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A book review symposium
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Linguistics and Education 20 (2009) 200–208
Book review A book review symposium Language in Late Modernity: Interaction in an Urban School, B. Rampton. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (2006). 443 pp., ISBN 13 978-0-521-81263-4 Book review editor’s note: The following three commentaries by David Poveda, Stanton Wortham, and Fred Erickson, on Ben Rampton’s Language in Late Modernity (2006), comprise the second go-round of what we hope will become a regular feature of the book review section in Linguistics & Education: The Book Review Symposium. In each issue, I will choose a new book central to the interdisciplinary nexus of Linguistics and Education and asked three diversely situated colleagues to share their views of the book from their own (inter)disciplinary standpoints. (In our last issue, the focus was Stanton Wortham’s Learning Identity (2006)). One goal of the symposia is to encourage dialogue, so please do forward commentary on the current essays or suggestions for future symposia to me at [email protected]. Social class and education: A linguistic ethnographic perspective David Poveda Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain [email protected] Language in Late Modernity presents findings from a research project focused on adolescents discursive practices in a multiethnic, multilingual urban secondary school in London. The purpose is to examine the educational conditions and processes that affect contemporary British urban high school students in the context of the economic, cultural and political changes associated with late modernity/postmodernism. Simultaneously, the book is also a highly appealing argument in favor of interactional sociolinguistics and linguistic ethnography as powerful approaches to the study these social changes and their effects in the educational field. The book is very relevant to current studies of classroom discourse and a variety of problems that are addressed in the book: popular culture and education, foreign language instruction, sociability and interaction among adolescents and, most importantly, social diversity, social class and the distribution of power in and through formal education. It should be considered a major contribution to the field by a leading author in contemporary sociolinguistics. It is also a complex book. There is no need to hide this fact and pretend it will be accessible to a variety of audiences of different skills and backgrounds. Ben Rampton has a characteristic writing style one needs to become acquainted with before it can be appreciated. The book is ambitious in that, first, it addresses a number of research topics which in themselves touch on different fields of independent investigation (popular media and culture, classroom discourse structure, foreign language learning, etc.) and, second, does this in the process of building a conceptual and theoretical framework in which detailed discursive linguistic analysis dialogues with cultural studies and broader sociological theories. Admittedly, the author does take the time to present and outline the literature relevant to the different problems he addresses but this effort is not a merely descriptive review. Rather, the author critically engages with this literature, selectively pointing out its limitations and contributions to his research project and this analysis is only fully comprehensible to a reader who is already rather familiarized with these works. Unfortunately, in a context of academic hyper specialization, this is not usually the case and, like me, I suspect a number of readers will move through the book with a varying sense of intellectual security (e.g. the reader will be required to engage with the details of Conversation Analysis and with debates in contemporary Neo-Marxist Sociology). 0898-5898/$ – see front matter © 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.linged.2008.10.001
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Finally, the book is structured in such a way that its overall architecture is somewhat misleading until it is finally revealed in the final part of the book. The book is organized in clearly delimited parts. Part II deals with the general structure of teacher–pupil interaction and the role popular media has in adolescents lives and discourses. Part III deals with student’s appropriation of German/Deutsch, the modern foreign language the participants are taught at school. Supposedly, each of these sections allows for their own substantial conclusions and analysis; which they do, but they also leave open a number of issues one would have expected the author to have addressed, such as, for example, the role of gender in some of the patterns that are described. Part IV deals with social class and we soon discover that this is the central part of the book. Rampton focuses on the production and stylization of different traditionally British class-based accents (‘Posh’ and ‘Cockney’) in a variety of interactional settings by a range of pupils. Here the author displays fully his analytical skills, rigor and the potential of the conceptual apparatus of linguistic ethnography. The main argument is to show the relevance and role of class-based processes and subjectivities in the lives of these adolescent’s against a background of sociological writings and commentators who have claimed that social class has lost its force as an analytical and public category in contemporary Great Britain. Rampton refutes this conclusion by examining one type of discourse phenomena: how adolescents produce, in interaction, exaggerated forms of accented speech with which, based on their social origin, they are apparently not identified with. Drawing on a robust tradition of analysis of these stylizations (in which Rampton has a leading role), the author simultaneously disentangles: (a) how matters of social class are still central in the everyday lives and subjectivities of these students; (b) how the form of sociolinguistic analysis he practices, in contrast to other forms of social research, is especially equipped to uncover this centrality; and (c) thus, linguistic ethnographic research, necessarily, has to play a role in the construction of these general social theories. It is in this context, that one discovers that previous parts of the book take on a new role in supporting these final arguments (by providing contrastive data, a general background of patterns, etc.) and are not expected to be judged with the same criteria as Part IV of the book. Part V comprises a single final chapter that deserves particular mention. It is a methodological reflection in which the author makes explicit his analytical strategies and contextualizes them within the general project of linguistic ethnography as it is currently being defined and practiced primarily in the United Kingdom and other parts of Europe (see UK Linguistic Ethnography Forum, http://www.ling-ethnog.org.uk/index.htm). The chapter is especially useful for at least two reasons. It gives the reader necessary information to assess the arguments that have been introduced in the book—in other types of research reports this part would be introduced as a theoretical–methodological section before the presentation of results. More generally, it serves as a good template to understand the theoretical and methodological logic of linguistic ethnography. For readers who may want to adopt aspects of this perspective for their own research it clearly situates linguistic ethnography in relation to other traditions that are close to it (primarily North American Linguistic Anthropology) and it specifies the relationship between language, society and ethnographic research that is articulated within linguistic ethnography. Read as an exemplar of linguistic ethnographic research it also invites reflection more generally on the potentials and the limitations of this form of analysis and it is to the latter that I turn to close the review. As a “good ethnography,” the book provides detailed portraits of a selected group of adolescents. We are introduced to Hanif, Ninnette, Joan or Simon and get a sense of what their lives and trajectories as students are like. But my impression is that we do not do this to the same degree for each of the book’s protagonists. The detailed focus on the public life in the classroom, performance, stylization and institutional and social organization through talk, which is what linguistic ethnography can empirically document in this book (and perhaps more generally) seems to be better equipped to understand and value the behavior of students like Hanif, exuberant ring-leaders, visible and successful in the public spotlight of the classroom and school. In contrast, Ninnette’s more retracted style, in my opinion, results in a globally less elaborate and detailed view of her experiences and what they might mean in socio-educational terms. Admittedly, this is somewhat corrected in later parts of the book where Rampton, by introducing concepts from cultural studies and expanding the tools of interactional analysis, turns to student’s ‘subjectivities’ and Ninnette’s picture is enriched. Nevertheless, this move supports my impression and it poses what may be an important question. Linguistic ethnographic analysis attempts to be relevant to more substantial social analysis, but what if it is empirically better equipped to study fully only certain types of social actors (those who are “good” at articulating their worldviews, positions and roles in public social speech and interaction)? What would the consequences of this potential bias be for the general theoretical objectives of linguistic ethnography? It could be that this is an issue that is only particular to Language in Late Modernity and its singular methodological, personal and conceptual choices. The (always imperfect) methodological preferences of the book, in
