The authors explore how the use of sarcasm in an urban high school English classroom fostered critical language awareness and positive relationships among diverse classroom participants. The guiding research question was, What were the social-pedagogical functions of sarcasm in this classroom? Drawing on interactional sociolinguistics and…

This article explores how peer and teacher-student interactions in linguistically diverse high school English as a Second Language (ESL) classrooms produce changes in learners' uptake of different languages and cultures. Data presented are from a 2-year ethnography of communication focusing on adolescent multilingual English learners' language use…

Adolescence is a time in young people's lives when identities are being constructed and what their friends say is particularly important. The teenage years are a critical period in terms of attitudes to language, yet there have been relatively few studies of student metalanguage and, to our knowledge, no studies which have considered age-graded…