Moments of Enduring Struggle

A review of Ben Rampton (2006), Language in late modernity: Interaction in an urban school. Ben Rampton has a gift for identifying subtle discursive patterns that hook into and illuminate broadly relevant social processes. His earlier work on "language crossing" focused on moments when multiethnic British youth inserted forms from other languages into ongoing talk in English (Rampton, 2005). His new book describes three similar patterns: the appearance of popular cultural forms (especially music) in school, students' out-of-class use of forms from a foreign language learned in school and students' stylized use of social-class-stereotypical forms ("posh" and "Cockney") dropped into everyday discourse. By tracing these distinctive types of language use through a remarkable data set of recorded youth speech, Rampton is able to develop a precise, compelling empirical account. He then uses the data to explore questions of broad concern—about the continued relevance of social class, the influence of media on youth engagement in schools, the shift from teacher-centered to student-centered instruction and other important issues. Many write about these topics, but few ground their accounts in such precise and convincing empirical analyses. In addition to offering comprehensive sociolinguistic accounts, both statistical overviews of usage by different types of speakers and detailed discourse analyses of many instances of use, Rampton provides extensive discussions of several other dimensions that illuminate his central object—that object being the discourse of multiethnic, working class youth in one inner city school and the ways in which their discourse is shaped by and contributes to more enduring social struggles. The first dimension, beyond his extensive microanalyses, involves theory and history. Rampton engages with many relevant social theories, articulating distinctive features of the "late modern" condition these youth find themselves in and discussing British, American and continental accounts of subjectivity and emotion, language and society, globalization and postmodernism, capitalism and domination. He also describes historical transformations that have brought us into the current period and the distinctive features that have changed in larger social systems across time. The second dimension involves ethnography. Rampton provides extensive ethnographic background on the focal youth and the classroom, giving the reader a vivid sense of these students' lives and relations in school. The third dimension involves method. Rampton provides a whole chapter, plus many other commentaries throughout, on how he did his research, on the relations between theory and method and on the warrants for his empirical claims. The extensive discussions …