In his introduction to this volume, Stanton Wortham argues for the value of a linguistic anthropological approach to education. After all, “a society's beliefs about language – as a symbol of nationalism, a marker of differences, or a tool of assimilation – are often reproduced and challenged through educational institutions” (p. 2). So too is language used in schools in ways that, often unwittingly, reproduce the inequities in society more generally; a linguistic anthropological approach is particularly well suited to pointing out the processes by which this happens.

Chaps. 2 through 4 show how fruitful the notion of indexicality can be in understanding educational outcomes. James Collins, in his examination of reading tutorials for middle school students, demonstrates how students index aspects of their identities in ways that affect the instruction itself. One student, for example, indexes his time-harried life outside school in such a way that his tutor eventually learns that “taking time, extra time, is one of the keys to connecting with this young man” (54). Rather than consider such tutorial sessions as closed off from the rest of the world, then, it would behoove educators to use references to that world to further their educational goals.

Kevin O'Connor, in his study of a multi-site engineering project, shows “how, in the detailed processes of moment-to-moment interaction, language is used to produce a world in which certain kinds of expertise are valued (or devalued) while at the same time speakers position themselves and others within those ways of understanding expertise” (63). That is, he finds that a working-class identity that is positively valued among Tech students is subsequently devalued during a teleconference with Institute students; specifically, the Tech students “become identified as less ‘educated’ persons than their counterparts at the Institute … as Institute students brought ‘into play’ potential but backgrounded – and to the Tech students, irrelevant – identities of ‘experts’ and used these as the basis for rejecting claims to expertise grounded in practical experience” (84–89). An “expert identity,” in other words, is not something that exists prior to these interactions; rather, it emerges through the interaction itself.

Similarly, Agnes Weiyun He illustrates how knowledge – and teacher authority – emerge as interaction unfolds in a Chinese heritage language classroom. She is particularly interested in examining the extent to which Chinese-American students are being socialized to value the “Way of the Teacher” that is so important in traditional Chinese culture. To do so, He examines a lesson about the simplified script used in China versus the unsimplified script used in Taiwan and elsewhere. While the teacher wants the student to use the simplified script, the student invokes the authority of the headmaster and textbook in using the nonsimplified script: “by attending to interactional details moment by moment, we are able to see that … the teacher's expertness and authority [are] not presupposed to the same degree at all times and [are] not readily accepted by the student at all times” (112).

These chapters deftly show how the indexing of “multiple relevant identities” (76) can affect educational processes and outcomes. Chaps. 5 through 7 focus on how language ideologies and practices interrelate in linguistic diverse classrooms. Betsy Rymes demonstrates how, even though they use very different methodologies, two reading teachers construct very similar visions of literacy as “unrelated to students' experiences outside of the literacy event” (128). One teacher, adhering to a strict phonics program, conveys this message by silencing or chastising students when they use extralinguistic clues in making sense of text. But even though she embraces a literature-based approach to literacy, another teacher ultimately conveys the same restricted vision of literacy: “despite the teacher's intent to draw on students' experiences related to the text, the teacher's own experiences are the only ones legitimized” (135). For instance, when trying to get a student to think about his favorite foods as a way to connect with a story that mentions an unfamiliar food, she accepts her own suggestion as correct, ignoring an answer given by another child. But even when students did draw on their own experiences in understanding the text, “the interaction that followed didn't build on possible entailed meanings, but instead closed off entailments to focus students' attention back on the text” (139).

In her investigation of a Corsican-French classroom, Alexandra Jaffe discusses the strategies teachers employ to deal with the weaker sociolinguistic position of Corsican vis-à-vis French. Jaffe finds that teachers try to create institutional and symbolic parity between French and Corsican in the classroom by “striving for equality in both the number of hours and the subject areas taught in the language” (157). The same attention is paid in both languages, for example, to pronunciation and delivery. Further, teachers rarely use a text without introducing it orally first; this allows students to develop an “authentic Corsican voice” (181). Teachers also try to give Corsican a privileged value as a language of cultural identity by, for example, evaluating literacy work in Corsican in a way that “confer[s] competence and cultural ownership of Corsican on a group of children with very uneven levels of linguistic skills in that language” (158). In contrast, students “are far more regularly forced to demonstrate their individual knowledge in French than in Corsican” (179); they are also drilled in French grammar more often. Despite the teacher's moves toward leveling the linguistic playing field, then, students come to consider French the language of academic rigor.

Norma Gonzalez & Elizabeth Arnot-Hopffer, in their examination of a dual language program, demonstrate how even second graders “actively pick and choose among circulating ideologies, whether they are those expressed by their parents or circulating more widely in society at large, to develop their own critical counter-discourses” (236). One student, who began the program as a monolingual English speaker, even writes a bilingual letter to the editor targeting the proponent of English-only legislation. The target of the letter, however, does not believe a second grader is capable of formulating such opinions on her own. This chapter urges researchers not to make the same mistake, but, as Marjorie Harness Goodwin 1997 has charged, to “take children seriously and use the distinctive practices of anthropology to give voice to their social worlds and concerns” (quoted in Gonzalez & Arnot-Hopffer, p. 213).

While the above chapters show the effects language ideologies can have on language practices in bilingual settings, Karen Stocker's chapter about Matambugueños in Costa Rica demonstrates the impact ideologies can have on educational processes even when language differences do not exist. That is, in part because of the nationalist ideology of language that there should be a clear linkage between language and identity, other Costa Ricans attribute exclusively to Matambugueños linguistic features that are shared by neighboring groups, and the “fact of the social inferiority ascribed to Indians [on the Matumbu reservation] leads to a perception of their lesser linguistic capacity” (185). Teachers overlook the fact that the Matumbugueño students “are perhaps the most adept at changing registers of any students” (201). Regardless of how they actually speak, then, these students are perceived as speaking “worse” than other students.

In her very informative concluding chapter, Nancy Hornberger reviews the contributions made by early linguistic anthropology – especially the ethnography of community, interactional sociolinguistics, and micro-ethnography – to the study of education and the promise new approaches, such as those in this volume, hold for the future. In particular, she argues that “linguistic anthropologists of education have an obligation to bring their considerable analytical skills to bear on enabling change toward greater equity in our educational policies and practices” (266). This volume proves that linguistic anthropology does indeed offer a unique set of tools with which to tease apart the process by which schools, especially through their language ideologies and practices, reproduce social inequalities. One hopes that it will inspire others to develop educator-friendly programs and policies that can mitigate those processes.