“You are children but you can always say ...”: hypothetical direct reported speech and child–parent relationships in a Heritage Language classroom

Abstract

The paper investigates how children attending a religious Russian Heri-tage Language school are taught to relate to their parents in culturally acceptable ways. It examines hypothetical direct reported speech that promotes respectful and humble communication behavior in interactions with their parents. The paper is based on discourse analysis of audio- and video-recorded interactions and longitudinal ethnographic observations. Analysis demonstrates that the moral concept of humility is valued in the school and is considered important for children's everyday lives outside of school. Through the use of hypothetical reported speech children receive concrete understandings of this complex moral concept. The use of hypothetical reported speech allows for creation of a situation where absent parties become active characters. The hypothetical reported quotes are presented as relevant to all of the children while being simultaneously “typical” and “de-personalized.” This allows teachers to avoid accusing a particular child of behaving inappropriately toward a parent. Furthermore, the role of mothers is highlighted in the quotes positioning them as important in the everyday lives of children. While the hypothetical reported speech demonstrates to the children how to be respectful and humble toward parents, it also presents ways to disagree with the parents. Prosody was found to be utilized in the hypothetical speech as an important way to allow for positioning of the social actors in relation to each other to take place. The teachers produce a “layering of voices” (Bakhtin 1981) in the quotes. This layering allows an opportunity for the teachers to express their own stances toward the quotes while at the same time to present to the children acceptable norms through creation of typified characters.