Structured improvisation in two bilingual schools case study added to MECA
On Sunday, August 20th, 2017 from 10:15 am to 11:00 am, California State University Long Beach Linguistics Department Chair Dr. Alexandra Jaffe will present a case study entitled, “Structured improvisation in two bilingual schools.”
On Corsica, French-Corsican bilingual schools serve French-dominant children and are intended as tools of Corsican language revitalization. This presentation examines pedagogies involving apprenticeship to the poetic genre of the Chjam’è rispondi (Call and Reponse). Traditionally practiced by expert, male poets, this genre involves one poet improvising a 6-line poem and his opponent responding immediately with another 6-line verse. Following a description of a collaborative project undertaken by the author and two Corsican bilingual teachers and their classes, the analysis focuses on the sociolinguistic and cultural implications of the apprenticeship of novice minority language speakers to this expert genre in schools.
Alexandra Jaffe received her Ph.D. in Linguistic Anthropology from Indiana University and is Professor and Chair of the Linguistics Department at CSULB and joint appointee in Anthropology. Her primary area of research is Corsica, where she has studied language planning in several domains, including education, the media and literature. Her analyses combine detailed attention to linguistic interactions with a focus on social processes of reproduction and change; in particularly the tensions that inhere in the experiences of linguistic minorities. In 1999, she published Ideolologies in Action: Language Politics in Corsica with Mouton de Gruyter, winner of the first Sapir book prize from the Society of Linguistic Anthropology. She has also published widely on sociolinguistic representations in the media, the sociolinguistics of orthography and the notion of stance. This latter subject is the topic of the 2009 edited volume Stance: Sociolinguistic Perspectives, (OUP). Following a 4-year collaborative project on linguistic and representational practices in tourism, the media and education in Finland, Corsica, Ireland and Wales. co-authored publication Sociolinguistics from the Periphery: Small Languages in New Circumstances (Cambridge, 2016). Jaffe has been co-editor of the journal Linguistics and Education and recently finished a term as editor-in-chief of the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology.