BAAL Book Prize 2007

This book sets forth the author‟s research on style and stylization among adolescents in urban settings. It examines how speakers in a London school draw on a variety of resources – a foreign language, stylized varieties of English, bits and pieces of media culture – in their everyday activities; the kinds of conversational inferences evoked by these practices; the ways they contribute to situated meaning-making; and their implications for the relevance of macro-sociological concepts, in particular social class and gender, to the pupils. With respect to applied and more specifically educational linguistics, the book examines the tension between classroom discourse and students‟ engagement with media culture, approaching this tension from the perspective of students.