Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

536 Part 6: Language and Interaction
Learner, Rene quickly chimes in with the ‘right’ answer, on the heels of his
classmates. This is representative of Rene’s tendency to deftly use his
peers’ responses to formulate his own identity as competent (Here, the
square brackets indicate overlapping talk):
Teacher: What do all the men have on their heads?
Tiffany: Ha[ts
Rene: [Hats
In other cases, Rene reads a teacher’s intonation or phrasing of a question,
to arrive at the ‘correct’ answer. As in conversation, sometimes one
just needs to know what one’s interlocutor wants to hear:
Teacher: What is ↑wrong with ↓that. Is there anything wrong with
that?
Sara: No.
David: No.
Rene: No.
As Monzó and Rueda (2009) point out, this kind of ‘passing’ as fl uent in
English can become especially common in English-Only contexts, in which
alternative communicative repertoires are quashed. Such passing practices,
like the more overtly disruptive practices of playing dumb or building a
student-centered underlife, may keep students from direct engage ment
with what is deemed correct in the teacher’s mind. Monzó and Rueda
insightfully add, however, that even in cases of passing, deft use of this
seemingly superfi cial repertoire may be a way to preserve one’s social
identity as competent while more privately learning what needs to be
learned. Whether students are using their range of repertoires to affi liate
with peers, to distance themselves from the teacher or to hide certain gaps
in other repertoires, a close look at all these interactional phenomena
highlights delicate maneuvers students deploy each day to both preserve
their dignity and negotiate their status in widely varying communities –
including the academic community.
Emerging and receding repertoires
Instead of focusing on ‘correctness’, looking at ‘communicative repertoires’
entails a new approach to pedagogy. We can begin to understand
this shift in pedagogical strategy, by noticing how communicative repertoires
emerge and recede in classroom talk, and monitoring the results.
For example, I noticed many years ago, while doing research at an alternative
school in Los Angeles, in which many students had been in jail and
were currently on parole, that the topic of ‘jail’ occasionally emerged in
discussions between teachers and students. Sometimes these discussions
went smoothly, sometimes they led to confl ict, sometimes they led to a
dead end – even when the same teacher was involved. Upon closer look at