Classroom discourse analysis is probably the most direct application of sociolinguistic insights to teachers' daily practice. This chapter illustrates this point by showing how researchers and teachers may use the concept of 'communicative repertoire' as a lens for understanding and analyzing interaction in classrooms. I also demonstrate why an understanding of how students develop and become aware of their own communicative repertoire – rather than correctness in any homogeneous standard target language – is a relevant goal and application of the analysis of classroom discourse.

Communicative Repertoire

A communicative repertoire is the collection of ways individuals use language and literacy and other means of communication (gestures, dress, posture, or accessories) to function effectively in the multiple communities in which they participate. This concept grows out of John Gumperz's initial observations of the complex ways multilingualism was deployed across social groups in India. Here, he found, switching languages functioned in many of the same ways stylistic switching functions in monolingual communities. Gumperz was fascinated with the social effects of switching and mixing languages among bilinguals. Even the verbs 'switching' and 'mixing' seemed inadequate to describe the systematic ways parts of different, linguistically demarcated 'languages', were being used. To reflect the nexus of grammatical distinctions between languages and the social effects of linguistic choices, he coined the term verbal repertoire. (Gumperz, 1964, 1965). For Gumperz, a verbal repertoire is potentially more extensive than a 'language', including 'the totality of linguistic forms regularly employed in the community in the course of socially significant interaction' (Gumperz, 1971: 184).

Gumperz initially coined the term 'verbal repertoire' to address the massive variety of languages deployed in multilingual communities within India. By doing so, he reconceptualized the object of linguistic study, illustrating that the term linguists traditionally used to demarcate communities of speakers, 'language', was descriptively inadequate in a setting of societal multilingualism (cf. Sridhar, 1996). His insights have since been generalized to monolingual communities as well.