Are You With Me

As Isabella stated in her blog, I as well never dealt with different ethnicities in the classroom until I came to college. I went to a small high school with primarily Caucasian students and teachers. Therefore, different “ways of speaking” was never necessarily an issue for me.

After reading this article, I decided to take a different route in discussion- from the perspective of African American women not necessarily in the classroom, but in the community. An interesting quote I found within this article was when Foster states that, “ According to Marcyliena Morgan, studies of African American women’s speech behavior are central to a complete understanding of how the community expresses its reality because it is women who have historically been responsible for the language development of children and consequently the community.” I found this take interesting because of the large amount that we have discussed “gendered social norms” in this course.

Different articles we have read over the course of this semester have discussed women’s speech patterns, and how women are seen as being less dominant in a group setting than men. However, Foster is emphasizing the fact that women have been the primary way that children develop language, not only in the classroom, but also the community, and is referring to African American women specifically. A movie that came to my mind when thinking from this perspective was “The Help.” This film deals with differences between black and white women in the deep south, and I feel that it is a good indication of the amount of influence that the African American women in this movie had on the children in the white homes that they were working within.

Because I couldn’t find a sufficient specific example from the movie, the link for the trailer is below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_ajv_6pUnI

This deals not only with racism, but with gendered norms and African American womens’ influence in a specific community. I feel that this can be looked at as an extension of Foster’s article. 

Liz Ream

Are You With Me

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BTr0evZSis (Youtube clip from How I Met
Your Mother: Revertigo)

This *How I Met Your Mother* clip does not fully touch on the aspects of
African American women's speech that Foster discusses, however it does help
initiate one of her main topics: code-switching.  In the clip Lily is
visited by her old high school friends Michelle, and Lily begins to speak
in a type of African American English.  Similarly Michelle speaks in this
way when she is with Lily but when Lily leaves the table Michelle reverts
to Standard English and tells the group she is working on her Ph.D.  This
clip hints at something else Foster's article touches on, that the Standard
English variant is associated with knowledge and intelligence, while the
African English variant is thought to be a sign of poor education.

In her article, Foster studies teacher-student conversation patterns and
finds that often when the teacher needs to connect more closely with the
student or encourage participation in a conversation the teacher reverts to
African American English from the Standard English variant.  Foster
mentions that by speaking in this way with the student, the teacher makes
the student feel more comfortable and encourages them to respond.  She also
mentions code-switching later in the article when she compares interview
data of other African American teachers.  She notes that at the beginning
of every interview the women spoke in the Standard English variant, but as
they became more comfortable in the situation and more willing to speak
about their experiences they switched over to speaking in the African
American English variant.

Foster also mentions the use of metaphors and how teachers use metaphors in
the classroom to teach the children about social ranks based upon the
students' grades in the class.  The teacher will call on the students also
known as the F-troops, to answer more questions, and make them work harder
to get their grades back up to passing.



Kalyssa Eversman

Are You With Me?

This article was really interesting to me because it made me think about something that I was not often faced with and didn't really realize could be a potential problem. It talks about how African Americans have a different way of speaking than white people do and it can cause a problem in a classroom when it is majority African American students or an African American teacher. Foster goes further by developing on the difference between Standard English and African American English this is done through codeswitching within African American females. I grew up in a school district that was predominantly white and I have never had an African American teacher, but at Indiana University I have had teachers of other ethnicities that spoke a different form of English which made it hard to understand them.

This is a brief clip from a sitcom Modern Family this particular episode does a good job addressing codeswtiching and people talking in different forms of English. One of the main characters speaks Latin-English but can speak Standard English if necessary. Even when speaking standard English though it is hard to understand her because she is used to speaking in a different language. Gloria tries to speak in a Standard English tone throughout the episode but in the end realizes that it is her tone in Latin-English that makes her who she is and defines her background and personality.

Are you with me

The summary that Anna posted on this article, Are You With Me, was well done. Therefore, I won't bore you with a recap on the reading, yet I will give my thoughts. In the conclusion of the reading, Foster wrote, "codeswitching is a deliberate and systematic practice intended to express the speakers' identities and influenced by the social relationships between participants." 


