Language attitudes and literacy education: Seventeenth-century Paris and contemporary Philadelphia

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2013
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Tri-College (Bryn Mawr, Haverford, and Swarthmore Colleges). Department of Linguistics
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eng
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Tri-College users only
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Abstract
In this paper, I consider the interaction of societal language attitudes and children's literacy education, with attention to two particular societies: seventeenth-century Paris and contemporary Philadelphia. In both societies, language attitudes favor a standard dialect--the variety spoken by the upper class, and the variety representative of elite social status. I examine literacy education practices and children's reading materials. For both societies, I suggest that the divergence of orthography and pronunciation causes difficulty for beginning readers who speak non-standard dialects. I ultimately propose the similarity of reading education in seventeenth-century Paris and modern Philadelphia, two societies more than three centuries apart.
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