Over the years, linguistic anthropological research has shown how classrooms are socializing institutions and how language functions as one medium through which this socialization is accomplished. Early work in the field has captured the immediacy of social practice and language use in educational contexts, and has created useful characterizations of variations in communicative competence.

The present work builds on the strengths of prior work, showing how new theoretical concepts and empirical methods developed in linguistic anthropology over the last decade can further illuminate...

This new book offers a timely and lively appraisal of the concept of communicative repertoires, resources we use to express who we are when in dialogue with others. Each chapter describes and illustrates the communicative resources humans deploy daily, but rarely think about not only the multiple languages we use, but how we dress or gesture, how we greet each other or tell stories, the nicknames we coin, and the mass media references we make and how these resources combine in infinitely varied performances of identity. Rymes also discusses how our repertoires shift and grow over the...

This new book offers a timely and lively appraisal of the concept of communicative repertoires, resources we use to express who we are when in dialogue with others. Each chapter describes and illustrates the communicative resources humans deploy daily, but rarely think about - not only the multiple languages we use, but how we dress or gesture, how we greet each other or tell stories, the nicknames we coin, and the mass media references we make - and how these resources combine in infinitely varied performances of identity. Rymes also discusses how our repertoires shift and grow over the...