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ABSTRACT
This paper addresses potentially problematic classroom episodes in which someone foregrounds a social division that is normally taken for granted. It illustrates the way in which linguistic ethnography can unpack the layered processes that collide in the breaking of silence, showing how linguistic form and practice, individual positioning, local institutional history and national education policy development all count, and it discusses the value of situated interactional data for teacher development. It presents two case studies, involving a Turkish language class in a Greek-Cypriot secondary school, and a discussion of Standard English in an inner London comprehensive.
Το παρόν άρθρο εξετάζει κάποια εν δυνάμει προβληματικά επεισόδια σε σχολικές τάξεις, στα οποία έρχονται στο προσκήνιο κοινωνικές διαιρέσεις που συνήθως θεωρούνται δεδομένες. Παρουσιάζει τον τρόπο με τον οποίο η γλωσσική εθνογραφία μπορεί να φανερώσει τις πολυεπίπεδες διαδικασίες που συμβάλλουν στο «σπάσιμο της σιωπής», εξετάζοντας ταυτόχρονα γλωσσικές μορφές και γλωσσικές πρακτικές, ατομικές τοποθετήσεις, την τοπική ιστορία και θεσμούς, και την ανάπτυξη εθνικής πολιτικής για την εκπαίδευση. Με βάση αυτά, το άρθρο συζητά στη συνέχεια την αξία της χρήσης δεδομέμενων συνομηλιακής αλληλεπίδρασης σε επιμορφωτικά σεμινάρια εκπαιδευτικών. Παρουσιάζει δύο μελέτες περίπτωσης, εκ των οποίων, η μία αφορά μια τάξη Τουρκικών σε Ελληνοκυπριακό λύκειο, και η δεύτερη μία συζήτηση για την πρότυπη Αγγλική γλώσσα σε σχολείο (comprehensive school) στο κεντρικό Λονδίνο.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on Contributors
Ben Rampton is Professor of Applied & Sociolinguistics and Director of the Centre for Language Discourse and Communication at King's College London (www.kcl.ac.uk/ldc). He does interactional sociolinguistics, and his interests cover urban multilingualism, ethnicity, class, youth, and education. He is the author of Crossing: Language & Ethnicity among Adolescents (Longman 1995/St Jerome 2005) and Language in Late Modernity: Interaction in an Urban School (CUP 2006), and a co-author of Researching Language: Issues of Power and Method (Routledge 1992). He co-edited The Language, Ethnicity & Race Reader (Routledge 2003) and Language & Superdiversity (Routledge 2015), and he edits Working Papers in Urban Language and Literacies (www.kcl.ac.uk/ldc). He was founding convener of the UK Linguistic Ethnography Forum, and was the Director of the King's ESRC Interdisciplinary Social Science Doctoral Training Centre from 2011 to 2014 (www.kcl.ac.uk/kissdtc).
Constadina Charalambous is a Lecturer of Language Education & Literacy at the European University of Cyprus. Her research interests include language education, interactional sociolinguistics, peace education, and more specifically language learning in contexts of conflict. She has conducted research on peace education initiatives in Cyprus and has been involved in teacher-training seminars. At the moment, she is conducting research on Other-language learning classes in Cyprus investigating the role of language learning in promoting peaceful coexistence (funded by the Leverhulme Trust).
Notes
1. Linguistic ethnography emerged from the encounter of British applied linguists with US linguistic anthropology (for discussion, see, e.g. Copland & Creese, Citation2015; Rampton, Citation2007; Snell, Shaw, and Copland, Citation2015). The Linguistic Ethnography Forum (www.lingethnog.org) was set up in Britain in 2000, incorporating both inter-disciplinarity and practical relevance in its rationale, and it now has over 750 members internationally. The term ‘linguistic ethnography’ appeared in two publications produced in 2000; in 2005, it was used in 28; in 2010, 121; and in 2014, 175 (Google Scholar).
2. Funded by King's College London, C. Charalambous's PhD fieldwork was conducted between September 2006 and January 2007. It was located (a) in a Lyceum in Nicosia, mostly following one Turkish language teacher in two of his classes for the whole of the autumn term; and (b) in an adult institution, following one teacher in one of her classes. Data collection involved classroom observation and recordings, interviews with language learners, teachers, ministry officials, and the collection of related documents (textbooks, curricula and other government texts).
3. This was part of a 28-month ESRC-funded project (1997–1999), and data collection involved interviews, participant observation, radio-microphone recordings of everyday interaction, and participant retrospection on extracts from the audio-recordings. Analysis focused on 4 youngsters (2 male, 2 female) in a tutor group of about 30 fourteen-year-olds, and centred on episodes selected from 37 hours of radio-mic audio-data.
4. In fact, on two of those occasions, he referred to Turks or Turkish-Cypriots to note their absence from students’ everyday experience - “You can't learn a language without studying it unless you live with people who speak it ( … ) We … in our country (pause) well we do have Turkish-Cypriots but we do not have contact with them.”
5. The students also regularly produced spontaneous strategic performances of exaggerated posh and Cockney, and these have been analysed as ‘creative practices’ that denaturalised class hierarchy (Rampton, Citation2006, Part III). But this was not accompanied by much collective propositional debate about class, and in the London data, students were relatively unresponsive when teachers tried to introduce the topic (Rampton, Citation2006, Chapter 7.2).
6. The laughter was, of course, also governed by a very local discourse dynamic. Mr Newton develops a syllogistic argument over the course of this extract, which can be summarised as: (1) SATs are hard because they require standard English (lines 8–11); (2) people who use (vernacular) aints and innits are handicapped in SATs (19–25); (3) because you're from London (and speak London vernacular), you're handicapped (26–41). He leads up to the climax in line 41 with a triple repetition of ‘because you're all from (London)’, including a dramatic delay before the last one, and he culminates with a (bald on-record) ‘extreme case formulation’. The structure of Mr N's speech invites a collective response immediately after line 41, and students provide this with their laughter (cf Atkinson, Citation1984).
7. In fact, in 2008–2009, following the election of a leftist government, the Ministry of Education announced as a general education objective the “cultivation of a culture of peaceful coexistence between Greek-Cypriots and Turkish-Cypriots” – see Zembylas et al., (forthcoming).
9. However, see the discussion of the intimate relationship between interaction and ideology in Gumperz et al. (Citation1979).