- Betsy Rymes
Penn GSE
3700 Walnut St.
Philadelphia, PA, 10143 - 215-740-4112
Betsy Rymes
University of Pennsylvania, Educational Linguistics, Faculty Member
- Citizen Sociolinguistics, Communicative Practices, Linguistic Anthropology, Adolescent Literacy, Discourse Analysis, Pop Culture, and 10 moreYouth Subcultures, Fan Cultures, Linguistics, Educational Linguistics, Applied Linguistics, Critical Theory, Sociolinguistics, Ethnography, Cultural Heritage, and Social Theoryedit
- My research, theoretically and methodologically informed by linguistic anthropology, is centered in educational conte... moreMy research, theoretically and methodologically informed by linguistic anthropology, is centered in educational contexts and examines how languages, social interaction, and institutions influence an individual’s educational trajectory.edit
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This paper examines the different ways that professional experts and everyday language users engage in scaling practices to claim authority when they talk about multilingual practices and the social significance they assign to them.... more
This paper examines the different ways that professional experts and everyday language users engage in scaling practices to claim authority when they talk about multilingual practices and the social significance they assign to them. Specifically, we compare sociolinguists' use of the term translanguaging to describe multilingual and multimodal practices to the diverse observations of amateur online commentators, or citizen sociolinguists. Our analysis focuses on commentary on cross-linguistic communicative practices in Wales, or "things Welsh people say." We ultimately argue that by calling practices "translanguaging" and defaulting to scaled-up interpretations of multilingual communication, sociolinguists are increasingly missing out on analyses of how the social meaning of (cross)linguistic practices accrues and evolves within specific communities over time. By contrast, the fine-grained perceptions of "citizen sociolinguists" as they discuss their own communicative practices in context may have something unique and underexamined to offer us as researchers of communicative diversity.
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This article reports on preliminary research investigating linguistic diversity on a college campus by analyzing individuals' everyday comments about their own language. We developed a three-phase method to gather metacommentary from... more
This article reports on preliminary research investigating linguistic diversity on a college campus by analyzing individuals' everyday comments about their own language. We developed a three-phase method to gather metacommentary from members of the university community, then analyzed these comments by attending to distinctions participants themselves made about their own repertoire variation across contexts. We illustrate how individuals' fine-grained distinctions about their own language use can be a highly socially relevant tool for disaggregating broad, institutionally generated labels for linguistically, nationally, and culturally diverse groups. Our findings suggests that further research that accounts for the fine distinctions within everyday metacommentary may counter processes of homogenizationddiscussed herein in terms of erasure (Gal, 1998) and 'lumping'dcoming from both within and outside of institutionally labeled groups.
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In this article we lay out the tenets of a communicative repertoire (CR) approach to meeting the needs of English learners (ELs) in the context of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). We begin by critiquing the underlying theory of... more
In this article we lay out the tenets of a communicative repertoire (CR) approach to meeting the needs of English learners (ELs) in the context of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). We begin by critiquing the underlying theory of language that has long guided approaches to EL
instruction.We then illustrate how the CR approach builds on more contemporary understandings of language and language development, noting its compatibility with the CCSS, and providing an example of what this approach looks like in a twelfth-grade English literature class for ELs. Building from this example, we illustrate the general framework for developing lessons from a CR perspective that align with the CCSS and can be used across a variety of instructional settings. Finally, we discuss what policies and opportunities for teacher professional development might be conducive to supporting this instructional approach and to ensuring that the CCSS is implemented in ways that maximize EL academic achievement and engagement.
instruction.We then illustrate how the CR approach builds on more contemporary understandings of language and language development, noting its compatibility with the CCSS, and providing an example of what this approach looks like in a twelfth-grade English literature class for ELs. Building from this example, we illustrate the general framework for developing lessons from a CR perspective that align with the CCSS and can be used across a variety of instructional settings. Finally, we discuss what policies and opportunities for teacher professional development might be conducive to supporting this instructional approach and to ensuring that the CCSS is implemented in ways that maximize EL academic achievement and engagement.
