Playful Talk, Learners' Play Frames and the Construction of Identities
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PLAYFUL TALK, LEARNERS’ PLAY FRAMES AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF IDENTITIES
INTRODUCTION
Research into learners’ talk in schools and classrooms from educational and sociolinguistic perspectives has explored the intersection of language and identity construction. These research traditions view identity as “an emergent construction, the situated outcome of a rhetorical and interpretative process in which interactants make situationally motivated selections from socially constituted repertoires of identificational and affiliational resources and craft these semiotic resources into identity claims for presentation to others” (Bauman, 2000, p. 1). From this perspective, language (including playful talk) emerges as one of the central semiotic resources available to learners (and teachers) to make identity claims. By focusing on the learners’ linguistic and other semiotic resources, we can then explore “when and how identities are interactively invoked by sociocultural actors” (Kroskrity, 1993, p. 222). This understanding of identity is premised on a view of the self as an active participant in the interactively achieved social construction of meaning. Identity construction is, therefore, viewed as an on-going process that is constituted through daily interactions in sites such as schools, classrooms and other social places, rather than a quality that a learner has or does not have. Moreover, in educational contexts, social realities are shaped by the institutional order of the school, rather than a priori taken for granted social fact. Both premises underlie a social constructionist approach to identity. Playful talk can, therefore, provide a productive locus for the study of the constitution, representation and negotiation of social roles and identities in learners’ talk in schools and classrooms (see also Bourne, Official Pedagogic Discourses and the Construction of Learners’ Identities, Volume 3; Luk Ching Man, Classroom Discourse and the Construction of Learner and Teacher Identities, Volume 3). In this chapter, I use the term “playful talk” as a super-ordinate category with the purpose of capturing a wide range of verbal activities and routines, including teasing, joking, humour, verbal play, parody, music making, chanting that can emerge in learners’ talk. Some of these activities and routines may be more fleeting and highly unstructured (e.g. private solo singing and humming of popular tunes in circulation) and others more ritualised M. Martin-Jones, A. M. de Mejia and N. H. Hornberger (eds), Encyclopedia of Language and Education, 2nd Edition, Volume 3: Discourse and Education, 185–197. #2008 Springer Science+Business Media LLC.
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(e.g. teasing routines). Moreover, these verbal phenomena may require different understandings of local and global contexts and allow for varying audience roles and participant structures. The notion of playful talk can be fruitfully combined with the concept of performance as linguistic practice that is “situated, interactional, communicatively motivated” (Bauman, 2000,
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