WP12 Multilingualism & Heteroglossia In and Out of School: End-of-Project Report

This project uses interactional sociolinguistics1 to investigate the ways in which adolescents experiment with different dialects and languages at school. It has grown out of research which studied the ways in which youngsters use both their own and other people?s ethnic home languages during recreation in multi-ethnic peergroups, and it sets out to extend the account (a) to classroom settings, and (b) to non-minority speech varieties. So far, the project has
* examined adolescents spontaneously ?putting on? two varieties, one of them prestigious (German) and the other stigmatised (Cockney)
* addressed the substantial theoretical challenges that this kind of ?stylisation? presents for established concepts and approaches in sociolinguistics and language education
* compiled dossiers on more than a dozen of the language varieties used in the two schools where the research was carried out.
Over time, an integrated account will develop of how adolescents position themselves in the ?economy? of different language and speech varieties around them. But in the first instance, analysis addresses these speech varieties separately, and seeks to engage with some of the main debates that surround each one.