Beyond ‘safe-talk’: Institutionalization and agency in China's English language education

This article will reflect on the risks of a careless application of “safe-talk”, a fruitful analytical concept that has been widely used in classroom discourse studies to link chorus-like repetition sequences with certain institutional and social processes related to either post-colonialism or migration. The discussion will draw on a sociolinguistic ethnography carried out in three urban schools in contemporary China. By going beyond dichotomized approaches between those who are interested in capturing institutional processes of social reproduction and those who prefer to focus on individual actions and choices in classroom practices, this article reflects on the pertinence of the representation of such chorus-like repetition sequences as a ritualized discursive space in which certain social identities are produced, attributed value, circulated and contested according to institutional logic and in view of the different interests at stake.

► We revisit the concept of ‘safe-talk’ within the area of classroom discourse studies. ► We acknowledge its contributions, but also the potential dangers. ► We use data from a sociolinguistic research carried out in contemporary China. ► Data analysis uncovers processes of institutionalization and social agency. ► These processes would be masked by the use of the analytical category of ‘safe-talk’.