Language Diversity in the Classroom - ymerleksi - home

Discourse Analysis and its Discontents 29emphasis upon so-called ‘lived experience’ (as opposed, one surmises, tosome unlived variety), and a concern for procedural breadth and depthhave tended to give way to a new reductionism.Tusting and Maybin (2007: 576) have recently argued for a new termhere ‘linguistic ethnography’ as part of an emerging interdisciplinaryreconfiguration ‘in the contexts of late modernity and globalisation’. Thecollection to which their paper is an introduction (Rampton et al., 2007)and an earlier piece (Rampton et al., 2004) flesh matters out here; thelatter notes that:linguistic ethnography generally holds that, to a considerable degree,language and the social world are mutually shaping, and that closeanalysis of situated language use can provide both fundamental anddistinctive insights into the mechanisms and dynamics of social andcultural production in everyday activity. (Rampton et al., 2004: 2)Rampton (2007: 585) goes on to say that linguistic ethnography is bestcharacterized as a ‘site of encounter’ where various research perspectivescan come together; the assumption is that ‘the contexts for communicationshould be investigated rather than assumed’. These hardly seemoriginal observations. And Wetherell (2007: 668) suggests that thecontributions of linguistic ethnography to our understanding of identitywould benefit if we dropped the latter term, replacing it with ‘personalorder’:Personal order is derived from social order but is not isomorphicwith it. A person... is a site, like institutions or social interaction,where flows of meaning-making practices or semiosis... becomeorganised. Over time particular routines, repetitions, procedures andmodes of practice build up to form personal style, psycho-biographyand life history, and become a guide for how to go on in thepresent... In the case of personal order, the relevant practices couldbe described as ‘‘psycho-discursive’’... those which among the sumof social practices constitute a psychology, formulate a mental lifeand have consequences for the formation and representation of theperson.I apologize for inflicting so much of this on the reader, but it is importantto realize that this sort of wheel-spinning has come to attract more andmore adherents. If one looks back over the publications record of thosewho now seem to specialize in pseudo-insights, one typically finds thatthey began their careers by writing, in English, about important things, inways that reasonably intelligent people could understand. It is a great