|
 |
Betsy Rymes
Associate Professor
|
Education
1987: B.A., English Literature (Honors Program), Swarthmore College
1994: M.A., Teaching English as a Second Language (TESL), University of California,
Los Angeles
1997: Ph.D., Applied Linguistics, University of California, Los Angeles
Areas of Expertise
Linguistic anthropology of education
Language socialization
Multilingualism and TESOL
Youth culture, mass media, and schooling
Professional Biography
Dr. Rymes’s career began in Los
Angeles, where she taught junior high school and adult English language
learners for three years. To follow up on the issues of language and
culture that she experienced and found compelling as a classroom
teacher, she pursued a master’s degree in Teaching English as a Second
Language and a doctoral degree in Applied Linguistics.
From 1998 to 2006, Dr. Rymes was a professor in the University of
Georgia’s department of language and literacy education, where she
continued to study issues of language and culture in classroom contexts
and beyond. In 2002, she founded the TELL (Teachers for English
Language Learners) program, a five-year project funded by the U.S.
Department of Education, designed to bring bilingual community members
into the teaching profession.
Dr. Rymes’s university teaching has focused on integrating discourse
analysis and concepts from linguistic anthropology with a study of the
conditions of multilingualism in school contexts. All the courses she
teaches are designed to help students develop critical reflexivity
regarding the role of language in social life and learning.
Research Interests and Current Projects
Dr Rymes’s
research, theoretically and methodologically informed by linguistic
anthropology, is centered in educational contexts and examines how
languages, social interaction, and institutions influence an
individual’s educational trajectory.
In her study of an alternative school in Los Angeles, for example (Conversational Borderlands, Teachers
College Press, 2001), she analyzed how the institutional context of an
alternative charter school in Los Angeles facilitated the telling of
certain kinds of personal narratives and, in turn, the possibility for
students to imagine new life trajectories through talk.
While in Georgia, her research on English language learners in an
elementary school explored how certain interactional contexts,
including those mediated by popular youth culture, contribute to and
complicate language development in schools.
She also investigated bilingual teachers in Georgia classrooms and
the identity conflicts bilingual teachers experience when they enter a
historically monolingual teaching context. Dr. Rymes is currently
investigating the perpetual influence of mass-mediated genres of talk
(e.g., ironic dispositions, allusions to mass media characters or
types, or new and resourceful uses of language variation and
multilingualism) in modern classrooms. Her previous and in-progress
studies as well as her own experiences as a teacher all inform a book,
currently in preparation, called Doing Classroom Discourse Analysis: A Guide for Teachers.
Courses Taught
EDUC 546: Sociolinguistics and Language Teaching
Selected Publications
Rymes, B. (in press.) Language
socialization and the linguistic anthropology of education. In N.
Hornberger and P. Duff (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Language and Education, Second Revised Edition. New York: Springer.
Cahnmann, M., Rymes, B., & Souto-Manning, M. (2005.) Using
critical discourse analysis to understand and facilitate identification
processes of bilingual adults becoming teachers. Critical Inquiry in Language Studies.
Rymes, B. (2004.) Contrasting zones of comfortable competence: Popular culture in a phonics lesson. Linguistics & Education, 14: 321-335.
Rymes, B. & Anderson, K. (2004.) Second language acquisition for
all: Understanding the interactional dynamics of classrooms in which
Spanish and AAE are spoken. Research in the Teaching of English, 29 (2): 107-135.
Rymes, B. (2003.) Eliciting narratives, producing identities:
Text-linked versus socially contingent processes for narrating the
self. Research in the Teaching of English.
Wortham, S. & Rymes, B. (Eds.) (2003.) TheLinguistic Anthropology of Education. Westport, CT: Greenwood.
Rymes, B. (2003.) Relating word to world: Indexicality during literacy events. In S. Wortham & B. Rymes (Eds.), TheLinguistic Anthropology of Education. Westport, CT: Greenwood.
Rymes, B. (2002.) Language in development in the United States:
Supervising adult ESOL pre-service teachers in an immigrant community. TESOL Quarterly, 36(3).
Rymes, B. (2001.) Conversational borderlands: Language and identity in an alternative urban high school. New York: Teachers College Press.
Rymes, B. & Pash, D. (2001.) Questioning identity: The case of one second language learner. Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 32 (3): 276-300.
|
