This book offers a linguistic ethnographic account of secondary schooling in Umbria, Italy, examining the complex intersection of language, socioeconomic class, social persona, and school choice to provide a holistic portrait of the situatedness of student “success.”

The book explores the everyday sociolinguistic practices at the three types of Italian secondary schools in Umbria—the lyceum, the technical institute, and the vocational school—and the language ideologies and de facto language policies associated with them. An analysis of narrative, interviews, and classroom discourse unpacks the ways in which students are socialized by both peers and teachers into specific academic discourses and specialized forms of knowledge throughout their school careers. In those close analyses of the micro-interactional contexts of three classrooms, drawing on a corpus of naturally occurring classroom discourse, the volume illuminates the ways in which certain forms of talk are exalted while others policed and how students either submit to or resist the social labels ascribed to them. This account contributes new insights into the ways in which educational institutions are constructed and maintained via talk.

This book will be of interest to students and scholars interested in educational linguistics, linguistic anthropology, classroom discourse, streamed-tracked education systems, and education policy.