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which radio-microphone data is used in favor of video-recordings, extensive participant observation or analysis of participant’s written productions; the linguistic devices that are examined in the book (stylization, ritual, etc.); or even the ethnographer’s better affinities with certain type of pupils, may result in a report which is empirically rich for certain types of pupils. This may not reflect any general bias in interactional sociolinguistics or linguistic ethnography or it may raise a potentially relevant issue in relation to claims about the general relevance of linguistic ethnography to social theory. In any case, it is one issue, among many, which the book invites us directly or indirectly think about, which confirms it is a book researchers in linguistics and education should read and consider seriously. Moments of Enduring Struggle Stanton Wortham University of Pennsylvania Ben Rampton has a gift for identifying subtle discursive patterns that hook into and illuminate broadly relevant social processes. His earlier work on “language crossing” focused on moments when multiethnic British youth inserted forms from other languages into ongoing talk in English (Rampton, 2005). His new book describes three similar patterns: the appearance of popular cultural forms (especially music) in school, students’ out-of-class use of forms from a foreign language learned in school and students’ stylized use of social-class stereotypical forms (“posh” and “Cockney”) dropped into everyday discourse. By tracing these distinctive types of language use through a remarkable dataset of recorded youth speech, Rampton is able to develop a precise, compelling empirical account. He then uses the data to explore questions of broad concern—about the continued relevance of social class, the influence of media on youth engagement in schools, the shift from teacher-centered to student-centered instruction and other important issues. Many write about these topics, but few ground their accounts in such precise and convincing empirical analyses. In addition to offering comprehensive sociolinguistic accounts, both statistical overviews of usage by different types of speakers and detailed discourse analyses of many instances of use, Rampton provides extensive discussions of several other dimensions that illuminate his central object—that object being the discourse of multiethnic, working class youth in one inner city school and the ways in which their discourse is shaped by and contributes to more enduring social struggles. The first dimension, beyond his extensive microanalyses, involves theory and history. Rampton engages with many relevant social theories, articulating distinctive features of the “late modern” condition these youth find themselves in and discussing British, American and continental accounts of subjectivity and emotion, language and society, globalization and postmodernism, capitalism and domination. He also describes historical transformations that have brought us into the current period and the distinctive features that have changed in larger social systems across time. The second dimension involves ethnography. Rampton provides extensive ethnographic background on the focal youth and the classroom, giving the reader a vivid sense of these students’ lives and relations in school. The third dimension involves method. Rampton provides a whole chapter, plus many other commentaries throughout, on how he did his research, on the relations between theory and method and on the warrants for his empirical claims. The extensive discussions of microanalysis, theory, ethnography and method together provide an illuminating and compelling account. Building from these complementary analyses, Rampton provides several lasting insights. He demonstrates the continuing relevance of social class, undermining the common academic lament that class does not matter any more. Through nuanced analyses of many speech events, he shows how youth themselves presuppose social class as part of their tacit accounts of the world. Through statistical sociolinguistic analyses, he finds social class in everyday behavior. Rampton also demonstrates how youth construct artful social commentaries, playing with language and its social connotations but also constructing commentaries that have bite. He demonstrates how popular media circulate into schools, where they do not displace academic tasks but instead contribute to a hybrid genre that allows both teachers and students to reach some of their goals. And he demonstrates how students confront rigid, teacher-centered lessons by constructing tacit commentaries on teachers and their pedagogical strategies. The central conceptual issue running through Rampton’s account involves the relation between interaction and social structure. His title, he says at the beginning of the book, intimates “both the rather grandiose and the fairly local” (p. 4). The book contains very abstract social theory, describing processes that take place over decades and involve very large groups of people spread out over the entire globe, but it also presents many analyses of secondslong snatches of talk. Rampton recognizes that he must articulate the relations between these two scales. At various points in the book, especially in early chapters, Rampton seems to follow a traditional argument about “structure” and “agency.” He cites Giddens (1984) and the classic account of “structuration” (p. 25). According to this account
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large scale social and historical processes provide “essential background” against which particular interactions must be construed (p. 11), because no event makes sense without presupposing some larger regularities of language use and social organization. Rampton “is always mindful of the positions that the participants occupy in larger/longer/slower social processes, seeking to reveal how these more established identities can be reproduced, contested and maybe changed by human agents interacting” (p. 24). Thus he also describes how “collective socio-historical schemas are continuously reconstituted within the flows and contingencies of situated activity” (p. 344). Larger scale processes constrain, but particular events can sometimes flout or redirect more entrenched regularities. Rampton argues that it is patronizing to ignore individuals’ agency, and he provides many nice illustrations of reflexive, unexpected and ironic usage. As Rampton acknowledges, however, a simple “dialectic” between “structure and agency” fails to explain how the two levels relate in practice (Agha, 2007; Bourdieu, 1972; Holland & Lave, 2001). He moves beyond this simple account in four different ways, at different points in his account. First, Rampton studies “meso-level” (p. 95) and “mid-level” (p. 89) processes that mediate between structure and agency. The two most important are “genre” and “ritual.” A genre “involves practical perceptions of how the social environment should come together with the details of meaningful activity in different types of situation, and as such, it integrates phenomena and processes that, from an analytic point of view, are often seen as operating at different levels” (p. 128). By describing how speakers’ generic expectations operate downward, as it were, to inform people’s interpretations and reactions in interaction, and upward, as those expectations are shaped by larger scale processes, Rampton begins to sketch in the spaces between structure and agency. “Ritual” serves a similar function, when he describes how students react to and sometimes parody teachercentered pedagogy, and also how that pedagogy fits with the organization of society. Second, Rampton says that he would like to study the historical development of classroom genres (p. 129) and the ontogenetic development of individuals’ sometimes divergent sociolinguistic habits (p. 365), but that his current data did not allow this. Including a diachronic dimension also allows an analyst to complicate the opposition between structure and agency, because it traces the emergence and transformation of “structure” over widely varying timescales (Agha, 2007; Wortham, 2006). Third, Rampton takes a more empirical stance and uses data from actual events to interrogate structural “claims with widespread contemporary currency” (p. 12). Theorists, policymakers and ordinary people speculate about the organization of the social world, claiming that social class has become less relevant, for instance, and that the penetration of popular culture into classrooms is undermining education. Rampton “look[s] at the proceedings more closely” (p. 88), and he provides evidence that social class is in fact relevant in many events and that popular culture weaves into academic activities in more complex ways than common wisdom would suggest. Fourth, Rampton points out that participants themselves make claims about the social world, and that the claims of social theory resemble these “secondary representations” (p. 223). He examines young people’s tacit claims about social structure and explores how their ideas about social structure influence behavior. Those trying to move beyond the theoretical limitations of “structure” and “agency” have pursued each of these four responses, often in isolation. Instead of presenting social structure as a simple fact that both constrains and is shaped by individual actions and events, people have offered more complex accounts by describing the many mediating processes that intervene between the “macro” and the “micro,” they have traced the spread and solidification of “structures” across different timescales, they have interrogated claims about structural “facts” by examining data, and they have focused on participants’ own social theories as the relevant level of analysis. Rampton does not attend to the emergence of structure, historically or ontogenetically, but he does pursue the three other approaches, drawing them together into a more complex account at the end of the ninth chapter. He argues that social structure really exists, he provides evidence for it and he describes the “tacit but continuous reiteration” and occasional transformation that occurs in events (p. 363). At the same time, he describes meso-level processes that mediate the influence of structure on agency. And he explores the interrelations between “primary realities” (p. 222) and people’s own “secondary representations,” as they come together to influence the outcome of interactions. Finally, he does all this with an eye toward debunking common claims about society and schooling, using data to show what is really going on. Rampton opens his book by describing how, in many disciplines, “research on classrooms is often seen as rather dull” (p. 3). His excellent and provocative analyses show that, to the contrary, many issues of central concern to various disciplines can be found and clarified through research on language and education—issues ranging from the forms and consequences of globalization to the influence of media to the development and legitimation of stratified social identities. As Rampton himself and others have argued (Levinson, 1999; Rampton, 2007; Wortham, in press), educational settings
