Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

534 Part 6: Language and Interaction
as in the following High-School discussion of ‘current events’ (Gutiérrez
et al., 1995).
Teacher: What did the Supreme Court decision in Brown versus the
Board of Education, have to do with?
Student: James Brown?
Student: Richard Brown?
Student: Shut-up
Student: You shut up
Student: James Brown?
Student: Al Green
Teacher: ((attempting to call on someone))Ye:::s?
Here, clearly, James Brown and Al Green are elements of a communicative
repertoire that some of these high-school students revel in, but to
which their teacher is not attuned (or is, perhaps, deliberately ignoring).
But even this brief example illustrates that some students are more fl uent
in the ‘James Brown’ repertoire than others. When another student
attempts to join in the banter with ‘Richard Brown’ (certainly not recognizable
as a musical icon like James Brown or Al Green) that student
receives a swift ‘shut up’, which is countered with an inelegant ‘you shut
up’. Clearly, this student is lacking facility in a newly emergent repertoire.
When another student comes up with ‘Al Green’, he steers the repartee
back into the ‘James Brown’ repertoire. Now, the teacher tries to resuscitate
the teacher repertoire with a characteristic, long-drawn-out ‘ye::::s’ in
an attempt to call on a student and bolster the teacher-fronted turn-taking
pattern that characterizes a traditional school-talk repertoire, but with
little response. As the teacher-centered discussion proceeds, the students
continue their banter about James Brown, building a student-centered,
classroom ‘underlife’ (Goffman, 1974).
The ‘James Brown’ repertoire emerges above largely because students
share a common, mass-mediated inventory of references that can swiftly
establish a new repertoire as common communicative currency between
students. Just as the high-school students use a reference to popular culture
to create their own communicative realm tangential to the teacher’s,
the elementary school children in the example below, use the reference to
a Pokemon character, ‘Chansey’, to accomplish the same interactional
function. While the teacher is drawing on a teacher repertoire to draw
students into sounding out, then pronouncing, a word on a card in the
Phonics Game, the students make another connection. I have indented
their side-play about ‘Chansey the Pokemon’ to make the foray into the
students’ Pokemon-repertoire visible in the transcript (Rymes, 2001):
Teacher: -C- -H- says?
David: Can
Rene: an- chan-