Abstract
The way a student speaks or interacts in a given context has been shown to have an impact on their social and academic trajectory beyond that context (Mehan 1996). This applies not only to so-called “foreign” students, but also to domestic students if we adopt the framework of the communicative repertoire (Rymes 2010) which includes a spectrum of communicative abilities, resources, and the knowledge of how to use them. The cultivation of repertoire awareness involves learning to leverage and strategically exploit elements of one’s repertoire, which is an important skill for academic success and social inclusion (Helot et al. 2018). This framework is adopted in this paper via the analysis of classroom discourse in second-year middle school classes in two urban centers in Northern Italy: one historically bilingual and one historically monolingual. This project adopts an ethnographic and action research approach (Stringer 2004) to understanding repertoire diversity in local classroom practice and in exploring how teachers can cultivate an inclusive pedagogy via an analysis and reflection on data gathered in their own classrooms. A series of workshops explore teachers’ and students’ communicative repertoires, highlighting the salience of language in the teaching and learning of all subjects, for all students. Through this participatory engagement— currently underway at the time of writing—teachers have shown great interest in analyzing and reflecting on interactions in their classrooms and have even implemented minor modifications to their teaching approaches and classroom interactions throughout the course of their involvement in the
project.