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This article illustrates how, in a Web 2.0 environment, narrative ways of knowing circulate and disseminate indexical value associated with performances of accent. We compare the information-storing and –sharing functions of Web 1.0 and... more
This article illustrates how, in a Web 2.0 environment, narrative ways of knowing circulate and disseminate indexical value associated with performances of accent. We compare the information-storing and –sharing functions of Web 1.0 and Web 2.0, making an analogy between these two conceptualizations of the Internet and Jerome Bruner's (1986) two different modes of knowing: logico-scientific and narrative. Just as analyses of Web 2.0 discourse highlight collaborative construction, dissemination, and uptake of information, analysis of narrative illuminates the accrual of sociocultural meaning in collaboratively constructed stories. We use discourse and narrative analytic methods to investigate the social indexicality of " accent " in a corpus of Philadelphia Accent Challenge YouTube videos (and the associated comment sections), and we illustrate how indexical value accrues via the snowballing of reflexive metacommentary in the form of " small stories " (Bamberg and Georgakopoulou 2008) about these accent performances. We argue that discourse in Web 2.0 affords narrative ways of recirculating certain emblematic features of accent. This perspective on analyzing YouTube video-based accent data illuminates the value of YouTube accent performances as a source of linguistic anthropological and narrative insight, and narrative modes of knowing as a means of circulating language ideological discourse via Internet-based participatory culture.
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This article reports on preliminary research investigating linguistic diversity on a college campus by analyzing individuals' everyday comments about their own language. We developed a three-phase method to gather metacommentary from... more
This article reports on preliminary research investigating linguistic diversity on a college campus by analyzing individuals' everyday comments about their own language. We developed a three-phase method to gather metacommentary from members of the university community, then analyzed these comments by attending to distinctions participants themselves made about their own repertoire variation across contexts. We illustrate how individuals' fine-grained distinctions about their own language use can be a highly socially relevant tool for disaggregating broad, institutionally generated labels for linguistically, nationally, and culturally diverse groups. Our findings suggests that further research that accounts for the fine distinctions within everyday metacommentary may counter processes of homogenizationddiscussed herein in terms of erasure (Gal, 1998) and 'lumping'dcoming from both within and outside of institutionally labeled groups.
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A few thoughts on James C. Scott's book "Two Cheers for Anarchism" and Citizen Sociolinguistics as a form of tacit everyday language politics.
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Citizen Sociolinguistics relies precisely on what traditional sociolinguistic methodology has tried to avoid: speakers’ own awareness of their language and their conscious attempts to manipulate it. The examples in this chapter... more
Citizen Sociolinguistics relies precisely on what traditional sociolinguistic methodology has tried to avoid: speakers’ own awareness of their language and their conscious attempts to manipulate it. The examples in this chapter illustrate the power of this metalinguistic awareness and its related commentary to illuminate the social value people themselves put on their own language use (Rymes 2014). The chapter includes three topics, or flashpoints of metacommentary: the Roman dialect, the concept of the “Native Speaker” accent, and the highly institutionalized genre of the five paragraph essay. We conclude by theoretically situating Citizen Sociolinguistics within a history of sociocultural linguistics.
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... VOLUME/EDITION: PAGES (INTRO/BODY): xx, 384 p. SUBJECT(S): Code switching (Linguistics); Sociolinguistics; Languages in contact; Youth; Language and education; Language; Great Britain. DISCIPLINE: No discipline assigned. LC NUMBER:... more
... VOLUME/EDITION: PAGES (INTRO/BODY): xx, 384 p. SUBJECT(S): Code switching (Linguistics); Sociolinguistics; Languages in contact; Youth; Language and education; Language; Great Britain. DISCIPLINE: No discipline assigned. LC NUMBER: P115.3 .R36 1995. HTTP: ...
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The Internet provides a medium for everyday perspectives on language and communication and this blog explores those understandings.
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Citizen Sociolinguistics is a response to the need for a new sociolinguistic methodology that accounts for and partakes of the social demands and affordances of massive mobility and connectivity in today’s world. Drawing from contemporary... more
Citizen Sociolinguistics is a response to the need for a new sociolinguistic methodology that accounts for and partakes of the social demands and affordances of massive mobility and connectivity in today’s world. Drawing from contemporary theories about participatory culture (Jenkins et al., 2009), orders of indexicality (Silverstein, 2003), and communicative repertoire (Rymes, 2011), as well as the decades-old tradition of Citizen Science, Citizen Sociolinguistics traces the ways citizens, moreso than trained sociolinguists, understand the world of language around them. The goal of this article, and the methodology it proposes, is to document, learn from, and advocate for the importance of this public participation in sociolinguistic inquiry and exploration and its potential to illuminate our contemporary communicative environment.