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are important sites for the production of social relations that deserve attention from various disciplinary perspectives. This book illustrates the point admirably. References Agha, A. (2007). Language and social relations. New York: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1972–1977). Outline of a theory of practice. (R. Nice, trans.). New York: Cambridge University Press. Giddens, A. (1984). The constitution of society. Cambridge: Polity Press. Holland, D., & Lave, J. (Eds.) 2001. History in person: Enduring struggles, contentious practice, intimate identities. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press. Levinson, B. (1999). Resituating the place of educational discourse in anthropology. American Anthropologist, 101, 594–604. Rampton, B. (2005). Crossing (2nd ed.). Manchester, UK: St. Jerome Publishing. Rampton, B. (2007). Neo-Hymesian linguistic ethnography in the United Kingdom. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 11, 584–607. Wortham, S. (2006). Learning identity: The mediation of social identity through academic learning. New York: Cambridge University Press. Wortham, S. (in press). Linguistic anthropology of education. Annual Review of Anthropology. Putting on the panopticon: High school muttering in late modernity Frederick Erickson University of California, Los Angeles To call Rampton’s book a tour de force would be an understatement. Language in late modernity (LLM) is magisterial in at least four aspects: the combination of strength and judiciousness in its theoretical reach, the comprehension and cogency of its reviews of diverse literatures, the empirical skill it demonstrates in data collection and analysis, and its clarity in exposition. This is by no means a quick read, but the book is carefully organized to provide scaffolding for a variety of readers and is thus able to engage multiple audiences. That is important because sociolinguistics is an inherently multi-disciplinary field, and LLM manages to address substantive issues in related literatures, whose within-group readers often do not cross disciplinary lines; linguistics, sociology, anthropology, social theory, and education. The study reported in this book combined ethnographic observation with microanalysis of speech data from audio recordings; analysis that was done from the perspective of the “interactional sociolinguistics” of Gumperz (1982, 1999). Within an overall span of two years, five months of intensive fieldwork were done at “Central High,” an inner city high school. During that time 37 h of naturally occurring speech were recorded for four focal students, recording 3–4 h consecutively for each student, who wore a radio microphone during recording. As Rampton notes in the introductory chapter (Rampton, 2006, pp. 1, 33) this approach to data collection—from the midst of the classroom rather than from an adult observer’s position at the front or back of the classroom—placed talk among students in the foreground of research attention and in consequence it de-centered talk by the teacher, whose utterances from the front of the room can be seen as often interrupting the verbal exchanges that are taking place among students. To be sure, focus on peer interaction among students is not unique in research on life in schools, but what makes Rampton’s book distinctive is that he focuses upon talk among students not as it occurs only in hallways or lunchrooms or small groups in a classroom, but also within whole class lessons—student talk that is taking place at the very foot of a Foucauldian panoptical tower of observation, as it were (see Foucault, 1979), and not all that surreptitiously in such an arena. This research focus accomplishes a Copernican revolution in the study of classroom discourse, and this has profound implications for what Rampton is able to show us about talk in classrooms, about student life in schools more generally, and it seems to me, about issues in social theory as well. The book is organized in five main sections. Its central portion of the book consists of three sections addressing on various aspects of classroom talk: (a) whole class lecture/discussion led by the teacher, (a) instruction in a second language (German) and the use of mock German (“Deutsch”) by students in classes other than German as a contextualization cue signaling irony and critique of “straight” school, and (c) an extended discussion of the use by students of mock social class registers (stylized “Posh” and “Cockney”) as a means of breaching serious school frames, and
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perhaps also as an indexical expression of deeper social commentary. The book concludes with a chapter on methodological reflections. Both that chapter and the preceding section on social class and schooling comment at length on controversies in substantive theory as they are voiced in various literatures. There is careful ordering in the literature reviews that appear throughout the book. Some reviews come in section introductions or conclusions and some are presented at a chapter level. Ongoing exposition within each chapter is also undergirded by commentary in endnotes that are unusually rich in content, presenting pertinent citations and discussing fine points of theory. Not only are the social sciences considered in relation to sociolinguistics in a more thorough way that many essays in sociolinguistics attempt, but in presenting a study of an educational setting for talk the author has done his homework on the educational research that bears on his arguments and on the high school as a late modern social institution. Moreover, in an unusually ecumenical way the author has spanned the Atlantic in the educational research he considers, citing studies from the United States and Canada as well as those from Britain. Because of space limitations I can only touch here on a few of the book’s most important themes. Rampton shows us a high school in which, inside and outside formal classes, students address much talk to each other and some to their teachers. This pattern of attention, in which adults are in the background or off to the side, is a general phenomenon currently and apparently has been so for some time (see Thiessen & Cook-Sather, 2007, which presents international evidence on student experience in going to school). In other words, there is a high proportion of “muttering” going on (talk off the record by subordinates) in relation to “uttering” (talk on the record by superordinates and by subordinates). (The notion of muttering as an aspect of school talk was introduced by Adelman (1981), who in studying classroom discourse in early grades observed the ubiquity of muttering in relation to uttering.) Interestingly, at Central High this verbal hacking around does not disrupt entirely the conduct of instruction during lessons. Rather, teachers and students have worked out an accommodation—a hybrid form of whole class talk that incorporates the students’ verbal play into the overall instructional discourse, constituting a discursive/pedagogical “third space,” (as has been described for elementary school by Gutierrez et al.). Students make opportunistic use of a wide variety of speech genre resources in their play, including popular culture (snatches of song), mock German (“Deutsch”), mock proper register (“posh”) and mock London working class vernacular (“Cockney”). The latter three are spoken allusively, all flexibly exaggerated—i.e. they range in amounts of stylization such that “Deutsch” is not the literal Hochdeutsch of the schoolbook, nor is “posh” simply Received Pronunciation (the upper class “BBC” voice of an earlier era) nor is “Cockney” the very particular dialect that is said to have originated within the area encompassed by the sound of the bells of the Church of St. Mary Le Bow in Cheapside. Rather, these are parodic rough approximations and they are spoken opportunistically within particular moments of use. Opportunistic use to what ends? The students’ mutterings, as a kind of contained cheekiness, serve to puncture the serious frame of “straight” school. But why would that be necessary? Because the comprehensive high school routinely presents students with lots of boredom and face threat. In Britain and the United States this has increased over the last generation, as a result of ideologically-driven national educational policy—in Britain the Thatcherite conservative “reforms” (continued by Blair) and in the United States various “back to basics” and “accountability” movements culminating in the recent federal legislation “No Child Left Behind.” LLM documents the reactionary pressure in Britain to return to whole class instruction in high school (such instruction is ideally driven by the I–R–E sequenced discourse that is documented in the 1970s literature on classroom discourse—INITIATION (teacher question to a particular student), followed by RESPONSE (student answer), followed by teacher EVALUATION of that answer). I–R–E discourse organization has special Foucauldian resonance. By exposing individual students successively in single turn slots it maximizes panoptical surveillance by the teacher and by other students (just as is such surveillance maximized in the rank and file organization of desks of students in the classroom and in the marching order of soldiers on the parade ground and battlefield—spatial orderings of persons which as Foucault observes, both appeared for the first time in the mid-17th centuries, with the number of students in a classroom and of private soldiers in a platoon being on approximately the same scale). This rank and file exposure maximizes face threat potential for subordinates, whether student or soldier. And in armies and high schools, muttering by the troops is ubiquitous. Goffman (in the essays “On face work” (1967) and “Fun in games” (1961)) characterizes this muttering as a reaction to rituals of status degradation—such rituals must be punctured if one’s dignity is to be preserved. Scott (1990) calls it “hidden transcript”—transgressive action by subordinates that never becomes completely overt, but which nonetheless resists the totalizing exercise of control from above. Giddens (1984, p. 157) invokes Goffman directly in saying “Foucault’s bodies do not have faces. In circumstances of surveillance in the work place—where surveillance means direct supervision,
