Interactional renegotiations of educational discourses in recreational learning contexts

In this paper I focus on sequences of interaction among youth where the participants engage in classroom related activities (such as spelling, discussion of essays, etc.). My paper is based on interactional and ethnographic data collected among youth in two different leisure contexts. I discuss how the participants by employment of various interactional and linguistic means, including the use of non-standard linguistic features, integrate different cultural frames by bringing out-of-classroom practices into educationally focused interactions, as well as by bringing classroom related activities outside the classroom and into recreational contexts. In these interactional sequences, the participants challenge and renegotiate dominant assumptions characteristic of educational discourses, of a contradiction between mainstream-societally accepted behaviour valued in school contexts, and semiotic measures of social peer-credibility among late modern urban youth. I consider how the adolescents’ interactional practices and their situated use of particular linguistic features reflect as well as contribute to ongoing enregisterment (Agha, 2007) of a speech style in contemporary Copenhagen. Finally, I discuss to what extent the bringing together of peer-culture and school orientation can be viewed as re-negotiations of social class relations. This discussion involves a comparison to the British context and to work by Rampton, 2006 and Rampton, 2008.

Research highlights▶ I discuss adolescents’ use of non-standard linguistic resources in school-oriented activities. ▶ The speakers bring together different cultural frames in interaction. ▶ Thereby they challenge assumptions of an opposition between youth- and school-cultural frames. ▶ This can possibly be viewed as local renegotiation of social class relations.