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In this chapter, I illustrate that people accumulate idiosyncratic experiences as a repertoire of communicative resources and, in many everyday interactions, use those elements to strike out in new, more loosely encoded, de-enregistered... more
In this chapter, I illustrate that people accumulate idiosyncratic experiences as a repertoire of communicative resources and, in many everyday interactions, use those elements to strike out in new, more loosely encoded, de-enregistered ways. In the face of this kind of everyday creativity, however, a question arises: How do people make sense of each other? Without adhering to the normative expectations of language, dialect and register, how do people interacting know what counts as a communicatively relevant repertoire element? This chapter answers that question by using the concept of metacommentary--or comments about language--as a new ordering principal for understanding heteroglossic communication.
ABSTRACT Proper names have often been discussed by philosophers of language without the benefit of anthropological insights. This article combines research from these two fields in order to move toward a theory of nam-ing as social... more
ABSTRACT Proper names have often been discussed by philosophers of language without the benefit of anthropological insights. This article combines research from these two fields in order to move toward a theory of nam-ing as social practice - emphasizing the nature of ...
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EJ542898 - African American English: An Interview with Marcyliena Morgan.
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As its title suggests, this book focuses on attitudes to language and dialect pro-duction, perception, and use, and particularly on attitudes to language variation, dialect, speech style, language preference, and minority languages as... more
As its title suggests, this book focuses on attitudes to language and dialect pro-duction, perception, and use, and particularly on attitudes to language variation, dialect, speech style, language preference, and minority languages as well as their speakers. As we ...
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Today is your first day of second grade in the United States and you do not speak a word of English. You are in rural Georgia, and neither your classmates nor your teacher speak a word of Spanish, your primary lan-guage. You have arrived... more
Today is your first day of second grade in the United States and you do not speak a word of English. You are in rural Georgia, and neither your classmates nor your teacher speak a word of Spanish, your primary lan-guage. You have arrived in the middle of the year, and the ...
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It was with great personal interest that I read Palmer's impressive new book. I'm reminded that, a few years back, I listened to George Lakoff give a lecture at the University of Maryland. During it, he criticized... more
It was with great personal interest that I read Palmer's impressive new book. I'm reminded that, a few years back, I listened to George Lakoff give a lecture at the University of Maryland. During it, he criticized cultural anthropologists for not paying enough attention ...
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EJ572014 - Second Language Socialization: A New Approach to Second Language Acquisition Research.
... Article details. Review of Wallbangin': Graffiti and gangs in LA by Susan A. Phillips. Betsy Rymes. DOI: 10.1075/wll.4.2.14rym. In: Written Language & Literacy 4:2. 2001. (pp. 251256).
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In this paper I describe two contrasting classroom contexts for eliciting personal narratives, Drawingfrom a larger study in which I followed one second language learner as he proceeded through 2nd and 3rd grade, my analysis is based on... more
In this paper I describe two contrasting classroom contexts for eliciting personal narratives, Drawingfrom a larger study in which I followed one second language learner as he proceeded through 2nd and 3rd grade, my analysis is based on reading group interactions video-recorded ...
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8 Communicative Repertoires and English Language Learners Betsy Rymes Focus Points For the speaker of any language (s),correctness is a construction that func- tions secondarily to communicative goals. Rather than being correct or... more
8 Communicative Repertoires and English Language Learners Betsy Rymes Focus Points For the speaker of any language (s),correctness is a construction that func- tions secondarily to communicative goals. Rather than being correct or incorrect, a speaker's multiple ...
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Abstract This paper analyzes how two women in Northeastern Brazil narrate their experiences of dropping-out of school as children as a result of the socioeconomic-political context in place and of returning to a participatory education... more
Abstract This paper analyzes how two women in Northeastern Brazil narrate their experiences of dropping-out of school as children as a result of the socioeconomic-political context in place and of returning to a participatory education adult literacy program, the ...
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This paper describes and analyzes the use of Augusto Boal's Theater of the Oppressed (TO) as a form of academic and social support used in a recruitment and retention program for bilingual teachers in the Southeastern United... more
This paper describes and analyzes the use of Augusto Boal's Theater of the Oppressed (TO) as a form of academic and social support used in a recruitment and retention program for bilingual teachers in the Southeastern United States. We use critical discourse analysis to ...
