Making fun of language use: Teasing practices and hybrid language forms in auto mechanic student peer interactions

Abstract

This study focuses on how auto mechanics students in an upper secondary school in Sweden use teasing in everyday peer interactions to comment on one another's language use. Data are drawn from video-ethnographic work during two years in a Vehicle engineering programme taught in and through a foreign language, English. The analyses concern how and in what ways normative expectations on language can be seen to play a role in building an English-speaking classroom community. A linguistic ethnographic approach is taken in order to explore how students’ teasing activities are organized to invoke broader language ideologies. It is found that students deploy teasing as a way of co-constructing shifts between different second language registers, linked to classroom language ideologies. It is here argued that engaging in teasing and other joking activities should be seen as conditional for identity construction and peer group participation at the English medium instruction Vehicle programme.