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at any rate—discipline involves a great deal of ‘face work’ and the exercise of strategies of control that have in some part to be elaborated by agents on the spot.” Rampton shows at Central High an artful accommodation by teachers and students. The students say in effect, “All right, we’ll march along with you, more or less in cadence with your whole class instruction—but don’t expect us to Goose Step!” As Rampton describes the lesson scenes, the foreign language instruction is the most formally ritualized, running closest to the canonical I–R–E discourse organization. Such a scene of pedagogical forced marching and its attendant face threat can be invoked in other school situations by the use of mock Deutsch. The sacrality of school’s seriousness can also be transgressed by parodic use of posh/Cockney by students. Rampton goes to great lengths to treat this class-dimensional employment of speech genres by students in a careful way, with almost half the book’s pages and much of its bibliography devoted to theoretical and empirical treatment of school language in relation to class. On the one hand he does not want to invoke class in a simplistically “modernist” explanatory way, assuming that it drives language use determiningly across all students all the time, or that in inner city schools there is an inherent “lack of fit” between the middle class discourses of school instruction and the working class speech habitus of the students, which is what the older sociolinguistic literature on class, language, and schooling suggested. On the other hand, he wants to avoid an extreme “post” or “late” modernist way of ruling out class from the explanatory picture entirely, as just another piece of obsolete master narrative. The “indexical valence” (Ochs, 1996, p. 418) of students’ use of posh/Cockney has something to do with class, Rampton argues. But that does not mean that the students are preoccupied with class, and it does not entirely inhibit the participation by students in instructional dialogue with teachers—rather, it gets incorporated into that participation. Paradoxically this contained mockery can at once be a kind of subaltern critique of the class-based patronizing “Lady Bountiful” tone of schooling, especially as schooling takes itself too seriously (“hold still, this will hurt but it’s good for you”) and it can also function as a medium of affiliation with school—an affordance—as it allows students ways of cooperating with teachers in whole class discussion that are at least minimally face-saving. (I am reminded of a critical folk art image from Nicaragua called “Se˜nor Ratón.” This shows a burro who appears to be ridden by a man dressed in the armor of a Conquistador—the Spanish colonial oppressor. However if you look closely at the human-like legs of the donkey and at those of its rider you see that it is actually the rider’s legs that are on the ground, not the donkey’s. El Se˜nor thinks that the burro is carrying him, but in actuality he has been manipulated into carrying the burro. So for the pedagogical “bargains” that teachers enter into with teenagers in high schools.) Distally at Central High the posh-Cockney mutterings in particular may be in part about subaltern class identification and resistance. But it seems to me that it is also about more proximal concerns of students—those Goffmanian ones concerning face threat and face saving—and these two lines of distal and proximal influence are not mutually exclusive. Moreover, we need to remember that puncturing the bubble of school seriousness and participating in school by foot dragging—going through the motions of compliance without full commitment to such compliance—is not just something that happens in inner city schools, but in schools whose students come from affluent backgrounds, again see Thiessen and Cook-Sather (2007) for examples from both the United States and Britain). In the United States there is growing evidence that in upper middle class suburban schools high proportions of the students are disaffiliated from the “straight” project of school instruction, and this is also shown in television/cinema portrayals of high school classes as deadly dull. The affluent students do not protest overtly, or drop out. But they “tune out” and shut down, doing what it takes to get good grades but going through the motions of learning without a commitment to it. In a London inner city high school, singing, “Deutsch,” Posh/Cockney, and occasional parodies of South Asian or Afro-Caribbean speech styles are discursive media for the accomplishment of contained irreverence by students. One wonders how such irreverence is done at Eton or Westminster or St. Paul’s—perhaps there is no irreverence there, but the indirect evidence of autobiographical accounts of public school experience by “old boys” writing later in life seems to belie that assumption. Do today’s Etonians do some of their muttering in mock Cockney? If not, how do they do it? Do they use mock Greek or Latin in ways that are analogous to the use of mock Deutsch at Central High? And where within the full spectrum of social situations in school do their mutterings appear most saliently? Here are lines for future research by scholars who possess the sociolinguistic imagination and empirical skill that Rampton has brought to his account of Central High. Concerning social theory, I think that Rampton’s data warrants a revision if not a more fundamental critique of Foucault’s claims to have identified a “microphysics” in the exercise of power through Discursive Formations and through panoptical surveillance. Yes, power is being exercised within mundane local conduct of everyday life as well as in grander realms of social structuring—but what kind of microphysics is it—Newtonian or quantum? Does LLM
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show an inherent indeterminacy in the workings of power at the societally sub-atomic level, as it were, as students mutter and spoof at the foot of the panopticon? Scott, a harsh critic of Foucault, would say that—he argues in the book length essay titled “Domination and the Arts of Resistance” for a “paper thin theory of hegemony” (Scott, 1990, pp. 82–85). As we have already seen, Giddens argues in a similar vein (1984, p. 157), and see also the discussion in Erickson (2004, pp. 134–146, 172–200). Rampton gets to the edges of what Scott, Giddens, and I are asserting but then seems to hang back. That is my one quibble with the connections Rampton makes between his analysis of sociolinguistic evidence and its implications for social theory. It seems to me he does not take quite far enough those implications, which suggest to me a qualitatively different kind of microphysics of power from that which Foucault had in mind. Finally, to what extent is the hybridity/flexibility in use of speech genres that LLM illustrates a “late modern” phenomenon? This is a question that is unanswerable empirically but it needs to be raised as a matter of social theory. Rampton mentions the early sociolinguistic work from the 1970s and early 1980s on what came to be called classroom discourse, and the more general ethnographic description of student life in schools that appeared in the same time span. Those literatures identified working class differences from a middle class “standard” register, as spoken by teachers and as constituting the canonical ways of speaking in classroom lessons, most particularly in I–R–E sequences. There were speculations in those literatures about anxiety among working class students concerning their ways of speaking, which did not match those of the school. Working class student resistance to schooling underlay working class disaffiliation with the enterprise of school. Working class students muttered, but apparently they did so quite consistently (and the assumption was that more affluent students did not mutter to the same extent). Yet in the mid-1990s when Rampton’s fieldwork was done it appears that student talk was more hybrid, more flexible—and indeed his funded research study has the word “heteroglossia” in its title. Is this because the speech of working class teenagers in the 1990s is actually more hybrid than it was a generation earlier? Or is it that a focus on hybridity became intellectually fashionable in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and that modern recording technology (the radio microphone) also made it easier to record student speech from the middle of the room, instead of from the front or side, as in the early days of recording classroom talk? I wonder especially about this because in my own early work in recording in classrooms, which used wireless microphones and also roving video cameras in recording many classroom scenes besides formal lessons and then which analyzed the recordings using techniques of interactional sociolinguistics that were similar to those used by Rampton today, we found many instances of speaking, especially on the recordings done with radio microphones, that did not fit simple binaries of “working class” or “middle class”—or of “African-American” and “white.” (In one study of Native American students in rural Canadian classrooms that was done in the 1970s Mohatt and I made a point of saying that what we seemed to be seeing were “mixed cultural forms” i.e. not “village English” in contrast to “standard English” but something fluctuating in between (Erickson & Mohatt, 1982, pp. 172–174). But at the time such observations were not considered interesting by some of our sociolinguistic colleagues. And for a while I wondered if I was doing the work right—I kept seeing fuzzy sets in our data rather than clear binaries. Later that was celebrated as “hybridity.”) Because we cannot go back 40 years and record again, together with re-doing earlier observational fieldwork through contemporary theoretical lenses, we will never be able to determine for certain whether student ways of speaking have changed in fundamental ways as modernity is becoming more and more “late,” or if the changes lie more in the eye and ear of the “late” researcher. But it might well be that the earlier ethnographic and sociolinguistics work overlooked some of the subtler kinds of muttering by students in school and overlooked as well the kinds of affiliation with school that were going on then, along with disaffiliation. At any rate, no single study can answer all questions, nor should it be expected to do so. LLM is a magnificent book—subtle and powerful in analysis, erudite, fair-minded. It is well worth reading and re-reading, and it positions us well for follow-up with further inquiry. References Adelman, C. (1981). Uttering, muttering: Collecting, using, and reporting talk for social and educational research. London: Grant McIntyre. Erickson, F. (2004). Talk and social theory: Ecologies of speaking and listening in everyday life. Cambridge: Polity Erickson, F., & Mohatt, J. (1982). Cultural organization of participation structures in two classrooms of Indian students (with G. Mohatt). In G.D. Spindler (Ed.). Doing the ethnography of schooling (pp. 132–174). New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.
