Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

538 Part 6: Language and Interaction
In this conversation at the same school, but with different students, several
weeks later, instead of reacting to a student story about jail with moralizing
adult lexicon, Tim leaned back in his chair and uttered the casually
empathic, ‘I hear ya’. After this emergent matching of repertoires, the discussion
fl owed. Ultimately, the students in the second group ended up
agreeing with the teacher’s perspective that going to jail is ‘not proper’,
although they never used that diction to express it. In this way, the teacher,
by modulating his repertoire, earned ‘rights to advise’ these students (for
further analysis of these contrasting examples, see Rymes, 1997).
In the fi rst jail discussion, Tim’s repertoire emerged as a stark contrast
to the students’. But in the second, when he spoke, his repertoire modulated
as he voiced empathy with Keneisha. This opportunity for the
expression of like-mindedness seemed to emerge as a matter of chance.
But awareness of circulating repertoires and their effects can build once it
is acknowledged as a valuable activity. Recognizing the ebb and fl ow of
teacher and student repertoires across contexts makes it possible to do
more than simply focus on a correct ‘standard’, or the ‘proper’ thing to do,
and to focus instead, on moving across discourse boundaries so that
human connection and relevant learning can occur.
Accommodating repertoires different from our own
Recognizing new repertoires need not mean that we conform to student
repertoires or expect them to learn our own. Just as a fulfi lling conversation
involves much more than giving ones’ interlocutor pat answers
or what we think they want, classroom talk need not involve students
giving the teacher what they think she wants to hear – or for that matter, a
teacher trying to sound just like her students! In any sustained dialog,
however, conversationalists begin to take on characteristics of each other’s
communicative repertoire. Similarly, over the course of a year, participants
in a classroom community will probably begin to take on aspects of one
another’s repertoires. Sometimes, this involves ‘giving the teacher what
she wants’ (as when students try to ‘pass’ as English fl uent); at other times,
it may involve giving in to ‘peer pressure’ (as when JoJo plays ‘dumb’). As
Tim, the teacher above illustrates, in the best cases, an individual carefully
modulates his or her repertoire to achieve dialogue with others. No one is
‘giving in’ but both are gaining by occupying a third position in which
collaboration across repertoires is possible.
As Sonia Nieto (1999) writes, ‘accommodation’ must be bidirectional.
Students accommodate to school routines and repertoires, but teachers
accommodate to students’ repertoires as well. Not surprisingly, schools
that do well show evidence of both kinds of accommodation: Students are
learning repertoires of school success; teachers are learning that students’
native repertoires are valuable (e.g. Lucas et al., 1990; Sheets, 1995). When