This book investigates language use and its social meaning in urban schools in contemporary Britain. The author argues that, in the context of late modernity, conditions for schooling have changed, and that the social positioning of students in multilingual classrooms echoes both the shifting of educational policy toward an instrumental view of learning, and a certain blurring of social boundaries in society at large. These changes have an impact on how students negotiate their identity and categories of social belonging, giving “old” strategies new meanings or using new kinds of linguistic resources. Investigating the use of both standard and vernacular varieties, Rampton discusses new ways in which relations of power, solidarity, or resistance are enacted, as well as how categories such as social class and class consciousness are being constructed. He presents a fresh look at language and identity construction in late modern classrooms and offers an impressive piece of sociolinguistic research that links empirical data analysis to theory.
The ethnographic study is based in two urban schools. The primary focus is on Central High, a state secondary school mainly for 11–16-year-olds, characterized by a sociolinguistically diverse school population considered to be disadvantaged. The other school, West Park, from which data were collected for the purpose of comparative analysis, is a rather typical white, middle-class school with a less diverse school culture. The ethnographic part of the study draws on data including field notes and audio recordings collected by children wearing microphones. The study is primarily interested in oral forms of language production and examines mainly “on” and “off” task interactions between students and the teacher or among the students.
The book is divided into five parts. The first grounds the study in cross-disciplinary literature on late modernity. The second, third, and fourth parts present analyses of urban classroom discourse, performances of “Deutsch,” and the stylization of social class. The book concludes with methodological reflections and directions for further sociolinguistic research.
A first body of analysis looks at whole class discourse, and whole class teacher talk, that is strengthened by current educational policy. In contrast to previous studies, Rampton observes the emergence of a new discursive genre, which he relates to late modernity and characterizes as “interdiscursive.” By mixing curricular and popular discursive genres, students resist the political dogma of teacher-led whole class instruction that reduces their opportunities for actively participating.
A second case study examines the use and meaning of popular culture for constructing social identity in the classroom. Quantitative analysis reveals that singing and whispering of popular music during classroom hours is more prominent at Central High than at West Park. Qualitative analysis of audio recordings brings out that the social meaning of such practices is twofold. On the one hand, they seem to challenge the curriculum and authority of the teacher. On the other, they appear to position individuals at school and within the peer group, playing out “orders of discourse” that have a clearly gendered dimension. As such, they express intimacy among girls, not serving for wider social recognition, whereas they are used as a strategy for seeking social influence by some male students. In conclusion, these practices confirm larger patterns of participation and social identification in line with teacher's judgments of who is seen as a “good” or a “bad” student.
A third aspect of the study addresses the use of German and how it creates social meaning across “on-task” and “off-task” contexts. This fairly new focus is interesting because “German didn't belong to anyone, and so its use as an additional language was safe from the issues of racist mockery and/or expropriations that can arise with crossing into other local codes” (p. 167). Rampton distinguishes between “rituals of German” as parts of an authoritative discourse related to German as a subject of foreign language instruction, and “rituals of Deutsch,” whose meaning is ambivalent and a comic reproduction of the teacher's discourse.
A large body of analysis looks at issues of social class. This focus is tied to processes in society at large, as boundaries of social classes seem to be blurring and “their cultural salience appears to be diminishing” (216). This raises the question of whether the choice of language varieties such as “posh” (traditionally associated with English upper class) or “Cockney” (traditionally associated with London working classes) can still be seen as identifying the speaker's social class. Although Rampton is wary of postmodernist views that reduce social class to a matter of choice and style, he is interested in examining his data for what they reveal about contemporary class consciousness.
In his analysis of “stylised speech” and “performances of exaggerated posh and Cockney” he uses different, complementary theoretical lenses in order to capture the complexity of meanings. First, he discusses his findings in contrast with Labovian methods that assume the existence of socioeconomically and linguistically bound communities and identify distinctive vernacular “we-codes” to signal “in-group” discourse and standard “they-codes” to signal “out-group” discourses. The author, instead, reveals instances where “vernacular and standard – posh and Cockney – are intermingled … [and where] exaggerations of posh or Cockney style are linked to the different positions within the pedagogic settlement in the classroom and success in school” (270). For instance, a high-class accent is “put on” by a girl who wants to signal the asymmetry of an encounter with her teacher; while a vernacularization of school knowledge takes place when a male student “[is] bringing the science worksheet to life with non-standard accents and popular discourse formats” (301). Utterances in stylized posh and Cockney can therefore be seen as reconfiguring the relationship between education and nonstandard speech. Yet, it has to be noted, the use of vernacular language had been a tradition in Central High, not being entirely disregarded by school teachers and officials.
Second, the author considers the concept of indexical valence (Ochs Reference Ochs, Gumperz and Levinson1996) to discover recurrent pattern or rules for stylizing posh and Cockney in specific situations. He identifies a new indexical value for the dialect that is associable with new forms of working-class Englishness (Back Reference Back1996). Finally, he considers the stylization of accents from a poststructuralist perspective that centers on the individual and its subjectivity. In that view, it appears that a standard accent is used to articulate an incompetent or uneasy relationship both with the body and with feelings and emotions, whereas a Cockney accent is associated with bodily activity and with the expression of feelings unconstrained by social manners.
This book is innovative and powerful in the way it links careful data analysis to concerns of social theory. A limitation of the study, which the author himself admits, lies in the kinds of ethnographic data that are used for analysis. Relying primarily on observation and audio-recorded data, the analysis is confined to the spoken word, excluding other modes (such as the visual and actional, made visible by video recordings) and leaving out nonverbal contextual cues that play an increasingly important role in the creation of social meaning, especially in classrooms of late modernity.
A most valuable contribution to further research, however, is provided in the last chapter. Here, Rampton provides an “explicit account of the analytic procedures” of his own research, laying out and reflecting on the ontological, epistemological, and methodological underpinnings. Encompassing the whole process of doing research, he starts by explaining his own ontology and the qualities and forces that he believes to underlie his “object of research”; then he discusses the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of his research, comparing the traditional epistemological premises of “linguistics” and “ethnography”; and finally he addresses the production of new knowledge and the role that analytical tools play in it. He advocates an approach that integrates “linguistics” and “ethnography” by “‘opening linguistics up’ inviting reflexive sensitivity to the processes involved in the production of linguistic claims, and … ‘tying ethnography down’ pushing [it] towards the analysis of clearly delimitable processes” (394), whereby local description should be impregnated with analytical frameworks drawn from outside (e.g., anthropology or cultural studies). Drawing on tools and procedures of analysis such as descriptive linguistics, discourse analysis, conversation and interaction analysis, and theories of indexicality, he aims at extending knowledge by inviting cross-disciplinary work.
Rampton encourages scholars to engage in comparative studies with similar goals, but also lists the criteria of success. “As well as being novel/original, such work needs to be careful, logical, accurate, accountable/explicit, sceptical, comparative and generally well-informed, resting on combinations of data, analysis, inferencing and theorisation that seem solid and properly constructed” (407). It remains to add that with this book the author himself has met his own requirements in an impressive way.