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Foucault, M. (1979). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. New York: Random House/Vintage Books. Giddens, A. (1984). The constitution of society: Outline of the theory of structuration. Berkeley: University of California Press. Goffman, E. (1961). Fun in games. In Encounters: Two studies in the sociology of interaction (pp. 66–81). Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill (Reprinted in Lemert, C., & Branaman, A. (1997). The Goffman reader (pp. 129–139). Oxford: Blackwell). Goffman, E. (1967). On face-work: An analysis of ritual elements in social interaction. In Interaction ritual: Essays on face to face behavior (pp. 42–45). Garden City, NY: Anchor/Doubleday (Reprinted in Lemert, C., & Branaman, A. (1997). The Goffman reader (pp. 109–111). Oxford: Blackwell). Gumperz, J. (1982). Discourse strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gumperz, J. (1999). On interactional sociolinguistic method. In C Roberts, & S. Saranji, S. (Eds.), Talk, work, and institutional order (pp. 453–472). Berlin and New York: Mouton/deGruyter. Gutierrez, K., Rymes, B., & Larson, J. (1995). Script, counterscript, and underlife in the classroom. Harvard Educational Review, 65, 445–471. Ochs, E. (1996). Linguistic resources for socializing humanity. In J. Gumperz, & S. Levinson (Eds.), Rethinking linguistic relativity (pp. 438–469). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rampton, B. (2006). Language in late modernity: Interaction in an urban school. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Scott, J. (1990). Domination and the arts of resistance: Hidden transcripts. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Thiessen, D., & Cook-Sather, A. (2007). International Handbook of student experience in elementary and high school. New York and Berlin: Springer. Betsy Rymes The University of Pennsylvania, Graduate School of Education, Philadelphia, PA, United States
Linguistics and Education 20 (2009) 200–208
Book review A book review symposium Language in Late Modernity: Interaction in an Urban School, B. Rampton. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (2006). 443 pp., ISBN 13 978-0-521-81263-4 Book review editor’s note: The following three commentaries by David Poveda, Stanton Wortham, and Fred Erickson, on Ben Rampton’s Language in Late Modernity (2006), comprise the second go-round of what we hope will become a regular feature of the book review section in Linguistics & Education: The Book Review Symposium. In each issue, I will choose a new book central to the interdisciplinary nexus of Linguistics and Education and asked three diversely situated colleagues to share their views of the book from their own (inter)disciplinary standpoints. (In our last issue, the focus was Stanton Wortham’s Learning Identity (2006)). One goal of the symposia is to encourage dialogue, so please do forward commentary on the current essays or suggestions for future symposia to me at [email protected]. Social class and education: A linguistic ethnographic perspective David Poveda Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain [email protected] Language in Late Modernity presents findings from a research project focused on adolescents discursive practices in a multiethnic, multilingual urban secondary school in London. The purpose is to examine the educational conditions and processes that affect contemporary British urban high school students in the context of the economic, cultural and political changes associated with late modernity/postmodernism. Simultaneously, the book is also a highly appealing argument in favor of interactional sociolinguistics and linguistic ethnography as powerful approaches to the study these social changes and their effects in the educational field. The book is very relevant to current studies of classroom discourse and a variety of problems that are addressed in the book: popular culture and education, foreign language instruction, sociability and interaction among adolescents and, most importantly, social diversity, social class and the distribution of power in and through formal education. It should be considered a major contribution to the field by a leading author in contemporary sociolinguistics. It is also a complex book. There is no need to hide this fact and pretend it will be accessible to a variety of audiences of different skills and backgrounds. Ben Rampton has a characteristic writing style one needs to become acquainted with before it can be appreciated. The book is ambitious in that, first, it addresses a number of research topics which in themselves touch on different fields of independent investigation (popular media and culture, classroom discourse structure, foreign language learning, etc.) and, second, does this in the process of building a conceptual and theoretical framework in which detailed discursive linguistic analysis dialogues with cultural studies and broader sociological theories. Admittedly, the author does take the time to present and outline the literature relevant to the different problems he addresses but this effort is not a merely descriptive review. Rather, the author critically engages with this literature, selectively pointing out its limitations and contributions to his research project and this analysis is only fully comprehensible to a reader who is already rather familiarized with these works. Unfortunately, in a context of academic hyper specialization, this is not usually the case and, like me, I suspect a number of readers will move through the book with a varying sense of intellectual security (e.g. the reader will be required to engage with the details of Conversation Analysis and with debates in contemporary Neo-Marxist Sociology). 0898-5898/$ – see front matter © 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.linged.2008.10.001
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Finally, the book is structured in such a way that its overall architecture is somewhat misleading until it is finally revealed in the final part of the book. The book is organized in clearly delimited parts. Part II deals with the general structure of teacher–pupil interaction and the role popular media has in adolescents lives and discourses. Part III deals with student’s appropriation of German/Deutsch, the modern foreign language the participants are taught at school. Supposedly, each of these sections allows for their own substantial conclusions and analysis; which they do, but they also leave open a number of issues one would have expected the author to have addressed, such as, for example, the role of gender in some of the patterns that are described. Part IV deals with social class and we soon discover that this is the central part of the book. Rampton focuses on the production and stylization of different traditionally British class-based accents (‘Posh’ and ‘Cockney’) in a variety of interactional settings by a range of pupils. Here the author displays fully his analytical skills, rigor and the potential of the conceptual apparatus of linguistic ethnography. The main argument is to show the relevance and role of class-based processes and subjectivities in the lives of these adolescent’s against a background of sociological writings and commentators who have claimed that social class has lost its force as an analytical and public category in contemporary Great Britain. Rampton refutes this conclusion by examining one type of discourse phenomena: how adolescents produce, in interaction, exaggerated forms of accented speech with which, based on their social origin, they are apparently not identified with. Drawing on a robust tradition of analysis of these stylizations (in which Rampton has a leading role), the author simultaneously disentangles: (a) how matters of social class are still central in the everyday lives and subjectivities of these students; (b) how the form of sociolinguistic analysis he practices, in contrast to other forms of social research, is especially equipped to uncover this centrality; and (c) thus, linguistic ethnographic research, necessarily, has to play a role in the construction of these general social theories. It is in this context, that one discovers that previous parts of the book take on a new role in supporting these final arguments (by providing contrastive data, a general background of patterns, etc.) and are not expected to be judged with the same criteria as Part IV of the book. Part V comprises a single final chapter that deserves particular mention. It is a methodological reflection in which the author makes explicit his analytical strategies and contextualizes them within the general project of linguistic ethnography as it is currently being defined and practiced primarily in the United Kingdom and other parts of Europe (see UK Linguistic Ethnography Forum, http://www.ling-ethnog.org.uk/index.htm). The chapter is especially useful for at least two reasons. It gives the reader necessary information to assess the arguments that have been introduced in the book—in other types of research reports this part would be introduced as a theoretical–methodological section before the presentation of results. More generally, it serves as a good template to understand the theoretical and methodological logic of linguistic ethnography. For readers who may want to adopt aspects of this perspective for their own research it clearly situates linguistic ethnography in relation to other traditions that are close to it (primarily North American Linguistic Anthropology) and it specifies the relationship between language, society and ethnographic research that is articulated within linguistic ethnography. Read as an exemplar of linguistic ethnographic research it also invites reflection more generally on the potentials and the limitations of this form of analysis and it is to the latter that I turn to close the review. As a “good ethnography,” the book provides detailed portraits of a selected group of adolescents. We are introduced to Hanif, Ninnette, Joan or Simon and get a sense of what their lives and trajectories as students are like. But my impression is that we do not do this to the same degree for each of the book’s protagonists. The detailed focus on the public life in the classroom, performance, stylization and institutional and social organization through talk, which is what linguistic ethnography can empirically document in this book (and perhaps more generally) seems to be better equipped to understand and value the behavior of students like Hanif, exuberant ring-leaders, visible and successful in the public spotlight of the classroom and school. In contrast, Ninnette’s more retracted style, in my opinion, results in a globally less elaborate and detailed view of her experiences and what they might mean in socio-educational terms. Admittedly, this is somewhat corrected in later parts of the book where Rampton, by introducing concepts from cultural studies and expanding the tools of interactional analysis, turns to student’s ‘subjectivities’ and Ninnette’s picture is enriched. Nevertheless, this move supports my impression and it poses what may be an important question. Linguistic ethnographic analysis attempts to be relevant to more substantial social analysis, but what if it is empirically better equipped to study fully only certain types of social actors (those who are “good” at articulating their worldviews, positions and roles in public social speech and interaction)? What would the consequences of this potential bias be for the general theoretical objectives of linguistic ethnography? It could be that this is an issue that is only particular to Language in Late Modernity and its singular methodological, personal and conceptual choices. The (always imperfect) methodological preferences of the book, in
