Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

Classroom Discourse Analysis 529
regularly employed in the community in the course of socially signifi cant
interaction’ (Gumperz, 1971: 184).
Gumperz initially coined the term ‘verbal repertoire’ to address the
massive variety of languages deployed in multilingual communities
within India. By doing so, he reconceptualized the object of linguistic
study, illustrating that the term linguists traditionally used to demarcate
communities of speakers, ‘language’, was descriptively inadequate in a
setting of societal multilingualism (cf. Sridhar, 1996). His insights have since
been generalized to monolingual communities as well. This conceptualization
makes it clear that all communities have a range of varieties that
are functionally distinct and appropriate in different kinds of social events.
Individuals’ communicative repertoires may include multiple languages,
or may consist primarily of a range of varieties within a language.
In this chapter, I want, like Gumperz, to emphasize the signifi cant contributions
of social situation and communicative goals to an individual’s
language use – whether that speaker is described as multilingual or monolingual.
I also try to capture the centrality of an individual’s communicative
goals by using the slightly modifi ed phrase, ‘communicative repertoire’.
This term differs slightly from ‘verbal repertoire’ in that it focuses on the
resources deployed by individuals, rather than attempting to generalize
about the ‘verbal repertoire’ of ‘the community’ of speakers.
An individual’s communicative repertoires are inevitably more developed
in one social realm and more limited in another. Like a pianist who
may have an expansive ‘classical repertoire’, but a limited repertoire of
‘folk songs’ or ‘jazz’, an individual speaker may have a well-developed
‘academic’ repertoire, but a very limited ‘football fan’ or ‘blind date’ repertoire.
A two-year-old may have a vast repertoire that is functionally
communicative with her mother, but she may not be considered a viable
communication partner in many other contexts – a university seminar for
example. Nevertheless, even a two-year-old is developing distinct repertoires
for different social contexts and will have a different repertoire for
speaking with her mother than she uses at day care or with her older
brothers.
Human development across the life span consists in large part of the
growing awareness and accumulation of such communicative repertoires
and the effects they have (Bruner, 1983). This is true for babies, as they
take increasingly active roles in the various communicative realms in
which they participate; it is also true for every living being who moves in
and out of different social settings with varying communicative expectations.
Wolfe (2004) entertainingly captures this in his novel of collegiate
life, I am Charlotte Simmons. In this fi ctional world, all characters struggle
to fi nd their voice in the prestigious environs of ‘Dupont University’. In
the following passage, Charlotte, a scholarship girl from Southern