I liked how this reading tied into the previously read code-switching articles. Similar to genders, religions, etc., race is yet another identifier that similar people can code-switch through to relate to one another. 


While pondering my thoughts on where the dialect to which African Americans speak came from, I found the following video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvuWSJI87r8. This video claims that the dialect has evolved from slaves. Many of the words they spoke with have also made their way into standard english.


I think it is interesting to watch this video and understand what gave African-Americans this ability to code-switch through language.

Cameron's article, "Performing Gender Identity: Young Men's Talk and the construction of heterosexual masculinity" lists ways in which males interact in speech when surrounded by only other males. Cameron discusses topics such as cooperation (males cooperate with other males by allowing them a turn in the conversation by using phrases such as 'like' or 'you know?'), and competition (the power struggle between males to have control of the conversation).

I would like to take a closer look at competition and cooperation in the following video taken from the movie "Stepbrothers":

The competition in this dialogue is initially between Derek and Dale. Derek is telling his story about fishing and Dale tries to enter the conversation by asking about the type of fish that Derek caught. Both Derek and Robert proceed to pounce on Dale for interrupting the story. Both Robert and Derek are content with sharing the conversation but are not willing to let Dale in. Ultimately Derek is trying to compete with Dale to be the favorite son of Robert.

Cooperation comes into play between Derek and Robert. As Derek goes through his story telling, he asks Robert a question or two, and Robert answers the question and freely turns the conversation back over to Derek. And although Derek is telling a story for the whole table, he is primarily making eye contact with Robert. There is cooperation between Robert and Derek, but there is a struggle to let anyone else in.

Are You With Me

Threw out this article I couldn't help but go back to and think of the other articles about code switching and how women are the teachers and the ones that are softer spoken. In this article it starts off with saying that African American women were often overlooked. This study looked at African American teachers and how they communicated with their students. Also how they used code switching and metaphors both in teaching and interviewing.
When they taught the used the word performance when it came to have class discussions. Foster almost wanted you to feel like you were reading something like a play or a movie. He went into great detail how at the start of class everything was very structured and the teachers did all the talking but when they got into the performance stage of the class everyone was equal. The teacher wanted the students to feel comfortable speaking and giving them plenty of chances to speak. Foster even states that The teacher spoke 296 and the students spoke 211. This tells me the teacher played close attention to the students and wanted to hear them. The teacher also put things in metaphors to help the kids understand and help them relate to what the teacher is teaching and trying to tell them.
During the interviews it went into code switching and how the teachers in one group didn't code switch until later in the interview when they felt comfortable or just couldn't keep up the "proper english" anymore. But how in the other interview group they pretty much started off code switching from "proper english" to "African American english" depending on what they were trying to say and what the conversation was covering.
I chose a clip of students and teachers talking about why they talk the way they do and what it says about them. Also how they feel like talking tells a lot about a person. It tells how they were taught and who taught them. They express how that it brings them closer to old African American language. Their dialect helps identify them and who they are.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQrtB7cZDrA&feature=related

Are You With Me?

In the article, Are you with Me by Foster he shows how African American women that are teachers try to communicate with their children on an intimate level.  He breaks the article up in two different scenarios, the first half is him sitting in a classroom with an African American woman teacher and the second half is him interviewing four African American teachers.

The classroom scenario shows the teacher using performance speech to teach and communicate with the class.  Performance speech is shifting from Standard English to a more black style of discourse using elongated vowels, utilizing pitch and stress, repetition, and uses gestures.  She compares this with an African American church she attends, in which she says she always is more involved and people enjoy the service more when the Pastor uses performance speech.

The interview scenario shows the four women using codeswitching deliberately to show speakers’ identities and emphasis.  While the teachers express times when they speak with their students they use a more black style when expressing students’ responses and a more Standard English when developing the story. 