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which radio-microphone data is used in favor of video-recordings, extensive participant observation or analysis of participant’s written productions; the linguistic devices that are examined in the book (stylization, ritual, etc.); or even the ethnographer’s better affinities with certain type of pupils, may result in a report which is empirically rich for certain types of pupils. This may not reflect any general bias in interactional sociolinguistics or linguistic ethnography or it may raise a potentially relevant issue in relation to claims about the general relevance of linguistic ethnography to social theory. In any case, it is one issue, among many, which the book invites us directly or indirectly think about, which confirms it is a book researchers in linguistics and education should read and consider seriously. Moments of Enduring Struggle Stanton Wortham University of Pennsylvania Ben Rampton has a gift for identifying subtle discursive patterns that hook into and illuminate broadly relevant social processes. His earlier work on “language crossing” focused on moments when multiethnic British youth inserted forms from other languages into ongoing talk in English (Rampton, 2005). His new book describes three similar patterns: the appearance of popular cultural forms (especially music) in school, students’ out-of-class use of forms from a foreign language learned in school and students’ stylized use of social-class stereotypical forms (“posh” and “Cockney”) dropped into everyday discourse. By tracing these distinctive types of language use through a remarkable dataset of recorded youth speech, Rampton is able to develop a precise, compelling empirical account. He then uses the data to explore questions of broad concern—about the continued relevance of social class, the influence of media on youth engagement in schools, the shift from teacher-centered to student-centered instruction and other important issues. Many write about these topics, but few ground their accounts in such precise and convincing empirical analyses. In addition to offering comprehensive sociolinguistic accounts, both statistical overviews of usage by different types of speakers and detailed discourse analyses of many instances of use, Rampton provides extensive discussions of several other dimensions that illuminate his central object—that object being the discourse of multiethnic, working class youth in one inner city school and the ways in which their discourse is shaped by and contributes to more enduring social struggles. The first dimension, beyond his extensive microanalyses, involves theory and history. Rampton engages with many relevant social theories, articulating distinctive features of the “late modern” condition these youth find themselves in and discussing British, American and continental accounts of subjectivity and emotion, language and society, globalization and postmodernism, capitalism and domination. He also describes historical transformations that have brought us into the current period and the distinctive features that have changed in larger social systems across time. The second dimension involves ethnography. Rampton provides extensive ethnographic background on the focal youth and the classroom, giving the reader a vivid sense of these students’ lives and relations in school. The third dimension involves method. Rampton provides a whole chapter, plus many other commentaries throughout, on how he did his research, on the relations between theory and method and on the warrants for his empirical claims. The extensive discussions of microanalysis, theory, ethnography and method together provide an illuminating and compelling account. Building from these complementary analyses, Rampton provides several lasting insights. He demonstrates the continuing relevance of social class, undermining the common academic lament that class does not matter any more. Through nuanced analyses of many speech events, he shows how youth themselves presuppose social class as part of their tacit accounts of the world. Through statistical sociolinguistic analyses, he finds social class in everyday behavior. Rampton also demonstrates how youth construct artful social commentaries, playing with language and its social connotations but also constructing commentaries that have bite. He demonstrates how popular media circulate into schools, where they do not displace academic tasks but instead contribute to a hybrid genre that allows both teachers and students to reach some of their goals. And he demonstrates how students confront rigid, teacher-centered lessons by constructing tacit commentaries on teachers and their pedagogical strategies. The central conceptual issue running through Rampton’s account involves the relation between interaction and social structure. His title, he says at the beginning of the book, intimates “both the rather grandiose and the fairly local” (p. 4). The book contains very abstract social theory, describing processes that take place over decades and involve very large groups of people spread out over the entire globe, but it also presents many analyses of secondslong snatches of talk. Rampton recognizes that he must articulate the relations between these two scales. At various points in the book, especially in early chapters, Rampton seems to follow a traditional argument about “structure” and “agency.” He cites Giddens (1984) and the classic account of “structuration” (p. 25). According to this account
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large scale social and historical processes provide “essential background” against which particular interactions must be construed (p. 11), because no event makes sense without presupposing some larger regularities of language use and social organization. Rampton “is always mindful of the positions that the participants occupy in larger/longer/slower social processes, seeking to reveal how these more established identities can be reproduced, contested and maybe changed by human agents interacting” (p. 24). Thus he also describes how “collective socio-historical schemas are continuously reconstituted within the flows and contingencies of situated activity” (p. 344). Larger scale processes constrain, but particular events can sometimes flout or redirect more entrenched regularities. Rampton argues that it is patronizing to ignore individuals’ agency, and he provides many nice illustrations of reflexive, unexpected and ironic usage. As Rampton acknowledges, however, a simple “dialectic” between “structure and agency” fails to explain how the two levels relate in practice (Agha, 2007; Bourdieu, 1972; Holland & Lave, 2001). He moves beyond this simple account in four different ways, at different points in his account. First, Rampton studies “meso-level” (p. 95) and “mid-level” (p. 89) processes that mediate between structure and agency. The two most important are “genre” and “ritual.” A genre “involves practical perceptions of how the social environment should come together with the details of meaningful activity in different types of situation, and as such, it integrates phenomena and processes that, from an analytic point of view, are often seen as operating at different levels” (p. 128). By describing how speakers’ generic expectations operate downward, as it were, to inform people’s interpretations and reactions in interaction, and upward, as those expectations are shaped by larger scale processes, Rampton begins to sketch in the spaces between structure and agency. “Ritual” serves a similar function, when he describes how students react to and sometimes parody teachercentered pedagogy, and also how that pedagogy fits with the organization of society. Second, Rampton says that he would like to study the historical development of classroom genres (p. 129) and the ontogenetic development of individuals’ sometimes divergent sociolinguistic habits (p. 365), but that his current data did not allow this. Including a diachronic dimension also allows an analyst to complicate the opposition between structure and agency, because it traces the emergence and transformation of “structure” over widely varying timescales (Agha, 2007; Wortham, 2006). Third, Rampton takes a more empirical stance and uses data from actual events to interrogate structural “claims with widespread contemporary currency” (p. 12). Theorists, policymakers and ordinary people speculate about the organization of the social world, claiming that social class has become less relevant, for instance, and that the penetration of popular culture into classrooms is undermining education. Rampton “look[s] at the proceedings more closely” (p. 88), and he provides evidence that social class is in fact relevant in many events and that popular culture weaves into academic activities in more complex ways than common wisdom would suggest. Fourth, Rampton points out that participants themselves make claims about the social world, and that the claims of social theory resemble these “secondary representations” (p. 223). He examines young people’s tacit claims about social structure and explores how their ideas about social structure influence behavior. Those trying to move beyond the theoretical limitations of “structure” and “agency” have pursued each of these four responses, often in isolation. Instead of presenting social structure as a simple fact that both constrains and is shaped by individual actions and events, people have offered more complex accounts by describing the many mediating processes that intervene between the “macro” and the “micro,” they have traced the spread and solidification of “structures” across different timescales, they have interrogated claims about structural “facts” by examining data, and they have focused on participants’ own social theories as the relevant level of analysis. Rampton does not attend to the emergence of structure, historically or ontogenetically, but he does pursue the three other approaches, drawing them together into a more complex account at the end of the ninth chapter. He argues that social structure really exists, he provides evidence for it and he describes the “tacit but continuous reiteration” and occasional transformation that occurs in events (p. 363). At the same time, he describes meso-level processes that mediate the influence of structure on agency. And he explores the interrelations between “primary realities” (p. 222) and people’s own “secondary representations,” as they come together to influence the outcome of interactions. Finally, he does all this with an eye toward debunking common claims about society and schooling, using data to show what is really going on. Rampton opens his book by describing how, in many disciplines, “research on classrooms is often seen as rather dull” (p. 3). His excellent and provocative analyses show that, to the contrary, many issues of central concern to various disciplines can be found and clarified through research on language and education—issues ranging from the forms and consequences of globalization to the influence of media to the development and legitimation of stratified social identities. As Rampton himself and others have argued (Levinson, 1999; Rampton, 2007; Wortham, in press), educational settings
