The transgressive use of language by out-group speakers, or crossing/mocking, is used in a variety of ways to achieve both affiliative and disaffiliative ends in interaction and has been well documented in youth culture (Chun, 2007; Rampton 1995, 2006). However, how crossing (Rampton 1995) is used as an affiliative resource in managing rapport in the assymetrical relations between teachers and students has yet to be fully investigated. Reporting on some findings of a 1.5 year ethnography of an English/ language arts classroom at a multilingual and multiethnic public middle school in an urbanized area of Hawai‘i, this paper explores one teacher's use of crossing in building rapport. The teacher's stylization of students' voices through ventriloquizing (Tannen 2007) is seen to be an affiliative resource in managing rapport (Günther 2008) when strategically embedded in ritual oppositional frames of interaction. By exploring audio-recordings of naturally occurring interaction of how Hawai‘i Creole or Pidgin is used transgressively in reported speech by the teacher, an 'out-group' individual, for negotiating rapport in his English classroom in, instances of crossing emerge as artfully performed rapport building strategies providing a rich site for the construction of affiliative identities. Interestingly, these findings point to the important role that crossing plays in rapport management through reported speech, notably by providing a resource for the negotiation and (re)formulation of both students' and the teacher's moral and epistemic stances in interaction. The performance of crossing within positively valued, jocular oppositional classroom rituals demonstrates the capacity for crossing as a contributing factor to the emergence of a shared sense of community in this classroom. The use of crossing in this liminal stances between offense and respect are tactfully navigated by individuals and provide a crucial resource for building affiliative classroom cultures through the strategic management of rapport in late modern society.
展开▼
