Ben Rampton

The Idealised Native Speaker, Reified Ethnicities, and Classroom Realities

TESOL practice in the schooling sector in England has implicitly assumed that ESL students are linguistic and social outsiders and that there is a neat one-to-one correspondence between ethnicity and language. This perspective has tended to conceptualise L2 learners as a linguistically diverse group (from non-English-speaking backgrounds) but with similar language learning needs. However, demographic and social changes in the past 30 years have rendered such assumptions inadequate and misleading, particularly in multiethnic urban areas. In this article we seek to (a) offer an alternative account of the classroom realities in contemporary multilingual schools where the linguistic profiles and language learning needs of ESL students are not easily understood in terms of fixed concepts of ethnicity and language; (b) draw on recent developments in cultural theory to clarify the shifting and changing relationship among ethnicity, social identity, and language use in the context of postcolonial diaspora; and (c) question the pedagogical relevance of the notion of native speaker and propose that instead TESOL professionals should be concerned with questions about language expertise, language inheritance, and language affiliation.

Ethics, advocacy and empowerment: Issues of method in researching language

Researching Language, the book-length study on which the following discussion is based, deals with questions about power and method in a range of social science disciplines (anthropology, sociology and sociolinguistics). To put ‘power’ and ‘method’ together in such an explicit way, and to foreground them as major concerns, is perhaps an unconventional move. Yet any social researcher who has undertaken fieldwork must at some level be aware that power relations exist in this context as in others; and those power relations are strongly affected by the methods we are constrained to adopt in ‘doing research’. That is, they are not entirely determined by pre-existing differences of status imported from other contexts. Something happens within the process of research itself.

Deutsch in Inner London and the animation of an instructed foreign language

There has been a remarkable neglect of instructed foreign languages in sociolinguistics, and this can be attributed to a traditionally ‘reflectionist’ view of the relationship between language and social structure, to a preoccupation with the home-school interface, and to the dominance of what Bernstein (1996) calls the ‘social logic of competence’. In combination, these concerns provide little scope for seeing how the value and social indexicality of a school foreign language (FL) might be reshaped within the micropolitics of classroom interaction, or how an FL might serve as a significant resource in the maintenance and accumulation of vernacular prestige. More recent conceptual developments, however, make processes like these more visible, and this is illustrated in an analysis of the impromptu use of German among adolescents in a multilingual school in inner London, where the aesthetics of performance (in R. Baumans sense) play a significant role, both in the negotiation of identities and in the repositioning of an official code at school.

Critique in Interaction

This article looks at issues of critique from the perspective of interactional sociolinguistic (IS) discourse analysis. Using a small case study of the ways in which social class is both reproduced and problematized in the speech of inner London adolescents, it elaborates on the tensions between ‘behavioural’ and ‘established ideology’ that lie at the heart of IS research, and points to the changing intellectual environment in which the assessment of its practical value needs to be made.

Ritual and foreign language practices at school

This article focuses on adolescents at an inner-London secondary school who are learning German rather reluctantly in a foreign language class, and then using the language to play around elsewhere. I argue that the language teachers pedagogic methods turned the German lessons into relatively intense institutional rituals, and that the lessons provided symbolic and socio-emotional material that students subsequently inverted in a set of micro-ritual improvisations. There are some endemic problems of evidence in the argument that instructed German was connected to improvised Deutsch by cause-and-effect processes associated with ritual, but the discussion ends by affirming rituals value as an analytic frame that can be applied both to institutional language learning and to historical shifts in classroom experience.

Sociolinguistics and cultural studies: New ethnicities, liminality and interaction

With the emergence of ‘new ethnicities’ as its central empirical focus, this paper explores the relationship between sociolinguistic discourse analysis on the one hand, and research on youth in cultural studies, anthropology and sociology on the other. After a brief sketch of some major trends in the study of youth, the paper focuses on recent European work on inter‐ethnic processes among young people in urban neighbourhoods, and it notes the way in which major themes in the theorisation of late modernity have been brought to bear on descriptions of multiracial youth. From among these, it selects ‘liminality’, a notion that has been used to characterise youth cultural phenomena at a number of fairly macro levels of social organisation, and it then shifts attention to the details of interactional discourse, arguing that there are also conspicuous moments of liminality within the interaction order. Through the analysis of a short piece of recorded talk, this paper illustrates the way in which interaction ca...

Social class and sociolinguistics

Thisarticle makes the case for resuscitating social class as an issue in British applied and sociolinguistics. It begins with a sketch of the treatment of class in post-war social science in the UK, drawing out the implications for sociolinguistics. It then moves to a fuller review of how sociolinguistics has actually handled class, and considers Bernstein’s work and its relationship to classic US research in the ethnography of communication, as well as the reasons from the ‘retreat from social class’ in discourse-oriented UK sociolinguistics from mid-1980s onwards. After that it offers a class-oriented reinterpretation of my earlier work on ethnolinguistic crossing and stylization, and it concludes with some suggestions for further research, stressing the need to develop interactional and ethnographic perspectives on class processes.

Creole metaphors in cultural analysis: On the limits and possibilities of (socio-) linguistics

It is sometimes suggested that creole language study provides important concepts and metaphors for the analysis of cultural processes within globalization and transnational flow. This article argues, however, that although it may have served as a useful heuristic in certain cases, most of creole linguistics has been grounded in a set of assumptions and procedures that now look increasingly doubtful, both within linguistics and anthropology more generally. After some critical comments on politics and methodology within this subdisciplinary area, there is an overview of the challenge presented by a number of larger shifts in language study, and the article concludes with a socio-linguistic analysis of situated interaction which, we argue, provides a much better framework for understanding the dynamics of syncretic practice than the study of creole grammar.1

Ethnicities Without Guarantees: An Empirical Approach

What can the close study of everyday interactional life in a multi-ethnic urban setting reveal to us about contemporary ethnicity? Both in public debate and social science research over the last 50 years or so in the UK, the discussion of race and ethnicity has centred on conflict, discrimination, racism/anti-racism, equal opportunities policies and so on, placing ongoing struggle between clearly demarcated dominant and subordinated racial and ethnic groups in the foreground. In the process, overwhelming attention has been given to explicit (and often sincere) propositions and statements, whether these are the utterances or labels produced by social actors in the public arena (e.g. the 2006 Jade Goody/Shilpa Shetty controversy on British TV’s ‘Big Brother’), the views expressed by research subjects in qualitative interviews, or the conclusions drawn by quantitative survey research about race/ethnicity and differential outcomes in, for example, educational achievement.

Ethics, Advocacy and Empowerment in Researching Language

Researching Language, the book-length study on which the following discussion is based, deals with questions about power and method in a range of social science disciplines (anthropology, sociology and sociolinguistics). To put ‘power’ and ‘method’ together in such an explicit way, and to foreground them as major concerns, is perhaps an unconventional move. Yet any social researcher who has undertaken fieldwork must at some level be aware that power relations exist in this context as in others; and those power relations are strongly affected by the methods we are constrained to adopt in ‘doing research’. That is, they are not entirely determined by preexisting differences of status imported from other contexts. Something happens within the process of research itself.