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are important sites for the production of social relations that deserve attention from various disciplinary perspectives. This book illustrates the point admirably. References Agha, A. (2007). Language and social relations. New York: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1972–1977). Outline of a theory of practice. (R. Nice, trans.). New York: Cambridge University Press. Giddens, A. (1984). The constitution of society. Cambridge: Polity Press. Holland, D., & Lave, J. (Eds.) 2001. History in person: Enduring struggles, contentious practice, intimate identities. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press. Levinson, B. (1999). Resituating the place of educational discourse in anthropology. American Anthropologist, 101, 594–604. Rampton, B. (2005). Crossing (2nd ed.). Manchester, UK: St. Jerome Publishing. Rampton, B. (2007). Neo-Hymesian linguistic ethnography in the United Kingdom. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 11, 584–607. Wortham, S. (2006). Learning identity: The mediation of social identity through academic learning. New York: Cambridge University Press. Wortham, S. (in press). Linguistic anthropology of education. Annual Review of Anthropology. Putting on the panopticon: High school muttering in late modernity Frederick Erickson University of California, Los Angeles To call Rampton’s book a tour de force would be an understatement. Language in late modernity (LLM) is magisterial in at least four aspects: the combination of strength and judiciousness in its theoretical reach, the comprehension and cogency of its reviews of diverse literatures, the empirical skill it demonstrates in data collection and analysis, and its clarity in exposition. This is by no means a quick read, but the book is carefully organized to provide scaffolding for a variety of readers and is thus able to engage multiple audiences. That is important because sociolinguistics is an inherently multi-disciplinary field, and LLM manages to address substantive issues in related literatures, whose within-group readers often do not cross disciplinary lines; linguistics, sociology, anthropology, social theory, and education. The study reported in this book combined ethnographic observation with microanalysis of speech data from audio recordings; analysis that was done from the perspective of the “interactional sociolinguistics” of Gumperz (1982, 1999). Within an overall span of two years, five months of intensive fieldwork were done at “Central High,” an inner city high school. During that time 37 h of naturally occurring speech were recorded for four focal students, recording 3–4 h consecutively for each student, who wore a radio microphone during recording. As Rampton notes in the introductory chapter (Rampton, 2006, pp. 1, 33) this approach to data collection—from the midst of the classroom rather than from an adult observer’s position at the front or back of the classroom—placed talk among students in the foreground of research attention and in consequence it de-centered talk by the teacher, whose utterances from the front of the room can be seen as often interrupting the verbal exchanges that are taking place among students. To be sure, focus on peer interaction among students is not unique in research on life in schools, but what makes Rampton’s book distinctive is that he focuses upon talk among students not as it occurs only in hallways or lunchrooms or small groups in a classroom, but also within whole class lessons—student talk that is taking place at the very foot of a Foucauldian panoptical tower of observation, as it were (see Foucault, 1979), and not all that surreptitiously in such an arena. This research focus accomplishes a Copernican revolution in the study of classroom discourse, and this has profound implications for what Rampton is able to show us about talk in classrooms, about student life in schools more generally, and it seems to me, about issues in social theory as well. The book is organized in five main sections. Its central portion of the book consists of three sections addressing on various aspects of classroom talk: (a) whole class lecture/discussion led by the teacher, (a) instruction in a second language (German) and the use of mock German (“Deutsch”) by students in classes other than German as a contextualization cue signaling irony and critique of “straight” school, and (c) an extended discussion of the use by students of mock social class registers (stylized “Posh” and “Cockney”) as a means of breaching serious school frames, and
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perhaps also as an indexical expression of deeper social commentary. The book concludes with a chapter on methodological reflections. Both that chapter and the preceding section on social class and schooling comment at length on controversies in substantive theory as they are voiced in various literatures. There is careful ordering in the literature reviews that appear throughout the book. Some reviews come in section introductions or conclusions and some are presented at a chapter level. Ongoing exposition within each chapter is also undergirded by commentary in endnotes that are unusually rich in content, presenting pertinent citations and discussing fine points of theory. Not only are the social sciences considered in relation to sociolinguistics in a more thorough way that many essays in sociolinguistics attempt, but in presenting a study of an educational setting for talk the author has done his homework on the educational research that bears on his arguments and on the high school as a late modern social institution. Moreover, in an unusually ecumenical way the author has spanned the Atlantic in the educational research he considers, citing studies from the United States and Canada as well as those from Britain. Because of space limitations I can only touch here on a few of the book’s most important themes. Rampton shows us a high school in which, inside and outside formal classes, students address much talk to each other and some to their teachers. This pattern of attention, in which adults are in the background or off to the side, is a general phenomenon currently and apparently has been so for some time (see Thiessen & Cook-Sather, 2007, which presents international evidence on student experience in going to school). In other words, there is a high proportion of “muttering” going on (talk off the record by subordinates) in relation to “uttering” (talk on the record by superordinates and by subordinates). (The notion of muttering as an aspect of school talk was introduced by Adelman (1981), who in studying classroom discourse in early grades observed the ubiquity of muttering in relation to uttering.) Interestingly, at Central High this verbal hacking around does not disrupt entirely the conduct of instruction during lessons. Rather, teachers and students have worked out an accommodation—a hybrid form of whole class talk that incorporates the students’ verbal play into the overall instructional discourse, constituting a discursive/pedagogical “third space,” (as has been described for elementary school by Gutierrez et al.). Students make opportunistic use of a wide variety of speech genre resources in their play, including popular culture (snatches of song), mock German (“Deutsch”), mock proper register (“posh”) and mock London working class vernacular (“Cockney”). The latter three are spoken allusively, all flexibly exaggerated—i.e. they range in amounts of stylization such that “Deutsch” is not the literal Hochdeutsch of the schoolbook, nor is “posh” simply Received Pronunciation (the upper class “BBC” voice of an earlier era) nor is “Cockney” the very particular dialect that is said to have originated within the area encompassed by the sound of the bells of the Church of St. Mary Le Bow in Cheapside. Rather, these are parodic rough approximations and they are spoken opportunistically within particular moments of use. Opportunistic use to what ends? The students’ mutterings, as a kind of contained cheekiness, serve to puncture the serious frame of “straight” school. But why would that be necessary? Because the comprehensive high school routinely presents students with lots of boredom and face threat. In Britain and the United States this has increased over the last generation, as a result of ideologically-driven national educational policy—in Britain the Thatcherite conservative “reforms” (continued by Blair) and in the United States various “back to basics” and “accountability” movements culminating in the recent federal legislation “No Child Left Behind.” LLM documents the reactionary pressure in Britain to return to whole class instruction in high school (such instruction is ideally driven by the I–R–E sequenced discourse that is documented in the 1970s literature on classroom discourse—INITIATION (teacher question to a particular student), followed by RESPONSE (student answer), followed by teacher EVALUATION of that answer). I–R–E discourse organization has special Foucauldian resonance. By exposing individual students successively in single turn slots it maximizes panoptical surveillance by the teacher and by other students (just as is such surveillance maximized in the rank and file organization of desks of students in the classroom and in the marching order of soldiers on the parade ground and battlefield—spatial orderings of persons which as Foucault observes, both appeared for the first time in the mid-17th centuries, with the number of students in a classroom and of private soldiers in a platoon being on approximately the same scale). This rank and file exposure maximizes face threat potential for subordinates, whether student or soldier. And in armies and high schools, muttering by the troops is ubiquitous. Goffman (in the essays “On face work” (1967) and “Fun in games” (1961)) characterizes this muttering as a reaction to rituals of status degradation—such rituals must be punctured if one’s dignity is to be preserved. Scott (1990) calls it “hidden transcript”—transgressive action by subordinates that never becomes completely overt, but which nonetheless resists the totalizing exercise of control from above. Giddens (1984, p. 157) invokes Goffman directly in saying “Foucault’s bodies do not have faces. In circumstances of surveillance in the work place—where surveillance means direct supervision,
