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Repertoires of communicative possibility: Clues for creating classrooms that support learning and being
G Model LINEDU-608; No. of Pages 2
ARTICLE IN PRESS Linguistics and Education xxx (2016) xxx–xxx
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Linguistics and Education journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/linged
Book Review Essay
Repertoires of communicative possibility: Clues for creating classrooms that support learning and being Communicating Beyond Language: Everyday Encounters with Diversity, B. Rymes. Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, New York (2014). ISBN 978-0-415-50338-9 Betsy Rymes asks us to consider communication beyond language. Her focus is on what lies outside the limits of current thought—what is just beyond our reach. While Rymes draws on ideas that will be familiar to many readers—Gumperz’s (1978) notion of linguistic repertoire, Bakhtin’s construct of heteroglossia (1981) and Hayes’ and Gee’s description of affinity spaces (2010)—she is pushing us. She wants us to move beyond the currently assumed limits of these constructs, inviting us to think about communication in ways that are unrestricted by our current unrelenting focus on language. Most importantly, she suggests that thinking about communication in new ways will provide tools for addressing diversity and improving education for all children. As Rymes argues, people develop communicative repertoires across their lives through conversation, discussion, and argument, via active interaction with others including teachers, students, scholars, and colleagues. Rymes defines a communicative repertoire as “the collection of ways individuals use language and other means of communication (gestures, dress, posture, accessories) to function in the multiple communities in which they participate” (pp. 9–10). By highlighting communicative repertoires in their fullest sense, Rymes decenters language and recognizes the ways both the non-linguistic and the multilingual operate in everyday communication. Rymes applies communicative repertoire as a tool for considering new ways of rethinking diversity education. She argues that our focus should be on successful communication rather than on accuracy, correctness, or individual mastery a particular language or language practice. Unfortunately, schools have focused more on correctness rather than communication, which has had particularly devastating effects on children from diverse language communities. As Rymes lays out her argument, she proposes another significant tool, that of “everyday metacommentary” (p. 11). To Rymes, metacommentary references awareness of a “sign’s situated communicative value” (pp. 121–122). Metacommentary involves considering the language people use, the ways they speak, and the degree to which their words are deemed understandable or appropriate. These comments simultaneously reference whether people’s language is deemed worthy of attention and/or respect. Thus, attending to metacommentary and shared criteria for valuing or not valuing speech acts brings conversations closer to addressing diversity and educational equity. Drawing on Gumperz (1978), Rymes proposes that a person’s communicative repertoire approach affects people’s abilities to
interact with others as researchers, teachers, and students. Drawing on examples from the work of Gee and Hayes (2011), Gumperz (1978), and Rampton (2006), Rymes presents empirical evidence inviting readers to rethink how people draw on communicative repertoires as resources to engage in various communities, with a meta awareness of what to say and how to say it. These ideas are further developed in Chapter 2, where Rymes distinguishes a repertoire approach from a linguistic monolithic approach. Here we enter Mr. Z’s classroom, where multiple languages are used and valued in fluid and meaningful ways. This fluidity is not only described through classroom examples but also through Rymes discussion of the communicative repertoires that operate within these examples. In short, Rymes expertly adapts and crafts language for her own purposes. As readers, we encounter words such as “theify,” “Jaan-e-Man,” and “youthy,” taken up by students, teachers and by Rymes herself to capture the fluid, yet communicative nature of language within richly communicative classrooms. By using language in meaningfully playful ways, Rymes alerts us to the tentative dangers of the homogeneous views of language that exacerbate differences and impose a sense of “otherness” upon some groups of students. Such homogeneous views do not recognize the vast array of linguistic meanings and interactional functions that operate linguistically within diverse contexts. Contrary to standardized notions of language, a repertoire perspective situates languages as resources for communication that invite learners to embrace difference and develop participatory approaches to language use. In Chapters 3 through 5, Rymes takes readers on a grand journey, exploring how ways of speaking are grounded in our earliest interactions and our exposure to our native language(s). She highlights how attention to differences across languages contributes to the development of metacommentary, allowing people to think about language and how it operates in their lives. Rymes then highlights