and ideologies emerge from people's practices and their engagements with materiality--more specifically, the construction of plazas and ritual performances. I address this question through the combination of various methods including the following: spatial analyses based on GIS, extensive excavations, epigraphic studies, and material analyses through petrographic microscopy and particle-induced X-ray emission (PIXE). Using these methods, I conducted archaeological research at El Palmar, a Maya polity located in southeastern Campeche of Mexico. During the 2007-2014 field seasons, I investigated eleven plazas in total with eight located in the urban core and three in its outlying areas. The results from the urban core suggest that the power relations at El Palmar changed through time. Such changes are reflected in the designs of both public and exclusive plazas and associated ritual events. The results in the north outlying plaza, where a hieroglyphic stairway was built around A.D.726, further suggest that a group of officials negotiated their status and power with rulers. The protagonist of the event was not an El Palmar ruler but an official who emphasized diplomatic relations with foreign rulers, giving the El Palmar ruler only scant reference. Considering inter-regional contexts, however, they were not only engaged in internal power struggles, but also cooperated to negotiate with foreign dynasties. This complex mechanism of power was closely tied to the remodeling of the plaza and ideological symbolism materialized by mortuary practice, fire rituals, and termination rituals. My dissertation concludes that ritual performances in outlying plazas were not merely a reflection of royal ideology promoted by rulers but could have introduced new power and ideological relations in the community, relations that would be difficult to identify solely through the analysis of the main plaza.

This dissertation tracks the social circulation of media scripts and collaborative meaning-making in urban Moroccan and Lebanese families' domestic conversations as ways in which the social imaginary of a differentiated pan-Arab audience imaginary is performed. Media scripts refer to television input or information circulated through entextualization processes, embedded direct and indirect quotations framed by a particular discussion, in household dialogues. They include stories, statistics, historical dates, anecdotal observations, music tunes, quotes, iconic units of language varieties and their attendant identities that Moroccan and Lebanese families managed in interpretive discussions. Scripts are easily detached and mobile sound bites that serve on an affective level as possible identity performances. I argue that Fassi Moroccan and Beiruti families are interpretive communities created and who participate in creating a culture of circulation, which is not just about the objects moving through a culture, but the means, methods, and mechanisms of transmission and interpretation built around and negotiated by the members of that community (Lee and LiPuma 2002). Collaborative in this dissertation draws on the Bakhtinian concept that all interaction involves interlocutors, whether present or not, and a set of interpretive conditions affecting meaning (Bakhtin and Holquist 1982:424). Although the social imaginary of an Arab audience is perceived as unitary enough to merit regional satellite programming, the performances of Moroccan and Lebanese families illuminate the differentiated and fractured construction of a pan-Arab cultural project. Through domestic media ethnography of pan-Arab and national entertainment, talk shows, and news programming reception, I explore functional literacies tied to intervisual cues and the management of intergenerational authority; a pan-Arab language ideology that includes performances of multilingualism and shifting identity alignments linked to specific features of linguistic varieties encountered via television; and the link between language, gender, and confessionalism in morality evaluations of gendered media representations. I focus on the everyday domestic contexts, linguistic mechanisms, and discursive frameworks activated by Moroccan and Lebanese families in media engagements.

This dissertation is an investigation of the use, change, and status of the distinctive local dialect in rural Valdres, Norway. The Norwegian sociolinguistic situation has long been recognized as complicated by a protracted history of language planning and standardization, in which two competing written norms of Norwegian, called Bokmål and Nynorsk, are symbolically and ideologically associated with urban and rural identities, respectively. In addition, while Norwegians can choose from two written norms, no recognized standard exists for spoken Norwegian, and citizens are officially encouraged to use their native, local dialects. The present study approaches this situation through a case study of language use in Valdres today.In the summer of 2005, the distinctive dialect of the rural Valdres valley was voted "Norway's most popular dialect" on one of the country's most listened-to national radio programs, an event that both reflects and has contributed to a recent revaluation of the local dialect. Yet the results of previous dialectological research in Valdres have clearly pointed to long-term convergence toward what locals call "city language" -- the speech of nearby urban Oslo. While evidence of this decades-long trend is not contradicted by the findings of this dissertation research, the present study suggests that there may be more than one direction of dialect change in Valdres today. Despite ongoing changes in dialect morpho-lexis and phonology in the direction of urban regional speech, there is also a large number of relatively resistant dialect features in contemporary Valdresmål, and, even more importantly, evidence of a re-expansion of the dialect among younger speakers, which appears to align with forms found in written Nynorsk, the alternative "rural" norm. The simultaneous sociolinguistic trends of dialect convergence, non-convergence, and divergence in the contemporary Valdres dialect vis-a-vis urban regional norms thus provide an interesting and complicated case of language variation and change.This dissertation combines methods from linguistic and cultural anthropology, ethnographic sociolinguistics, and acoustic phonetics to provide an illuminating analysis of the local relationships between standard and non-standard varieties, between written and spoken forms, and between contemporary language use and historically-rooted language ideologies.

The purpose of this qualitative, ethnographic case study was to learn the nature of the discursive practices of English learners in playground peer cultures. Additionally, it sought to understand the relationship between these practices and ideology, gender, and school performance. Three questions guided this study: (1) what is the nature of the actual discursive practices of English learners in peer culture, playground interactions? (2) how do gender and ideology play a role in children's games? and (3) what is the relationship between these discursive practices and school performance?This inquiry was conducted over ten months at a school in Northern California where four English learner second graders were observed playing each day during their lunchtime recess. Data sources included audio and video taped observations and field notes, audio taped interviews, and artifact collection. Data analysis was ongoing, characterized by member-checking, peer review, and multiple codings.The findings of this study reflected the dynamic, sophisticated nature of discursive practices which were co-constructed in peer culture settings. These practices included the exploration and explanation of new games, uses of imitative and counter-imitative behaviors, performed rule talk, integrated displays of gesture, pitch and silences, and code-switching strategies. Students employed these for a variety of purposes, including the facilitation of alignment within groups, the manipulation of social organization, the orchestration of inclusion or exclusion, and the creation of positions of power.This research also proposed a working model within which the playground became a site for the interpretive reproduction of ideologies. Students at Westside demonstrated that they had appropriated adult ideologies in creative ways. They negotiated these in their peer cultures, and preserved and transformed adult culture.Finally, this study revealed that, based on the discursive practices observed on the playground, proficiency levels and instructional goals, as determined by the California English Language Development Test (CELDT) and the state English Language Development (ELD) standards were inaccurate and underestimated student ability. Policy reform reflecting greater awareness, both of the social nature of discourse, as well as the power of peer cultures, was recommended.