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at any rate—discipline involves a great deal of ‘face work’ and the exercise of strategies of control that have in some part to be elaborated by agents on the spot.” Rampton shows at Central High an artful accommodation by teachers and students. The students say in effect, “All right, we’ll march along with you, more or less in cadence with your whole class instruction—but don’t expect us to Goose Step!” As Rampton describes the lesson scenes, the foreign language instruction is the most formally ritualized, running closest to the canonical I–R–E discourse organization. Such a scene of pedagogical forced marching and its attendant face threat can be invoked in other school situations by the use of mock Deutsch. The sacrality of school’s seriousness can also be transgressed by parodic use of posh/Cockney by students. Rampton goes to great lengths to treat this class-dimensional employment of speech genres by students in a careful way, with almost half the book’s pages and much of its bibliography devoted to theoretical and empirical treatment of school language in relation to class. On the one hand he does not want to invoke class in a simplistically “modernist” explanatory way, assuming that it drives language use determiningly across all students all the time, or that in inner city schools there is an inherent “lack of fit” between the middle class discourses of school instruction and the working class speech habitus of the students, which is what the older sociolinguistic literature on class, language, and schooling suggested. On the other hand, he wants to avoid an extreme “post” or “late” modernist way of ruling out class from the explanatory picture entirely, as just another piece of obsolete master narrative. The “indexical valence” (Ochs, 1996, p. 418) of students’ use of posh/Cockney has something to do with class, Rampton argues. But that does not mean that the students are preoccupied with class, and it does not entirely inhibit the participation by students in instructional dialogue with teachers—rather, it gets incorporated into that participation. Paradoxically this contained mockery can at once be a kind of subaltern critique of the class-based patronizing “Lady Bountiful” tone of schooling, especially as schooling takes itself too seriously (“hold still, this will hurt but it’s good for you”) and it can also function as a medium of affiliation with school—an affordance—as it allows students ways of cooperating with teachers in whole class discussion that are at least minimally face-saving. (I am reminded of a critical folk art image from Nicaragua called “Se˜nor Ratón.” This shows a burro who appears to be ridden by a man dressed in the armor of a Conquistador—the Spanish colonial oppressor. However if you look closely at the human-like legs of the donkey and at those of its rider you see that it is actually the rider’s legs that are on the ground, not the donkey’s. El Se˜nor thinks that the burro is carrying him, but in actuality he has been manipulated into carrying the burro. So for the pedagogical “bargains” that teachers enter into with teenagers in high schools.) Distally at Central High the posh-Cockney mutterings in particular may be in part about subaltern class identification and resistance. But it seems to me that it is also about more proximal concerns of students—those Goffmanian ones concerning face threat and face saving—and these two lines of distal and proximal influence are not mutually exclusive. Moreover, we need to remember that puncturing the bubble of school seriousness and participating in school by foot dragging—going through the motions of compliance without full commitment to such compliance—is not just something that happens in inner city schools, but in schools whose students come from affluent backgrounds, again see Thiessen and Cook-Sather (2007) for examples from both the United States and Britain). In the United States there is growing evidence that in upper middle class suburban schools high proportions of the students are disaffiliated from the “straight” project of school instruction, and this is also shown in television/cinema portrayals of high school classes as deadly dull. The affluent students do not protest overtly, or drop out. But they “tune out” and shut down, doing what it takes to get good grades but going through the motions of learning without a commitment to it. In a London inner city high school, singing, “Deutsch,” Posh/Cockney, and occasional parodies of South Asian or Afro-Caribbean speech styles are discursive media for the accomplishment of contained irreverence by students. One wonders how such irreverence is done at Eton or Westminster or St. Paul’s—perhaps there is no irreverence there, but the indirect evidence of autobiographical accounts of public school experience by “old boys” writing later in life seems to belie that assumption. Do today’s Etonians do some of their muttering in mock Cockney? If not, how do they do it? Do they use mock Greek or Latin in ways that are analogous to the use of mock Deutsch at Central High? And where within the full spectrum of social situations in school do their mutterings appear most saliently? Here are lines for future research by scholars who possess the sociolinguistic imagination and empirical skill that Rampton has brought to his account of Central High. Concerning social theory, I think that Rampton’s data warrants a revision if not a more fundamental critique of Foucault’s claims to have identified a “microphysics” in the exercise of power through Discursive Formations and through panoptical surveillance. Yes, power is being exercised within mundane local conduct of everyday life as well as in grander realms of social structuring—but what kind of microphysics is it—Newtonian or quantum? Does LLM
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show an inherent indeterminacy in the workings of power at the societally sub-atomic level, as it were, as students mutter and spoof at the foot of the panopticon? Scott, a harsh critic of Foucault, would say that—he argues in the book length essay titled “Domination and the Arts of Resistance” for a “paper thin theory of hegemony” (Scott, 1990, pp. 82–85). As we have already seen, Giddens argues in a similar vein (1984, p. 157), and see also the discussion in Erickson (2004, pp. 134–146, 172–200). Rampton gets to the edges of what Scott, Giddens, and I are asserting but then seems to hang back. That is my one quibble with the connections Rampton makes between his analysis of sociolinguistic evidence and its implications for social theory. It seems to me he does not take quite far enough those implications, which suggest to me a qualitatively different kind of microphysics of power from that which Foucault had in mind. Finally, to what extent is the hybridity/flexibility in use of speech genres that LLM illustrates a “late modern” phenomenon? This is a question that is unanswerable empirically but it needs to be raised as a matter of social theory. Rampton mentions the early sociolinguistic work from the 1970s and early 1980s on what came to be called classroom discourse, and the more general ethnographic description of student life in schools that appeared in the same time span. Those literatures identified working class differences from a middle class “standard” register, as spoken by teachers and as constituting the canonical ways of speaking in classroom lessons, most particularly in I–R–E sequences. There were speculations in those literatures about anxiety among working class students concerning their ways of speaking, which did not match those of the school. Working class student resistance to schooling underlay working class disaffiliation with the enterprise of school. Working class students muttered, but apparently they did so quite consistently (and the assumption was that more affluent students did not mutter to the same extent). Yet in the mid-1990s when Rampton’s fieldwork was done it appears that student talk was more hybrid, more flexible—and indeed his funded research study has the word “heteroglossia” in its title. Is this because the speech of working class teenagers in the 1990s is actually more hybrid than it was a generation earlier? Or is it that a focus on hybridity became intellectually fashionable in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and that modern recording technology (the radio microphone) also made it easier to record student speech from the middle of the room, instead of from the front or side, as in the early days of recording classroom talk? I wonder especially about this because in my own early work in recording in classrooms, which used wireless microphones and also roving video cameras in recording many classroom scenes besides formal lessons and then which analyzed the recordings using techniques of interactional sociolinguistics that were similar to those used by Rampton today, we found many instances of speaking, especially on the recordings done with radio microphones, that did not fit simple binaries of “working class” or “middle class”—or of “African-American” and “white.” (In one study of Native American students in rural Canadian classrooms that was done in the 1970s Mohatt and I made a point of saying that what we seemed to be seeing were “mixed cultural forms” i.e. not “village English” in contrast to “standard English” but something fluctuating in between (Erickson & Mohatt, 1982, pp. 172–174). But at the time such observations were not considered interesting by some of our sociolinguistic colleagues. And for a while I wondered if I was doing the work right—I kept seeing fuzzy sets in our data rather than clear binaries. Later that was celebrated as “hybridity.”) Because we cannot go back 40 years and record again, together with re-doing earlier observational fieldwork through contemporary theoretical lenses, we will never be able to determine for certain whether student ways of speaking have changed in fundamental ways as modernity is becoming more and more “late,” or if the changes lie more in the eye and ear of the “late” researcher. But it might well be that the earlier ethnographic and sociolinguistics work overlooked some of the subtler kinds of muttering by students in school and overlooked as well the kinds of affiliation with school that were going on then, along with disaffiliation. At any rate, no single study can answer all questions, nor should it be expected to do so. LLM is a magnificent book—subtle and powerful in analysis, erudite, fair-minded. It is well worth reading and re-reading, and it positions us well for follow-up with further inquiry. References Adelman, C. (1981). Uttering, muttering: Collecting, using, and reporting talk for social and educational research. London: Grant McIntyre. Erickson, F. (2004). Talk and social theory: Ecologies of speaking and listening in everyday life. Cambridge: Polity Erickson, F., & Mohatt, J. (1982). Cultural organization of participation structures in two classrooms of Indian students (with G. Mohatt). In G.D. Spindler (Ed.). Doing the ethnography of schooling (pp. 132–174). New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.
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Foucault, M. (1979). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. New York: Random House/Vintage Books. Giddens, A. (1984). The constitution of society: Outline of the theory of structuration. Berkeley: University of California Press. Goffman, E. (1961). Fun in games. In Encounters: Two studies in the sociology of interaction (pp. 66–81). Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill (Reprinted in Lemert, C., & Branaman, A. (1997). The Goffman reader (pp. 129–139). Oxford: Blackwell). Goffman, E. (1967). On face-work: An analysis of ritual elements in social interaction. In Interaction ritual: Essays on face to face behavior (pp. 42–45). Garden City, NY: Anchor/Doubleday (Reprinted in Lemert, C., & Branaman, A. (1997). The Goffman reader (pp. 109–111). Oxford: Blackwell). Gumperz, J. (1982). Discourse strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gumperz, J. (1999). On interactional sociolinguistic method. In C Roberts, & S. Saranji, S. (Eds.), Talk, work, and institutional order (pp. 453–472). Berlin and New York: Mouton/deGruyter. Gutierrez, K., Rymes, B., & Larson, J. (1995). Script, counterscript, and underlife in the classroom. Harvard Educational Review, 65, 445–471. Ochs, E. (1996). Linguistic resources for socializing humanity. In J. Gumperz, & S. Levinson (Eds.), Rethinking linguistic relativity (pp. 438–469). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rampton, B. (2006). Language in late modernity: Interaction in an urban school. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Scott, J. (1990). Domination and the arts of resistance: Hidden transcripts. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Thiessen, D., & Cook-Sather, A. (2007). International Handbook of student experience in elementary and high school. New York and Berlin: Springer. Betsy Rymes The University of Pennsylvania, Graduate School of Education, Philadelphia, PA, United States