Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-7bb8b95d7b-pwrkn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-09-19T03:49:36.400Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

4 - Deutsch in improvised performance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 September 2009

Ben Rampton
Affiliation:
King's College London
Get access

Summary

Every weekday, either by choice or compulsion, vast numbers of children and adults all round the world participate in foreign language learning classes, focusing on languages other than English. This process is often the focus of intense local and national dispute, and although very substantial sums of money are devoted to it, in Britain and other English-dominant countries, massive educational underachievement is one of its most striking outcomes (Boaks 1998; Branaman and Rhodes 1998; Schulz 1998). And yet looking back either over the last twenty-five years of the leading sociolinguistics journal (Language in Society), or through introductory textbooks on sociolinguistics, there are no detailed analyses of instructed foreign language practices, and it is hard to find even a cursory reference. So the question of why sociolinguistics has shown such little interest in instructed foreign languages is one issue to address in this chapter, and for me, it sprung into salience when I heard the young people in my radio-microphone recordings using Deutsch among themselves, playing vigorously with its sound properties and re-styling it in their maths and English lessons.

Admittedly, peer group Deutsch turned out to be a passing fad. Eighteen months or so after I last recorded it, its principal exponents said in interview that they no longer used the language among themselves, and they were very negative about the German classes that they continued to attend. So there are no grounds for supposing that their japes with Deutsch spurred them on to become enthusiastic modern linguists.

Type
Chapter
Information
Language in Late Modernity
Interaction in an Urban School
, pp. 137 - 172
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2006

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×