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This paper examines non-instructional conversation in the classroom and illustrates how the giving of advice is contingently arranged in student-teacher conversations about jail at one urban charter school. Drawing on data which was... more
This paper examines non-instructional conversation in the classroom and illustrates how the giving of advice is contingently arranged in student-teacher conversations about jail at one urban charter school. Drawing on data which was video-recorded during a two-year ...
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This groundbreaking study of an innovative charter school is the first to look closely at adolescent identity by analyzing the language of narratives told in school. The author helps us to understand why adolescents sometimes make choices... more
This groundbreaking study of an innovative charter school is the first to look closely at adolescent identity by analyzing the language of narratives told in school. The author helps us to understand why adolescents sometimes make choices that seem incomprehensible to the adults who ...
The most important challenges humans face - identity, life, death, war, peace, the fate of our planet - are manifested and debated through language. This book provides the intellectual and practical tools we need to analyse how people... more
The most important challenges humans face - identity, life, death, war, peace, the fate of our planet - are manifested and debated through language. This book provides the intellectual and practical tools we need to analyse how people talk about language, how we can participate in those conversations, and what we can learn from them about both language and our society. Along the way, we learn that knowledge about language and its connection to social life is not primarily produced and spread by linguists or sociolinguists, or even language teachers, but through everyday conversations, on-line arguments, creative insults, music, art, memes, twitter-storms - any place language grabs people's attention and foments more talk. An essential new aid to the study of the relationship between language, culture and society, this book provides a vision for language inquiry by turning our gaze to everyday forms of language expertise.
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This book links issues of school reform with close analysis of language and interaction within a controversial charter high school in Los Angeles in the 1990's.
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This book links issues of school reform with close analysis of language and interaction within a controversial alternative charter high school in Los Angeles in the 1990's.
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Communicating Beyond Language offers a timely and lively appraisal of the concept of communicative repertoires—resources we use to express who we are when in dialogue with others. Each chapter describes and illustrates the communicative... more
Communicating Beyond Language offers a timely and lively appraisal of the concept of communicative repertoires—resources we use to express who we are when in dialogue with others. Each chapter describes and illustrates the communicative resources humans deploy daily, but rarely think about—not only the multiple languages we use, but how we dress or gesture, how we greet each other or tell stories , the nicknames we coin, and the mass-media references we make—and how these resources combine in infinitely varied performances of identity. The book also discusses how our repertoires shift and grow over the course of a lifetime, as well as how a repertoire perspective can lead to a rethinking of cultural diversity and human interaction, from categorizing people's differences to understanding how our repertoires can expand and overlap with others', thereby helping us to find common ground and communicate in increasingly multicultural schools, workplaces, markets, and social spheres. This book affirms the importance of communicative repertoires with highly engaging discussions and contemporary examples from mass media, popular culture , and everyday life. The result is a fresh and exciting work that will resonate with students and scholars in sociolinguistics, intercultural communication, applied linguistics, and education.
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This second edition of Classroom Discourse Analysis provides teachers with the tools to analyze talk in their own classrooms. Through discussions of classic and contemporary classroom research as well as examples, activities, and... more
This second edition of Classroom Discourse Analysis provides teachers with the tools to analyze talk in their own classrooms. Through discussions of classic and contemporary classroom research as well as examples, activities, and questions, the fi rst chapters walk readers through the techniques for recording, viewing, transcribing, and analyzing classroom interaction. The subsequent chapters focus on specifi c features of talk and interaction: patterns of turn-taking, the effects of intonation and nonverbal behavior, the role of storytelling in classrooms, and the way participation is framed by both physical classroom arrangements and ways of speaking. This new edition introduces a " repertoire approach " to the study of talk in classrooms, highlights the increasing role of linguistic variety and Internet resources, and includes examples from current research that emphasizes these aspects of classroom interaction.