how mass media and popular culture contribute to cultural repertoires. In particular, she examines Soulja Boy’s YouTube video and Obama’s “Yes, We Can” speech to explore how popular media motifs are taken up across organizations and affinity groups, creating larger cross-cultural communities, as novel ways with language assume meanings and enter people’s communicative repertoires. Viral words and phrases cut across traditional social spaces, creating potential connections and relationships across people. In Chapter 5, Rymes analyzes other videos posted on YouTube to explore how existing narrative structures are replicated, abandoned, and reconceptualized with new content, and sometimes novel intention and effect. These examples contribute to Rymes’ argument that storylines circulate and change as people recycle, rework, and revisit ideas, plots, storylines, and modalities as they attempt to communicate with others. Perhaps most compelling for educators is Chapter 6, where Rymes explores the ‘proliferation of “youth” repertoire elements
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.linged.2016.08.003 0898-5898/
Please cite this article in press as: Compton-Lilly, C., et al. Repertoires of communicative possibility: Clues for creating classrooms that support learning and being. Linguistics and Education (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.linged.2016.08.003
G Model LINEDU-608; No. of Pages 2 2
ARTICLE IN PRESS Book Review Essay
among adults’ (p. 89). While the mixing of adult and adolescent repertoires has been described as either responsible adults channeling their inner child, or adults willfully becoming delusional about their adulthood, Rymes suggests that border crossings in repertoires have communicative potential in schools. Thus, we return to Mr. Z’s classroom, where we witness him carefully drawing on multiple repertoires, with an awareness of the various meanings and functions that words have for students who bring differing languages and expectations. In short, Mr. Z uses engaging and equitable youthy repertoires and is intimately aware of how they are being received and interpreted by students from diverse backgrounds. These insights lead the reader to Chapters 7 and 8, where Rymes explore how the “careful design of discussions and activities that foster multiple repertoires, can function to build common ground, rather than accentuate distinction between groups.” (p. 100). Specifically, readers take a deep dive into the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Erving Goffman. Through their work, Rymes reveals how language gains meaning through its use and subsequently contributes to the formation of social groups where people are either invited to participate or rejected. Thus, we find Mr. Z “nudging” his students into language games that are meaningful and compelling. Such games contribute to the construction of spaces in which students communicate with each other, and thus are invited to use their full range of language repertoires, “not only multiple languages but, through the web and movie-making software, multiple modalities” (p. 115). Rymes’ final thoughts outline key concepts concerning language. She begins by explaining that languages involve communicative repertoires reaching far beyond the words people speak. Rather than focusing on correctness, she highlights negotiation, as speakers draw on unique and powerful repertoires—including multimodal resources—when they negotiate meaning. Rymes suggests that awareness of differing ways of using language is essential, as repertoire elements can be deployed in hybrid combinations that invite participation from others, while nudging students to take on new communicative forms. Here, Rymes calls educators to invite students to collect, observe, and report on communicative features
operating in their schools and communities. These features might include naming, popular culture references, gestures, turn-taking, ways of telling stories, language practices, and youthy talk. By making these linguistic features the subject of talk, they also become the subject of thought, thus inviting metacommentary that situates students as “citizen sociolinguists” (p. 123). Students then gain awareness of the existence of multiple communicative repertoires and hone their “awareness of daily encounters with diversity, looking for regularities, while fully appreciating distinctions” (p. 123). Thus, both teachers and students build their repertoires by considering the repertoires of others, and by treating language as sets of communicative resources that can transcend communities, rather than as sets of skills to be mastered and performed. Classrooms like Mr. Z’s, can become sites of inclusivity for all students, rather than sites of failure. References Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). The dialogic imagination: Four essays by M.M. Bakhtin. In M. Holquist (Ed.), Four essays by M. M. Bakhtin (C. Emerson, M. Holquist, Trans.). Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Gee, J. P., & Hayes, E. R. (2011). Language and learning in the digital age. Routledge. Gumperz, J. J. (1978). The conversational analysis of interethnic communication. Interethnic Communication, 13–31. Rampton, B. (2006). . Language in late modernity: Interaction in an urban school (Vol. 22) Cambridge University Press.