I chose a scene from an African American church service.  From this scene, you can see the performance speech taking place.  The pastor uses repetition by repeating phrases to get his point across.  He uses stress and change in pitch to engage the audience.  He uses a more black style of speaking like discussed in Foster to relate to his audience and to get his point across. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rffwcLVm93w

Anna Frick

McElhinny and the police force

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEBLrCGhTVM

             “Miss Congeniality” is a movie about a woman CIA agent (Sandra Bullock) who goes undercover as a beauty pageant contestant.  In this video clip we are able to see the media ideologies of woman in the CIA. Sandra Bullock’s character is physical, has messy hair, aggressive, tough, and out spoken. All of these adjectives fit with the description of being masculine, which we listed in class just the other day. This clip goes along with the societal view that women in the police force are “masculine” because it is the only way that they can earn respect from their fellow officers and criminals.

            In McElhinny’s article, “Challenging Hegemonic Masculinities”, the author states, “ women who work as police officers are often assumed to have either a certain kind of personality (tomboyish or tough)….”. However, McElhinny clarifies that there are no single personality traits that are shared by all women in the police force.  Miss Congeniality proves that we are being socialized, as media viewers, to believe that woman in the police force are all masculine.  In reality, there are masculine, tomboyish police women, but there are also police woman who are seen as feminine.

            At the end of the movie we see Sandra Bullock’s character not only acting feminine, but also looking feminine. This reminded me of one of the woman police officers who was interviewed in the article that believes “her occupational persona is a mask.” I think that the movie portrays this idea well because we can see at the end of the movie Sandra Bullock is comfortable as portraying her feminine qualities while still being in a “masculine job”.  

Stephanie Channing

Gossip Revisited: Language in all-Female Groups

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZooRizQQ5k&feature=relmfu

The video clip I found is from The Desperate Housewives. Unlike what Coates studied in her article, this one is just a very brief 40 seconds conversation.

As we concluded in class, Coates concludes four formal features of femal gossip, including topic developement, mininal responses, simultaneous speech and epistemic modality.

We can see the four women establish their topic because they are watching their new neighbour moving in and commenting based on their "assumptions." They are not interrupting each other, but developing the topic in a collaborative way. Everyone is actively participating in the discussion to draw some kind of conclusion.

Due to the length and the form of the conversation, there isn't many minial responses in this clip. At one point, Lynette picks up two key words from the previous two persons' comments to start for her comment. This functions as a minial response to indicate herself paying attention to other speakers. Similarly in some other videos I saw, sometimes minimal responses could be replaced by transitional words or phrases, or even facial expressions and head nods.

Simultaneous speaking refers to multiple speakers voicing at the same time which doesn't really happen here. It's more like turn taking in this case where thay are talking on after the other to make the conversation flow.

Epistemic modality is very apparent here because we can hear words like "definitely" and "maybe." Like we discussed in class, it is a way of showing confidence to save face for others or themselves. We would later learn that the women who use "definitely" are actually very confidence in their conclusions because they've seen the new neighbor earlier whereas the woman who uses "maybe" are just guessing based of her past experience. Beyond words, their tone would also suggest if they are confident with what they are talking.

This conversation, though short, still consists a bit of storytelling in the end. They do start out talking about things, but they are not talking about how to do things, but what those things represent.

I think Coates do have some great observations, but her sample is too small and it might just represent a certain group of people instead of general female gossip. I do agree that female gossip is not a chaotic mess, but a constructive and continueous process. It is also important to see how women incorporate nonverbal during conversations as well.

Cheerleader Gossip

Bring It On (Watch First Minute)

This scene is from the movie Bring It On, and is a good example of high school senior cheerleaders gossiping in their "typical location." The scene shows the cheerleaders discussing in a gossipy fashion who deserves to become the next captain and who just isn't good enough. The majority of the scene is set talking about the current head captain and how certain cheerleaders truly feel about her. This scene mirrors Coates four steps that she found in every female conversation. The first being topic development, the cheerleaders are feeding off one another’s conversations, in somewhat of a joint production, without even necessarily noticing it. One girl starts by saying, “She puts the ass in massive” and three other girls follow her cue ending with Courtney saying, “She puts the whore in horrifying.” The next feature is minimal responses, which Courtney shows when she gives a little “uh-huh” to acknowledge Whitney’s comment about a cheerleader she doesn’t think deserves the captain position. Simultaneous speech is shown when both Courtney and Whitney speak in agreeance that the current captain doesn’t deserve anything from them. The final step shows epistemic modality when all the cheerleaders are voicing who they believe will get the captain spot.