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How do you use the Internet as a language learning tool? Relying on one teacher— even the most charismatic and inspirational teacher—is usually not enough to motivate students to use a new language and incorporate it into their identity.... more
How do you use the Internet as a language learning tool? Relying on one teacher— even the most charismatic and inspirational teacher—is usually not enough to motivate students to use a new language and incorporate it into their identity. Fortunately the World Wide Web has the potential to exponentially extend the language resources available to language students, language teachers, or the everyday language enthusiast. Many language learners independently develop their own strategies for using the Internet as a language learning tool and to augment the way they engage with speakers of their new language. Students have strategic ways of using Google searches and Google translate to answer grammar questions or learn about particular ways of speaking, but YouTube and other social media can also help students learn (and even participate in) local and international speech events and customs. Beyond the Internet tools for translating and editing, the Internet is loaded with amateur web series depictions of “Dorm Life”, “Break-ups”, and “How to talk like a Philadelphian," which give learners a glimpse into the types of language they will undoubtedly encounter and use outside the classroom. We call the practice of creating these resources and of using them innovatively “Citizen Sociolinguistics.” In this workshop, we will illustrate several ways to tap into this Citizen Sociolinguistic expertise to build students’ and teachers’ communicative repertoires in multiple languages.
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This paper examines the different ways that professional experts and everyday language users engage in scaling practices to claim authority when they talk about multilingual practices and the social significance they assign to them.... more
This paper examines the different ways that professional experts and everyday language users engage in scaling practices to claim authority when they talk about multilingual practices and the social significance they assign to them. Specifically, we compare sociolinguists’ use of the term translanguaging to describe multilingual and multimodal practices to the diverse observations of amateur online commentators, or citizen sociolinguists. Our analysis focuses on commentary on cross-linguistic communicative practices in Wales, or “things Welsh people say.” We ultimately argue that by calling practices “translanguaging” and defaulting to scaled-up interpretations of multilingual communication, sociolinguists are increasingly missing out on analyses of how the social meaning of (cross)linguistic practices accrues and evolves within specific communities over time. By contrast, the fine-grained perceptions of “citizen sociolinguists” as they discuss their own communicative practices in c...
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This article illustrates how, in a Web 2.0 environment, narrative ways of knowing circulate and disseminate indexical value associated with performances of accent. We compare the information-storing and -sharing functions of Web 1.0 and... more
This article illustrates how, in a Web 2.0 environment, narrative ways of knowing circulate and disseminate indexical value associated with performances of accent. We compare the information-storing and -sharing functions of Web 1.0 and Web 2.0, making an analogy between these two conceptualizations of the Internet and Jerome Bruner’s two different modes of knowing in his (1986) bookActual minds, possible worlds: logico-scientific and narrative. Just as analyses of Web 2.0 discourse highlight collaborative construction, dissemination, and uptake of information, analysis of narrative illuminates the accrual of sociocultural meaning in collaboratively constructed stories. We use discourse and narrative analytic methods to investigate the social indexicality of “accent” in a corpus of Philadelphia Accent Challenge YouTube videos (and the associated comment sections), and we illustrate how indexical value accrues via the snowballing of reflexive metacommentary in the form of narratives ...
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This paper examines the different ways that professional experts and everyday language users engage in scaling practices to claim authority when they talk about multilingual practices and the social significance they assign to them.... more
This paper examines the different ways that professional experts and everyday language users engage in scaling practices to claim authority when they talk about multilingual practices and the social significance they assign to them. Specifically, we compare sociolinguists’ use of the term translanguaging to describe multilingual and multimodal practices to the diverse observations of amateur online commentators, or citizen sociolinguists. Our analysis focuses on commentary on cross-linguistic communicative practices in Wales, or “things Welsh people say.” We ultimately argue that by calling practices “translanguaging” and defaulting to scaled-up interpretations of multilingual communication, sociolinguists are increasingly missing out on analyses of how the social meaning of (cross)linguistic practices accrues and evolves within specific communities over time. By contrast, the fine-grained perceptions of “citizen sociolinguists” as they discuss their own communicative practices in c...
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This article illustrates how, in a Web 2.0 environment, narrative ways of knowing circulate and disseminate indexical value associated with performances of accent. We compare the information-storing and -sharing functions of Web 1.0 and... more
This article illustrates how, in a Web 2.0 environment, narrative ways of knowing circulate and disseminate indexical value associated with performances of accent. We compare the information-storing and -sharing functions of Web 1.0 and Web 2.0, making an analogy between these two conceptualizations of the Internet and Jerome Bruner’s two different modes of knowing in his (1986) bookActual minds, possible worlds: logico-scientific and narrative. Just as analyses of Web 2.0 discourse highlight collaborative construction, dissemination, and uptake of information, analysis of narrative illuminates the accrual of sociocultural meaning in collaboratively constructed stories. We use discourse and narrative analytic methods to investigate the social indexicality of “accent” in a corpus of Philadelphia Accent Challenge YouTube videos (and the associated comment sections), and we illustrate how indexical value accrues via the snowballing of reflexive metacommentary in the form of narratives ...
