Communicative Repertoire

Fighting Words: Antiblackness and Discursive Violence in an American High School

“…Overall, the narratives shared by Timothy and Anthony and many of the young men I spoke with at Jefferson drew upon legal registers to talk about their wide‐ranging problems with peers and authorities, and they regularly employed discursive strategies from their vast communicative repertoires (Rymes ) to construct selves as honest and innocent. These patterns suggest either an awareness of, or unconscious responses to, the ways they and/or their peers were routinely criminalized or ostracized by the state and its attendant institutions like schools.…”

Challenging the monolingual mindset: Understanding plurilingual pedagogies in English as an Additional Language (EAL) classrooms

“…II The multilingual turn and the monolingual mindset: EAL in Australian schooling There is growing recognition that the rapid flow of people, language, and cultural diversity characterising this current era of globalisation is contributing to new variations in how people communicate (Rymes, 2014;Taylor and Snoddon, 2013). These changes have been reflected in scholarship where the notion of language as a social practice-and the need to understand language through a focus on how language is enacted by and between people-has displaced conventional, geopolitically defined notions of 'named' languages (e.g., English, Japanese, Italian, etc.)…”

“What the fuck is this for a language, this cannot be Deutsch?” language ideologies, policies, and semiotic practices of a kitchen crew in a hotel restaurant

“…As such, the kitchen as a “hidden domain” revealed the sociolinguistic realities of the participants in their daily workplace interactions, which rely on individuals’ creative uses of their total semiotic repertoires in order for meaning-making to occur and communication to be achieved, a point Simu pointed out when referring to “all my language”. When emic and etic perspectives converge, perhaps it is time to question and reassess the labels (Gumperz 1965 ; Rymes 2014 ) and ‘ideological inventions’ (Makoni and Pennycook 2006) employed by individuals, scholars and particular sub-fields in order to advance our epistemological stances. As long as scholars continue to talk about ‘language’ as a countable entity, a view that is not only ‘outdated’ but strips individuals of their creative resources and potential to draw on a wide-range of semiotic and material resources, repertoires and objects within certain socio-cultural and historical political contexts, the ‘disjunctures’ between policies and practices will inevitably continue.…”

“…In their recent work on semiotic repertoires, Kusters et al ( 2017 ) discuss the relevance of incorporating multimodal and multilingual aspects of communication along with a more nuanced understanding of translanguaging that recognizes the different ways in which individuals draw on their multimodal linguistic resources in order to make meaning ( 2017 : 220). They call for an incorporation of the visual-gestural modality of communication that includes signs, gestures, body orientation and the use of objects, which they refer to as individuals’ ‘semiotic repertoires’ erasing the strict distinction between linguistic and non-linguistic ones ( 2017 : 221) echoing earlier work done by Rymes ( 2014 ) on communicative repertoires that questioned monolithic perspectives of language. This all-encompassing multimodal approach goes far beyond looking at language or linguistic resources and repertoires only, but aims to capture a more complex and perhaps complete picture of how communication is achieved among interlocutors in different multilingual contexts.…”

“…The relevance of body comportment within gesture studies and studies of multimodality is not new nor is the fact that we communicate by utilizing semiotic means beyond language novel from an integrationist perspective (Harris 1998 ). Nevertheless, such views of communicative repertoires and semiotic ones in particular seem to have gained momentum in recent years within both applied linguistics and sociolinguistics with regard to the ‘translingual turn’ especially within educational contexts (Rymes 2014 ; Canagarajah 2013 ; Pennycook 2017 ; Sherris and Adami 2019 ) questioning positivist assumptions about language as stable, countable entities. The impetus of Pennycook and Otsuji’s ( 2015 ) work on metrolingualism was to look at linguistic and semiotic repertoires outside educational domains and focus on the different resources people deploy in interaction across workplace contexts in city centers.…”