Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

530 Part 6: Language and Interaction
Appalachia, wrestles with how to write home to her parents about her
initial experiences as a freshman:
Dear Momma and Daddy,
I’ll admit my eyes blurred with mist when I saw you drive off in the
old pickup.
The old pickup? ... my eyes blurred with mist? ... What on earth did she
think she was writing? ... She rocked forward with another trill of lowgrade
guilt to confront her letter home ... the old pickup. Daddy is totally
dependent on the poor, miserable old truck, and I’m treating it like it’s
something quaint. Eyes blurred with mist ... Yuk! She could just imagine
Momma and Daddy reading that. The ‘pretty writing’. (Wolfe, 2004: 158)
Charlotte labels her academic/literary repertoire ‘pretty writing’ and
recognizes that this part of her repertoire has very different functionality
in her home community than it does in a community of academics. Indeed
her own ‘coming of age’ is a process of coming to terms with her rapidly
expanding communicative repertoires and their effective uses. For her,
the journey through ‘Dupont University’ is one that exposes her to a vast
range of new communicative repertoires. Her challenge is to understand
them and to be able to use them to her advantage – and to transcend the
loneliness that she initially feels, trapped in a communicative repertoire
that she shares neither with her new acquaintances at Dupont nor with
her family back home.
Charlotte Simmons’ interior monologue about ‘pretty writing’ encapsulates
a struggle that countless students have about the way they speak
and the language choices they make across academic, family and other
social contexts. Charlotte Simmons’ fi ctional insights resonate with the
experiences of non-fi ctional personalities who have come from humble
origins, but gone on to excel in the most elite institutions of higher learning.
For example, The New York Times describes Supreme Court Justice
Clarence Thomas, and a current nominee to the Supreme Court, Sonia
Sotomayor, as questioning the adequacy of their own repertoires when
they began to attend prestigious universities: both were worried ‘what
others would think when they opened their mouth (p. 1)’:
Ms. Sotomayor had grown up in the Bronx speaking Spanish;
Mr Thomas’s relatives in Pin Point, Ga., mixed English with Gullah,
a language of the coastal South. Both attended Catholic school,
where they were drilled by nuns in grammar and other subjects. But
at college, they realized they still sounded unpolished. (Kantor &
Gonzalez, 2009: 1, 21)
As this narrative of these highly successful people indicates, Thomas
and Sotomayor were aware that part of their success would depend on the
way they managed their own ways of speaking.