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In this chapter, I illustrate that people accumulate idiosyncratic experiences as a repertoire of communicative resources and, in many everyday interactions, use those elements to strike out in new, more loosely encoded, de-enregistered... more
In this chapter, I illustrate that people accumulate idiosyncratic experiences as a repertoire of communicative resources and, in many everyday interactions, use those elements to strike out in new, more loosely encoded, de-enregistered ways. In the face of this kind of everyday creativity, however, a question arises: How do people make sense of each other? Without adhering to the normative expectations of language, dialect and register, how do people interacting know what counts as a communicatively relevant repertoire element? This chapter answers that question by using the concept of metacommentary—or comments about language—as a new ordering principal for understanding heteroglossic communication.
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ABSTRACT In this article, I deconstruct the macro–micro dichotomy by arguing that the very same mass‐media messages that appear culturally homogenizing (like catchy tunes and phrases) also invite creative recontextualizations ( Bauman and... more
ABSTRACT In this article, I deconstruct the macro–micro dichotomy by arguing that the very same mass‐media messages that appear culturally homogenizing (like catchy tunes and phrases) also invite creative recontextualizations ( Bauman and Briggs 1990 ). Moreover, the more widely circulated and mass‐produced a message is, the more highly diverse the interactions with it will be. This is because these widely circulating forms become incorporated into individuals' communicative repertoires ( Rymes 2010 ), to be deployed in indeterminate variation. I illustrate this point by first looking at the meteoric rise of the pop artist “Soulja Boy” and his hit, “Crank Dat.” Following the illustration of the circulation and recontextualization of Soulja Boy's hit, I apply this method of analysis to a less seemingly trivial mass‐mediated movement—Obama's first presidential campaign. By tracing the pathway of semiotic forms as recontextualized and circulated via YouTube, I demonstrate an empirical approach for studying how widely circulating cultural emblems become incorporated into individual‐level communicative repertoires. This approach is important to scholars of Anthropology and Education because, unlike micro–macro approaches, which often rely on a priori demographic or interactional categories for analysis, a repertoire approach provides a nonessentializing way of investigating difference in and out of classrooms.[communicative repertoire, popular culture, discourse analysis, mass media]
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This paper examines non-instructional conversation in the classroom and illustrates how the giving of advice is contingently arranged in student-teacher conversations about jail at one urban charter school. Drawing on data which was... more
This paper examines non-instructional conversation in the classroom and illustrates how the giving of advice is contingently arranged in student-teacher conversations about jail at one urban charter school. Drawing on data which was video-recorded during a two-year ...
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In this paper, I illustrate the cyclical proliferation of mass-mediated communicative repertoires through small-scale mechanisms of classroom discourse. I draw on examples of current advertising, classroom discourse data from diverse... more
In this paper, I illustrate the cyclical proliferation of mass-mediated communicative repertoires through small-scale mechanisms of classroom discourse. I draw on examples of current advertising, classroom discourse data from diverse studies, my own study of an elementary ESL group’s interaction, and mass mediated representations of classroom discourse on websites and TV shows about school to illustrate the relationship between mass media and classroom discourse. I analyze how mass-mediated metadiscourse creates new participation frameworks in classrooms that propel small-scale changes in classroom discourse and potentially facilitate the integration of new voices. Finally I discuss the implications of this analysis for how future research conceptualizes the roles of multilingual/multicultural students and teachers and the multiple communicative repertoires they command.
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The most important challenges humans face - identity, life, death, war, peace, the fate of our planet - are manifested and debated through language. This book provides the intellectual and practical tools we need to analyse how people... more
The most important challenges humans face - identity, life, death, war, peace, the fate of our planet - are manifested and debated through language. This book provides the intellectual and practical tools we need to analyse how people talk about language, how we can participate in those conversations, and what we can learn from them about both language and our society. Along the way, we learn that knowledge about language and its connection to social life is not primarily produced and spread by linguists or sociolinguists, or even language teachers, but through everyday conversations, on-line arguments, creative insults, music, art, memes, twitter-storms - any place language grabs people's attention and foments more talk. An essential new aid to the study of the relationship between language, culture and society, this book provides a vision for language inquiry by turning our gaze to everyday forms of language expertise.
