A Linguistic Analysis of a Cultural Model of Mathematical Achievement in an American Community of Practice

The use of cultural consensus analysis to verify cultural models represents a major advance to assess the degree to which members of some community share common responses to propositions. But because knowledge is not stored and used in the sorts of propositional knowledge that consensus analysis employs, quantitative consensus analysis alone is likely insufficient to understand cognitive models underlying motivation, attention, and decision making. A complementary approach is outlined, drawing on natural language data to investigate how linguistic structures and metaphorical associations, used in persistent ways by members of a community, shape cognition. Using two extended analyses drawn from an ethnographic study of the Math Corps, a mathematical community of practice centered in Detroit, Michigan, it is demonstrated that patterned linguistic structures help elucidate the cognitive structure of the cultural model for achievement and intelligence widely shared in this specific community. This approach integrates linguistic data of the sort achievable ethnographically into the suite of methods employable for directly verifying cultural sharing, complementing rather than replacing consensus analysis.