Professional Biography
Betsy Rymes studies how students use language in their everyday lives, and how teachers can get students thinking about words and their meaning. She has examined how language, social interaction, institutions, and the Internet influence what students learn in schools. She is also an expert on teaching English-language learners. Rymes uses her blog, Citizen Sociolinguistics, to discuss her work.
Dr. Rymes’ career began in Los Angeles, where she taught junior high school and adult English language learners for three years. After these experiences with language and culture as a classroom teacher, she decided to pursue a master’s degree in Teaching English as a Second Language (TESOL) and a doctoral degree in Applied Linguistics, both from UCLA. From 1998 to 2007, Dr. Rymes was a professor in the University of Georgia’s Department of Language and Literacy Education, and also held a secondary appointment in the Linguistics Department. 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’ university teaching focuses on integrating discourse analysis and concepts from linguistic anthropology with a study of the conditions of multilingualism in school contexts. She teaches both at Penn GSE and the Penn Arts & Sciences Anthropology Graduate Group.
Research Interests and Current Projects
Dr. Rymes’ research is centered in educational contexts and examines how language, social interaction, institutions, and the Internet influence what students learn in schools. She is the author of several books: Classroom Discourse Analysis: A Tool for Critical Reflection (2nd Edition, Routledge, 2016), Communicating Beyond Language: Everyday Engagements with Diversity (Routledge, 2014), Conversational Borderlands (Teachers College Press, 2001), and the forthcoming, How We Talk about Language: Exploring Citizen Sociolinguistics (Cambridge, in press). She has also published her research in Language in Society, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Research on the Teaching of English, TESOL Quarterly, Anthropology & Education, Linguistics & Education, and Harvard Educational Review, among other journals.
Her current research investigates how sociolinguistics can be integrateEducationd into the high school English curriculum in ways that will enhance student and teacher appreciation of linguistic and sociocultural diversity as a resource for language learning. She maintains a blog, Citizen Sociolingustics, to discuss her research.
Selected Publications
