Socio-Linguistic Essay Questions for Exam #3

Some version of the following questions are likely to be on the exam. For full credit, you must tie your comments to one or more readings from Exploring Language. You may use your book for this question.

A. Describe a time that you reacted to someone's use of a racial, ethnic, or otherwise discriminatory epithet. What was the context? How did you respond? What was the reaction?

B. Describe a time that you used doublespeak or euphemism to avoid some sort of confrontation. What was the context? How did the person respond? What was your reaction?

C. Imagine that you're a classroom teacher in a ninth-grade English classroom, and you're publishing a class magazine of student essays. As you are preparing the final copy, you discover that one of the essays makes hateful comments about recent immigrants to your community. In fact, students of the immigrant group are in the same class that's preparing the magazine. When you ask the student to remove the offending passage, she refuses, claiming her right to free speech. How would you respond?