the (very rough) beginnings of my annotated bibliography

Giles, Howard, and Clair Robert N. Saint. Language and Social Psychology. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1979. Print.
In the introduction alone, Giles offers a brief overview of what the book discusses and presents many of the ideas that I want to learn more about! He explains psychology in the context of language and talks about several language variables, including accent, speech rate, pitch variety, etc. All of these variables are extremely important to applying language to social context, where focus is placed on how individuals use language. He also mentions judgments that are passed, cultural differences, and how this affects the decoding process – a process that is not “built into” word choice or language itself; rather, it must be “added on to” the language. This decoding process affects how people communicate with one another and has strong implications in the context of second language acquisition.

Lutz, Catherine, and Lila Abu-Lughod. Language and the Politics of Emotion. Cambridge [England: Cambridge UP, 1990. Print
For this book, the title caught my eye first. So much of language is related to emotion! And lack of desire to learn language is sometimes related to over-active emotions (fear, inferiority, etc.) Because I want to interview ELLs in the U.S. about their experiences and what extra-linguistic factors hinder their language learning, I felt this book might be exactly what I needed. The introductory chapter I found to be particularly pertinent to my topic. ‘Discourse’ is discussed extensively as a means through which emotion is communicated. The authors go on to discuss how discourse is informed by emotion, culture, and the like – all things that relate to my topic.

Kramarae, Cheris, Muriel Schulz, and William M. O'Barr. Language and Power. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1984. Print
As the title implies, this book discusses the relationship between language and power. When we discussed sociolinguistics in class, we focused quite a bit on the subjects’ interactions with “power figures” in their lives and how it affected their language and ability to communicate. In this book, differences are discussed between high language and low language. Although that is not the situation exactly with many ELLs, that is often how it is treated in society – that English is “superior”. This book talks about how this affects society and social interactions.

Brown, Richard Harvey. Society as Text: Essays on Rhetoric, Reason and Reality. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1987. Print.
In the first chapter of this book, Brown discusses “sociolinguistics, language communities, and the mobilization of low-income groups”. This does not directly pertain to my topic, but indirectly it does have some valuable information that at least connects and will give me a start for my research. It talks about class and social distinctions, which is relevant to the idea of inferiority that my paper will focus heavily on. It also contains a section on structure of language and the social implications of that, which is not addressed extensively in the other resources I have so far. I might not use this book, but it is a possibility.