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Teaching While Praying, Praying While Teaching: An Interactional Sociolinguistics Of Educational Prayer, Robert Jean Leblanc

Journal of Catholic Education

What are the linguistic resources for teachers who pray in contemporary Catholic school classrooms? This article considers the intersections of prayer and language practice, and I make central two arguments. The first is that educational prayer—a particular type of teacher-led extemporaneous prayer in Catholic schools—is a linguistic phenomenon, a highly-flexible set of linguistic resources, captured within a special interactional frame marked by ambiguous boundaries which contains both prescribed formulaic linguistic properties and those which allow the performer to attend to real time classroom contingencies. Drawing on interactional data from a Catholic school classroom, this article delimits the …