Play frames and social identities deals with two aspects of sociolinguistics that are of great importance to all scholars of social identity. First, Lytra focuses on play frames as a broad category including not just speech events that are obviously playful (e.g., jokes or mimicry) but also humming, chanting, music-making, and teasing. As I myself have spent time immersed in the lives of ten-year-olds in the classroom (both in Germany and in the U.S.), this book has helped me to make sense of the cacophony of talk, snatches of song, garbled jokes, and whispered insults that make up my own data. Playful talk is, as Lytra convincingly shows, an important site of identity construction and a means through which language ideologies are reproduced.
Second, Lytra’s research looks at interactions in a multicultural setting, in which children have different cultural and linguistic knowledge that they bring to the classroom, and to their construction of play frames. The details of her particular field site – a neighborhood in Athens populated by many Turkish-speaking minority families as well as Greek majority families – inform her analysis of how they use playful talk in specific ways. However, the issues she deals with – attitudes toward majority and minority groups and languages, integration, cultural stereotypes and ideas of nationality and national identity – are issues that have also arisen in my studies of children in schools in the U.S. and Germany, and I dare say are issues which impact more and more schools around the world today.
Lytra’s book consists of an introduction, six chapters, a conclusion and a postscript updating the reader on what has happened to some of the children in the study in the years since the research took place. Three appendices provide spatial information about the site (Maps and classroom plan), outline the corpora analyzed (Data sources), and give a key for the examples (Transcription conventions).
After a general presentation of both the topic and analytic focus in the introduction, chapter 1 begins the detailed description of the “ethnographically informed sociolinguistic approach’ used to look at ‘playful talk, play frames and identity work” (p. 13). The author notes that much previous research has looked at language socialization of playful talk in homogeneous groups and in noninstitutional settings; thus, this volume’s focus on a heterogeneous group in a school setting provides a unique perspective.
Lytra combines the broad category of playful talk with the concept of performance, in which the focus is on both the act of expression and the performer. Performances are bound by convention but also open to creative variation. This can be clearly seen in some of the examples given that involve lines from songs, TV shows, and so on; variations on the form or implication of the performed utterances are common. For these examples, Lytra applies Bauman & Briggs’s concept of entextualization, which involves both decontextualization and recontextualization when a segment of discourse is extracted from its original context and used in another.
Also discussed in this chapter is the process of framing, obviously central to the goals of the analysis. Lytra addresses three types of frames in her research: socio-relational frames, which signal that talk is casual (and usually off-task as well); instructional frames, for talk related to the curriculum; and play frames. All types of frames are interactively constructed through contextualization cues, and the border between them may be distinct or fluid; there are conflicts between frames as well as frequent switches back and forth from one to another. In the classroom, switches from instructional frames to play frames and back again are part of the normal course of each lesson.
Chapter 2, “Setting the scene,” describes the Gazi neighborhood in Athens in which the research site, an elementary school, was situated. In addition to majority Greek children, the classroom that is the focus of this book contained Turkish-speaking children who were part of a Muslim minority of western Thrace (in the northeast of Greece). Despite Greek citizenship, these Turkish speakers reported feeling as if they were treated like foreigners, and the two groups (as well as other minority groups in the district) remained socially fairly unintegrated. Yet because of the growing diversity in Athens as a whole and this neighborhood in particular, educational authorities sought to better serve the populations of certain communities by creating so-called intercultural schools, in which the teachers were trained in intercultural communication. The school in this study was declared an intercultural school in 1996; the research for this book began in January 1999.
Chapter 3 examines what is meant by playful talk, defining a playful episode as “a sequence of talk introducing and often sustaining a play frame that is bounded by talk and activity devoted to other matters” (76). The structure of playful talk varies from one utterance by one speaker to an initiation and subsequent uptake by multiple speakers. The linguistic repertoires of the children primarily included Turkish and Greek (at various levels of proficiency, but most quite fluent) for the minority children, and Greek for the majority children. The two codes played quite different roles in playful talk. Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of all talk in the classroom was in Greek. Turkish was sometimes used to invoke play frames, including some mimicry and use of isolated words by majority children, but such uses of Turkish by majority children were generally not taken up by minority children. Although the minority children seemed in some ways eager to bring the knowledge gained from their home experiences into the classroom, they seemed reluctant to relinquish their ownership of the Turkish language.
Although all of the children were involved in Greek popular culture, and Greek football chants and lines from Greek pop songs often served as contextualization cues for play frames, the minority children also incorporated quotable segments from Turkish-language TV and music into their playful talk. In addition to relying on popular culture, however, one of the most common forms of playful talk was the use of nicknames. Nicknames were “contextualization cues par excellence” (109). Although sometimes used to taunt, nicknames were frequently used to evoke play frames that were participated in by multiple children.
Chapter 4 addresses teasing in recreational contexts, noting that it often emerged at “interactional junctures” (122), that is, when there was a transition between activities or speech events. Response to teasing was most commonly a playful retort, but teasing was sometimes ignored or even reported to the teacher. In the latter case, however, the children seemed to be using the threat of the teacher to negotiate a powerful position more than actually to get the teacher to intervene on their behalf.
In chapter 5, play frames within the classroom are examined, with reference to Goffman’s concepts of “backstage” and “frontstage.” While in groups or during teacher-fronted instruction, backstage playful talk was the norm, and there were frequent shifts from play to instructional frames. Frontstage playful talk also occurred during lessons, including teacher-fronted instruction, and was even sometimes initiated by the teachers themselves. In most cases, however, the teacher’s role was to shift the classroom talk back to an instructional frame. As both backstage and frontstage talk, playful speech served to foreground identities for the participants other than those associated with their student or teacher roles.
In chapter 6, the functions of playful talk are explored. While the entertainment value of playful talk cannot be ignored, it is never “just play”; all social behavior is part of identity construction. For girls, teasing, particularly cross-sex teasing, was a way of disengaging from traditional passive gender roles; for boys, it was often a reinforcement of traditional masculine roles. Other types of playful talk served to construct identity in different ways. For example, references to popular culture created alliances between those who shared knowledge of and taste in music, TV show, videos, and so on, and excluded those who did not; teasing about academic achievement illustrated the group ideology of the value of education. All these types of playful talk served to structure relationships between the classroom participants in terms of hierarchy and alignments.
The one drawback of this volume is most apparent in the conclusion, which is a relatively straightforward summary of the preceding six chapters. Although the book is theoretically sound and articulately written, and leaves the reader with a good bit of knowledge about and insight into playful talk in a Greek school, there is no discussion of how theories have been extended or revised, or the implications of this ethnography for other contexts. While this does not detract from the pleasure of reading this very interesting study, the lack of discussion of broader connections prevents this good book from being a great one. As it stands, however, it is an important contribution to what we know about children’s playful talk in a setting of linguistic, cultural, and ethnic diversity.
