Research Notes: An Honest Look at Classroom Communication?

In traditional conceptions of classroom communication, teachers dictate classroom discourse. In today's K-12 classroom, however, the use of "communicative repertoires"-multiple ways of speaking-is more common. Discussion and questioning are key classroom genres; teachers are not the sole sources of knowledge, acting instead as "border workers" who integrate different kinds of knowledge; and students help to renegotiate participation frameworks and actively involve themselves in each aspect of the initiation, response, evaluation (IRE) model.

Using examples of teacher-student interaction in urban and ELL classrooms, Betsy Rymes has shown that in this contemporary classroom model, students often finish teachers' sentences, participate in language and word play, and incorporate commentary into classroom activities. In such situations, where traditional and contemporary communicative repertoires coexist, students act as both productive consumers (those who use objects for their own ends) and rebellious consumers (those who act as rebels without really rebelling). In a world of YouTube, kid-centered and kid-built fan sites, and media featuring kids' meta-commentary (like Harry Potter or Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide), it is natural that students' meta-commentary enters the classroom.

The prevalence of kid-generated meta-commentary has a powerful impact on the classroom, casting students as masters at navigating new cultural borders, ones that do not always focus on race or gender, but rather focus on register recognition, for example, or even brand communities (i.e., a group of student fans of Pokemon). This new framework also allows us to see English Language Learners as resources in forming new social groupings and diversified teacher workforces as beneficial to the contemporary student.

Rymes emphasizes the importance of further research to study how students "participate in class, what ‘media' they draw on for that participation, and how those forms of participation are related to discourse in the world at large."

"The Relationship between Mass Media and Classroom Discourse" appears in Working Papers in Linguistics, 23(1).