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This groundbreaking study of an innovative charter school looks closely at adolescent identity by analyzing the language of narratives told in school. The author helps us to understand why adolescents sometimes make choices that seem... more
This groundbreaking study of an innovative charter school looks closely at adolescent identity by analyzing the language of narratives told in school. The author helps us to understand why adolescents sometimes make choices that seem incomprehensible to the adults who work with them. This unique book links issues of school reform with close analysis of language and interaction within a school to help us understand the needs and desires of some of today's diverse adolescent students. Both compelling and illuminating, this important book is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the human effects (and not just the resultant test scores) of school reform.
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Citizen sociolinguistics is a response to the need for a new sociolinguistic methodology that accounts for and partakes of the social demands and affordances of massive mobility and connectivity in today’s world. Drawing from contemporary... more
Citizen sociolinguistics is a response to the need for a new sociolinguistic methodology that accounts for and partakes of the social demands and affordances of massive mobility and connectivity in today’s world. Drawing from contemporary theories about participatory culture ( Jenkins, Purushotma, Wiegel, Clinton, & Robison, 2009), orders of indexicality (Silverstein, 2003), and communicative repertoire (Rymes, 2011), as well as the decades-old tradition of citizen science, Citizen sociolinguistics traces the ways citizens, more so than trained sociolinguists, understand the world of language around them. The goal of this article, and the methodology it proposes, is to document, learn from, and advocate for the importance of this public participation in sociolinguistic inquiry and exploration and its potential to illuminate our contemporary communicative environment. This article is available in Working Papers in Educational Linguistics (WPEL): http://repository.upenn.edu/wpel/vol29...
In this paper I describe two contrasting classroom contexts for eliciting personal narratives, Drawingfrom a larger study in which I followed one second language learner as he proceeded through 2nd and 3rd grade, my analysis is based on... more
In this paper I describe two contrasting classroom contexts for eliciting personal narratives, Drawingfrom a larger study in which I followed one second language learner as he proceeded through 2nd and 3rd grade, my analysis is based on reading group interactions video-recorded weekly during the second semester of each year. Comparison of oral narrative elicitation across years reveals two very different participation contexts. In one context narrative elicitation occurred primarily in two-person dialogue with the teacher. In another context oral narrative emerged through multi-party dialogue after the official lesson had closed. These contrasting contexts thus facilitated qualitatively different forms of co-tellership and as a consequence different opportunities for oral narrative. I intend this analysis of narrative elicitation to draw attention to the margins of classroom activity and by doing so to take a step toward a discourse-based solution to what has been recognized as a di...
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Communicating Beyond Language offers a timely and lively appraisal of the concept of communicative repertoires—resources we use to express who we are when in dialogue with others. Each chapter describes and illustrates the communicative... more
Communicating Beyond Language offers a timely and lively appraisal of the concept of communicative repertoires—resources we use to express who we are when in dialogue with others. Each chapter describes and illustrates the communicative resources humans deploy daily, but rarely think about—not only the multiple languages we use, but how we dress or gesture, how we greet each other or tell stories, the nicknames we coin, and the mass-media references we make—and how these resources combine in infinitely varied performances of identity. The book also discusses how our repertoires shift and grow over the course of a lifetime, as well as how a repertoire perspective can lead to a rethinking of cultural diversity and human interaction, from categorizing people’s differences to understanding how our repertoires can expand and overlap with others’, thereby helping us to find common ground and communicate in increasingly multicultural schools, workplaces, markets, and social spheres. This b...
Carelessly used language can create offense and miscommunication, so it’s important for students and teachers alike to pay attention to the language they use. Betsy Rymes advocates adopting a practice of citizen sociolinguistics, which... more
Carelessly used language can create offense and miscommunication, so it’s important for students and teachers alike to pay attention to the language they use. Betsy Rymes advocates adopting a practice of citizen sociolinguistics, which involves curiosity about the differences in the way people use language. She encourages teachers to build on students’ curiosity and wonderment about language to start conversations about how the words people use vary according to context. In addition, she suggests that when someone critiques another person’s language use, those “citizen sociolinguist’s arrests” can provide fodder for conversations about when and where certain types of language are appropriate. Such conversations require a willingness to take others’ views seriously and to avoid being tone-deaf about the different ways language is used.
