Lessons about respect and affect in a Korean heritage language school

Abstract

This paper examines the ideologies and practices surrounding respect at a Korean American heritage language school in California. It illustrates the interaction between locally circulating metadiscourses about children's dispositions, intentions, and identities and the enforcement of classroom norms of respect. In some cases, teachers accommodated to children's linguistic norms though a metadiscourse that reframed the indexicality of potentially disrespectful behavior. In other cases, forms of bodily demeanor were naturalized as indexical of children's deliberate communication of disrespect. Teachers’ classroom narratives presented theories of affective accommodation and affective display, where respect for a teacher's feelings was supposed to be given priority over respect for a child's feelings, but children did not always comply with these theories. By illustrating how teachers’ metapragmatic ideologies about children's identities as Korean Americans, contexts of language acquisition, and linguistic needs mediate the interactional construction of (dis)respect, this paper demonstrates the hybrid/multidirectional nature of language socialization.