Catherine Compton-Lilly ∗ Bess Van Asselt Jieun Kim University of Wisconsin-Madison, United States ∗ Corresponding
reviewer at: Curriculum and Instruction, University of Wisconsin-Madison, United States. E-mail address: [email protected] (C. Compton-Lilly) Available online xxx
Please cite this article in press as: Compton-Lilly, C., et al. Repertoires of communicative possibility: Clues for creating classrooms that support learning and being. Linguistics and Education (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.linged.2016.08.003
ARTICLE IN PRESS Linguistics and Education xxx (2016) xxx–xxx
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Linguistics and Education journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/linged
Book Review Essay
Repertoires of communicative possibility: Clues for creating classrooms that support learning and being Communicating Beyond Language: Everyday Encounters with Diversity, B. Rymes. Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, New York (2014). ISBN 978-0-415-50338-9 Betsy Rymes asks us to consider communication beyond language. Her focus is on what lies outside the limits of current thought—what is just beyond our reach. While Rymes draws on ideas that will be familiar to many readers—Gumperz’s (1978) notion of linguistic repertoire, Bakhtin’s construct of heteroglossia (1981) and Hayes’ and Gee’s description of affinity spaces (2010)—she is pushing us. She wants us to move beyond the currently assumed limits of these constructs, inviting us to think about communication in ways that are unrestricted by our current unrelenting focus on language. Most importantly, she suggests that thinking about communication in new ways will provide tools for addressing diversity and improving education for all children. As Rymes argues, people develop communicative repertoires across their lives through conversation, discussion, and argument, via active interaction with others including teachers, students, scholars, and colleagues. Rymes defines a communicative repertoire as “the collection of ways individuals use language and other means of communication (gestures, dress, posture, accessories) to function in the multiple communities in which they participate” (pp. 9–10). By highlighting communicative repertoires in their fullest sense, Rymes decenters language and recognizes the ways both the non-linguistic and the multilingual operate in everyday communication. Rymes applies communicative repertoire as a tool for considering new ways of rethinking diversity education. She argues that our focus should be on successful communication rather than on accuracy, correctness, or individual mastery a particular language or language practice. Unfortunately, schools have focused more on correctness rather than communication, which has had particularly devastating effects on children from diverse language communities. As Rymes lays out her argument, she proposes another significant tool, that of “everyday metacommentary” (p. 11). To Rymes, metacommentary references awareness of a “sign’s situated communicative value” (pp. 121–122). Metacommentary involves considering the language people use, the ways they speak, and the degree to which their words are deemed understandable or appropriate. These comments simultaneously reference whether people’s language is deemed worthy of attention and/or respect. Thus, attending to metacommentary and shared criteria for valuing or not valuing speech acts brings conversations closer to addressing diversity and educational equity. Drawing on Gumperz (1978), Rymes proposes that a person’s communicative repertoire approach affects people’s abilities to
interact with others as researchers, teachers, and students. Drawing on examples from the work of Gee and Hayes (2011), Gumperz (1978), and Rampton (2006), Rymes presents empirical evidence inviting readers to rethink how people draw on communicative repertoires as resources to engage in various communities, with a meta awareness of what to say and how to say it. These ideas are further developed in Chapter 2, where Rymes distinguishes a repertoire approach from a linguistic monolithic approach. Here we enter Mr. Z’s classroom, where multiple languages are used and valued in fluid and meaningful ways. This fluidity is not only described through classroom examples but also through Rymes discussion of the communicative repertoires that operate within these examples. In short, Rymes expertly adapts and crafts language for her own purposes. As readers, we encounter words such as “theify,” “Jaan-e-Man,” and “youthy,” taken up by students, teachers and by Rymes herself to capture the fluid, yet communicative nature of language within richly communicative classrooms. By using language in meaningfully playful ways, Rymes alerts us to the tentative dangers of the homogeneous views of language that exacerbate differences and impose a sense of “otherness” upon some groups of students. Such homogeneous views do not recognize the vast array of linguistic meanings and interactional functions that operate linguistically within diverse contexts. Contrary to standardized notions of language, a repertoire perspective situates languages as resources for communication that invite learners to embrace difference and develop participatory approaches to language use. In Chapters 3 through 5, Rymes takes readers on a grand journey, exploring how ways of speaking are grounded in our earliest interactions and our exposure to our native language(s). She highlights how attention to differences across languages contributes to the development of metacommentary, allowing people to think about language and how it operates in their lives. Rymes then highlights how mass media and popular culture contribute to cultural repertoires. In particular, she