Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

Classroom Discourse Analysis 535
Teacher: Chan- -C- -Y-
(2.0)
Rene: Chances.
Teacher: Cha:n:c:y
Rene: Chancy.
Rene: Ohp ((looking at David and
smiling)) Pokémon.
David: It’s a Pokémon.
Teacher: And you have to tell me why the
–a- is short.
In this example, at least two clear communicative repertoires are in
play. One is the teacher–student academic display repertoire in which she
patiently coaxes correct answers out of Rene. But as soon as the word
‘Chancy’ is articulated fully, Rene and David launch another repertoire,
that of Pokémon fans. Just as the name ‘Brown’ prompted student repertoires
involving ‘James Brown’, here ‘Chancy’ gets taken up as ‘Chansey’,
a Pokemon, another mass-media icon that provides common ground
among the students and, simultaneously, a departure from the teacher’s
repertoire.
As these examples illustrate, ‘correctness’ on the teacher’s terms is not
always what students are working to achieve. A more useful way of
describing the action in the above examples is a careful negotiation of repertoires.
In JoJo’s case, his performance of being not correct covered for his
‘knowing’. In the cases of the James Brown and Chansey examples, being
correct was redefi ned on student terms as awareness of mass-media icons.
But in all these cases, are students learning any more in the teacher repertoire
than they are in their own? In the Chansey example, these students
are English Language Learners in a pullout program. And, over the course
of the semester, their digressions from the phonics game, while technically
‘off-task’, produced far more extended talk in English than their careful
sounding out of game cards with the teacher. So, departures from the
classroom repertoire, and the expectations of correctness within it, need
not be departures from language learning.
Inversely, a performance of correctness can function as a cover for not
knowing. This phenomenon has been described variably as ‘passing’
(Goffman, 1959); ‘studenting’ (Knobel, 1999) or ‘procedural display’
(Bloome et al., 1989). Learning the repertoire for ‘passing’ as correct has
been noted particularly among English Language Learners who learn to
use contextualization cues (Gumperz, 1982), rather than a literal understanding
of the content of what is being said, to hone in on ‘right answers’
(Rymes & Pash, 2001) or to pass as fl uent in English (Monzó & Rueda,
2009).
For example, in the excerpt below, taken from a small book discussion
among second graders, in which Rene is the only English Language