Play Frames and Social Identities

This book is a sociolinguistic study of children’s talk and how they interact with one another and their teachers in multilingual, multicultural and multiethnic schools. It is based on tape recordings and ethnographic observations of majority Greek and minority Turkish-speaking children at an Athens primary school. It offers the reader a unique look into the ways in which children draw upon their rich interactional histories and share, transform and recontextualize linguistic and other semiotic resources in circulation to construct play frames and explore, adopt, resist available as well as novel social roles and identities. Drawing on ethnographically informed approaches to discourse, the book shows the ways in which verbal phenomena such as teasing, joking, language play, music making and chanting can provide a productive locus for the study of the negotiation of social identities and roles at school. This book will be of interest to scholars, researchers and students of sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, cultural studies, and multicultural education. It will also be of interest to anthropologists and sociologists.

Spiros A. Moschonas, University of Athens, in Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, Vol. 33 No. 1 (2009):
Vally Lytra's book provides a lively description of a community in transition and, at the same time, a very well documented analysis of such speech events as teasing and joking. It is a welcome contribution both to the ethnography of minorities and to linguistics.