examines Soulja Boy’s YouTube video and Obama’s “Yes, We Can” speech to explore how popular media motifs are taken up across organizations and affinity groups, creating larger cross-cultural communities, as novel ways with language assume meanings and enter people’s communicative repertoires. Viral words and phrases cut across traditional social spaces, creating potential connections and relationships across people. In Chapter 5, Rymes analyzes other videos posted on YouTube to explore how existing narrative structures are replicated, abandoned, and reconceptualized with new content, and sometimes novel intention and effect. These examples contribute to Rymes’ argument that storylines circulate and change as people recycle, rework, and revisit ideas, plots, storylines, and modalities as they attempt to communicate with others. Perhaps most compelling for educators is Chapter 6, where Rymes explores the ‘proliferation of “youth” repertoire elements
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.linged.2016.08.003 0898-5898/
Please cite this article in press as: Compton-Lilly, C., et al. Repertoires of communicative possibility: Clues for creating classrooms that support learning and being. Linguistics and Education (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.linged.2016.08.003
G Model LINEDU-608; No. of Pages 2 2
ARTICLE IN PRESS Book Review Essay
among adults’ (p. 89). While the mixing of adult and adolescent repertoires has been described as either responsible adults channeling their inner child, or adults willfully becoming delusional about their adulthood, Rymes suggests that border crossings in repertoires have communicative potential in schools. Thus, we return to Mr. Z’s classroom, where we witness him carefully drawing on multiple repertoires, with an awareness of the various meanings and functions that words have for students who bring differing languages and expectations. In short, Mr. Z uses engaging and equitable youthy repertoires and is intimately aware of how they are being received and interpreted by students from diverse backgrounds. These insights lead the reader to Chapters 7 and 8, where Rymes explore how the “careful design of discussions and activities that foster multiple repertoires, can function to build common ground, rather than accentuate distinction between groups.” (p. 100). Specifically, readers take a deep dive into the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Erving Goffman. Through their work, Rymes reveals how language gains meaning through its use and subsequently contributes to the formation of social groups where people are either invited to participate or rejected. Thus, we find Mr. Z “nudging” his students into language games that are meaningful and compelling. Such games contribute to the construction of spaces in which students communicate with each other, and thus are invited to use their full range of language repertoires, “not only multiple languages but, through the web and movie-making software, multiple modalities” (p. 115). Rymes’ final thoughts outline key concepts concerning language. She begins by explaining that languages involve communicative repertoires reaching far beyond the words people speak. Rather than focusing on correctness, she highlights negotiation, as speakers draw on unique and powerful repertoires—including multimodal resources—when they negotiate meaning. Rymes suggests that awareness of differing ways of using language is essential, as repertoire elements can be deployed in hybrid combinations that invite participation from others, while nudging students to take on new communicative forms. Here, Rymes calls educators to invite students to collect, observe, and report on communicative features
operating in their schools and communities. These features might include naming, popular culture references, gestures, turn-taking, ways of telling stories, language practices, and youthy talk. By making these linguistic features the subject of talk, they also become the subject of thought, thus inviting metacommentary that situates students as “citizen sociolinguists” (p. 123). Students then gain awareness of the existence of multiple communicative repertoires and hone their “awareness of daily encounters with diversity, looking for regularities, while fully appreciating distinctions” (p. 123). Thus, both teachers and students build their repertoires by considering the repertoires of others, and by treating language as sets of communicative resources that can transcend communities, rather than as sets of skills to be mastered and performed. Classrooms like Mr. Z’s, can become sites of inclusivity for all students, rather than sites of failure. References Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). The dialogic imagination: Four essays by M.M. Bakhtin. In M. Holquist (Ed.), Four essays by M. M. Bakhtin (C. Emerson, M. Holquist, Trans.). Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Gee, J. P., & Hayes, E. R. (2011). Language and learning in the digital age. Routledge. Gumperz, J. J. (1978). The conversational analysis of interethnic communication. Interethnic Communication, 13–31. Rampton, B. (2006). . Language in late modernity: Interaction in an urban school (Vol. 22) Cambridge University Press.
Catherine Compton-Lilly ∗ Bess Van Asselt Jieun Kim University of Wisconsin-Madison, United States ∗ Corresponding
reviewer at: Curriculum and Instruction, University of Wisconsin-Madison, United States. E-mail address: [email protected] (C. Compton-Lilly) Available online xxx
Please cite this article in press as: Compton-Lilly, C., et al. Repertoires of communicative possibility: Clues for creating classrooms that support learning and being. Linguistics and Education (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.linged.2016.08.003