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1. Communicative Repertoires: An Introduction 2. Multilingualism 3. Routines 4. Names and Nicknames 5. Mass Media and Popular culture 6. Storytelling 7. Performances: Putting It All Together 8. New Words for the New World: The... more
1. Communicative Repertoires: An Introduction 2. Multilingualism 3. Routines 4. Names and Nicknames 5. Mass Media and Popular culture 6. Storytelling 7. Performances: Putting It All Together 8. New Words for the New World: The Implications of a Repertoire Perspective
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Research Interests:
Proper names have often been discussed by philosophers of language without the benefit of anthropological insights. This article combines research from these two fields in order to move toward a theory of nam-ing as social practice -... more
Proper names have often been discussed by philosophers of language without the benefit of anthropological insights. This article combines research from these two fields in order to move toward a theory of nam-ing as social practice - emphasizing the nature of ...
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In this article, Kris Gutierrez, Betsy Rymes, and Joanne Larson demonstrate how power is constructed between the teacher and students. The authors identify the teacher's monologic script, one that potentially stifles dialogue and... more
In this article, Kris Gutierrez, Betsy Rymes, and Joanne Larson demonstrate how power is constructed between the teacher and students. The authors identify the teacher's monologic script, one that potentially stifles dialogue and interaction and that reflects dominant cultural values, and the students' counterscripts, formed by those who do not comply with the teacher's view of appropriate participation. The authors then offer the possibility of a "third space" — a place where the two scripts intersect, creating the potential for authentic interaction to occur. Using an analysis of a specific classroom discourse, the authors demonstrate how, when such potential arises, the teacher and students quickly retreat to more comfortable scripted places. The authors encourage the join construction of a new sociocultural terrain, creating space for shifts in what counts as knowledge and knowledge representation.
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In this article, Kris Gutierrez, Betsy Rymes, and Joanne Larson demonstrate how power is constructed between the teacher and students. The authors identify the teacher's monologic script, one that potentially stifles dialogue and... more
In this article, Kris Gutierrez, Betsy Rymes, and Joanne Larson demonstrate how power is constructed between the teacher and students. The authors identify the teacher's monologic script, one that potentially stifles dialogue and interaction and that reflects dominant cultural values, and the students' counterscripts, formed by those who do not comply with the teacher's view of appropriate participation. The authors then offer the possibility of a "third space" — a place where the two scripts intersect, creating the potential for authentic interaction to occur. Using an analysis of a specific classroom discourse, the authors demonstrate how, when such potential arises, the teacher and students quickly retreat to more comfortable scripted places. The authors encourage the join construction of a new sociocultural terrain, creating space for shifts in what counts as knowledge and knowledge representation.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Classroom Discourse Analysis: A Tool for Critical Reflection makes techniques widely used in the field of discourse analysis accessible to a broad audience and illustrates their application in the study of classroom talk. Separate... more
Classroom Discourse Analysis: A Tool for Critical Reflection makes techniques widely used in the field of discourse analysis accessible to a broad audience and illustrates their application in the study of classroom talk. Separate chapters illustrate the analysis of interactional ...
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EJ542898 - African American English: An Interview with Marcyliena Morgan.
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Citizen sociolinguistics is a response to the need for a new sociolinguistic methodology that accounts for and partakes of the social demands and affordances of massive mobility and connectivity in today's world. Drawing from... more
Citizen sociolinguistics is a response to the need for a new sociolinguistic methodology that accounts for and partakes of the social demands and affordances of massive mobility and connectivity in today's world. Drawing from contemporary theories about participatory culture (Jenkins, Purushotma, Wiegel, Clinton, & Robison, 2009), orders of indexicality (Silverstein, 2003), and communicative repertoire (Rymes, 2011), as well as the decades-old tradition of citizen science, Citizen sociolinguistics traces the ways citizens, more so than trained sociolinguists, understand the world of language around them. The goal of this article, and the methodology it proposes, is to document, learn from, and advocate for the importance of this public participation in sociolinguistic inquiry and exploration and its potential to illuminate our contemporary communicative environment. I f you are like many people who read articles like this one, you probably took The New York Times Dialect Quiz (K...