Labov & Responsible Scholarship
This 1979 trial centered on language after economic and cultural barriers were ruled irrelevant.
What is the Ann Arbor / King School case?
Viewing a dialect feature as a direct sign of a speaker's innate intelligence.
What is Iconization?
Fairclough's term for taken-for-granted information needed to make talk coherent.
What is Background Knowledge (BGK)?
This famous linguist was an expert witness in the 1979 Ann Arbor Black English case.
Who is William Labov?
The belief that telling a story differently on different occasions means a witness is not being truthful.
What is the ideology of inconsistency?
Labov's duty to correct research misinterpretations that cause social harm
What is the Principle of Error Correction?
When macro social hierarchies are mirrored on a micro classroom level.
What is Fractal Recursivity?
A world representation tied to a social position, operating without explicit intent
What is Ideology?
This 1985 paper by Norman Fairclough introduced the initial foundation for this major framework.
What is Critical Discourse Analysis?
Stripping a witness's word out of an earlier interview transcript without its surrounding context.
What is decontextualized fragments?
Features like habitual be show AAE has this quality, refuting "error" models.
What is systematicity?
Making systemic inequality invisible by calling language policies "neutral".
What is Erasure?
A position inside an institution combining a way of seeing with a way of talking.
What is an Ideological-Discursive Formation (IDF)?
In Fairclough’s model, the highest macro level of social structuring above institutions is called this.
What is the Social Formation?
The assumption that an interview story belongs solely to the witness, hiding the interviewer's role.
What is narrator authorship?
The duty to use research findings to benefit the community studied.
What is the Principle of Debt Incurred?
Erasure shifts the blame for student failure away from institutions and onto this.
What are student deficits or attitudes?
An institutional insider with a long-term role, like a teacher or counselor
What is a Subject?
"Are you coming out tonight?" followed by "I have an exam tomorrow" relies on this unstated assumption.
What is Background Knowledge (BGK)?
The legal assumption that asking the same question over and over will eventually reveal the truth.
What is repeated questioning?
Claiming this scholarly stance often works to protect existing institutions.
What is neutrality (or objectivity)?
The process where an ideological stance comes to be seen as basic "common sense".
What is Naturalization?
The capacity to keep one IDF dominant across an institution.
What is Power?
Hearing a regional accent and immediately assuming the speaker is less intelligent.
What is iconization?
In Aboriginal English, saying "yes" to a question regardless of actual agreement or understanding.
What is gratuitous concurrence?