I thought this scene is a good representation of dramatized gossip. This movie is obviously from a different day and age then the conversation that takes place in the Coates article, with the girls in Bring It On speaking with a more “inappropriate” language they still manage to speak in the “co-operative” nature that the women in the article speak. Agreeing with Coates conclusion that “women’s talk can be described as co-operative.” This movie stereotypes cheerleaders and women as using gossip as their main form of conversation and helps prove Coates’ several points about how women use gossip as their way of communication.

Anger and Gender

Snookie/JWow http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8rTYeKsIy0

Mike/Ronnie http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqDRZMW1xfE&feature=related

Although these particular clips of The Jersey Shore is a little extreme, I
still found it fitting based upon the excerpt of the conversation between
the two women. There are vulgarities and extreme profanities between the
two women just as there is between the two girls in this particular clip.
They instantly start screaming at each other with no real background of
meaning behind what they are saying.  The part that I thought was
particularly interesting was the reaction of the boys while the girls were
yelling at one another.  They really sit there and observe what?s going on,
almost like they have accepted in. In the Kulick article, the men were
observed as acting in a very similar sense. They have accept that their
women will be vulgar to one another and use profanities in public but they
simply walk by and discuss later. The men in the Jersey Shore and the men
from this Papua New Guinea article react to this particular gendered social
norm with acceptance.

Another thing that I thought was interesting within the gender social norms
in relation to this article was the different ways of fighting based on
gender in each community. Within the Papua New Guinea community, the women
are expected to converse or bicker in the kroses while the men are expected
to say certain things and express slight emotions within the oratories.
Each method of confrontation is accepted in a way that does not allow the
men or women to express themselves in another way. Throughout the show the
boys fight just as much, if not more than the. girls do, but just like the
gendered social norms of the Papua New Guinea community the ways in which
they fight are different but accepted. Most of the time women fight very
verbally, using words and explanations combined with profanities and
insults, only sometimes leading to physical fights. On the other hand, the
men are a bit less emotional in the sense that their fights are almost
strictly physical each and every time. When the boys get physical with one
another, most of the time they are left to sort it out by themselves
because it is an accepted way they can work it out. On the occasion that
the girls get physical though, the boys are almost instantly on them
pulling them off one another since they are more accepting of their verbal
form of confrontation.

In both the community discussed in the article and on the Jersey Shore,
there are accepted gendered social norms when it comes to methods of
confrontation that are distinct to each gender.

Mali

Title: “Gossip Revisited: Language in all-Female Groups” by Jennifer Coates

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIBpn5ob60s&feature=related

Title: “Gossip Revisited: Language in all-Female Groups” by Jennifer Coates

This clip from Sex and the City seemed to be a great example of how women talk among each other when they are together. As the four women have brunch, the topic of sex obviously comes up with Cynthia Nixon’s character, Miranda bringing up an event that happened the night before. As each girl gives their input and codes sex as “coloring” because of Charlotte’s daughter also being in their presence, this light topic becomes somewhat more serious. “The brief account of the development of one topic in a conversation between women friends provides an example of the way that women develop topics progressively” (Coates, 207). After listening and to each other and comparing their sex lives, Miranda is able to realize that her and Steve are having a problem, but this realization is almost light-hearted with her friends input. Each woman progressively shared their experiences while also aware of Miranda’s concern.

When Carrie cuts Samantha off by saying, “We get it, you love to color.” I thought it was not only funny, but a perfect way to show how simultaneous talk can include interruptions without gaining the floor. Since all of the ladies are equals, the main goal of the conversation is to catch up on their friendship and if more than one person speaks at a time, it is not thought of as rude, but rather as an active contribution. I also think that this is apparent in girl talk everyday. If only one person is talking, it isn’t always a negative, but when a lot of girls are trying to voice their opinion, it kind of makes it more fun, interesting and open. In almost every “Sex and the City” episode, the conversations are meant for each girl to collectively participate in the brunch or dinner discussion with no competitiveness, but co-operativity.