Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

Classroom Discourse Analysis 531
This awareness of communicative repertoire and its effects is also
echoed in the ways everyday high-school students talk about their feelings
about their own language habits. Speakers of multiple languages in
particular encounter this tussle among repertoires. Consider, for example,
the words of Seba, a ninth grade girl, originally from Morocco, now
attending a Philadelphia area high school, musing about what her multiple
languages mean to her.
I defi nitely I think Arabic is the most popular language that I speak
‘cause everybody – every person loves to speak Arabic because they
think is- everyone speaks Arabic. They say – like, any kind of person
likes to speak Arabic because it’s popular. Anywhere you go, people
say, ‘oh hey’ in Arabic. I’m like, everybody knows that. So, I think
Arabic is the one language I love to keep going on.
And I used to take Spanish when I was in my home country. And,
I used to take a lot of classes. I used to learn a lot of languages, but
I didn’t keep going on them. So when I came here. My mom, she
does speak Spanish, she tried to push me, but I’m like no I have to
learn English, so I forgot about Spanish. I forgot a little about French.
But I’m holding on Arabic. Yeah. It’s the only language that I can talk
with my mom.
All the words we say in home are like half Arabic, half English, half
French, half – all the languages they’re like mixed together.
Seba, like the fi ctional Charlotte Simmons, seems to be trying to account
for the ways of speaking that attach her to home. In United States, she
says, ‘I have to learn English, so I forgot about Spanish’. Still she is
clearly part of a social milieu, even in the United States, in which ‘every
person loves to speak Arabic’. Arabic, she says, is ‘the most popular language’.
As a ninth grader in a Philadelphia area high school, English is
clearly important, but other languages continue to play an important role
in her life: Arabic is, she says, ‘the only language that I can talk with my
mom’. She also describes her language at home, with her mother, as a
mixture of many languages. Her repertoires cannot simply be demarcated
by the standard names or linguistic distinctions between standard ‘English’
or ‘Arabic’. She recognizes that ‘the words we say at home’ are not simply
textbook versions of language, but a more complicated repertoire of ‘half
Arabic, half English, half French, half – all the languages they’re like
mixed together’.
These three, wide-ranging examples illustrate critical issues in the analysis
of communicative repertoires:
(1) ‘Correctness’ is a construction that functions secondarily to communicative
goals. Charlotte Simmons is not worrying how ‘correct’ her language
is in her letter home. She is attempting to modulate it to be appropriate
(cf. Hornberger, 1989; Hymes, 1972) to the community of speakers