Performing critical resistance through language play

This study focuses on the playful multilingual practices of two specific students in plurilingual settings,
considering the performative functionality of these practices in interaction. Through positioning analysis,
we explore how these playful episodes contribute to student positioning (Davies & Harré, 1990), and
whether they can be considered to count as linguistic performances (Rampton, 1999). Due to the
distinctively rebellious feel to the episodes in question, we move on to consider how these playful
performances challenge classroom power dynamics, drawing on critical language awareness theory
(Wallace, 2018) in general and the concept of critical resistance (Nuñez, 2022) in particular.
We find that the different instances of language play all contribute to students’ repositioning in interaction,
but the types of criticality and linguistic resistance differ among our two case students, one student
primarily repositioning himself in relation to the local context of the interaction, and the other implicitly
challenging the linguistic hierarchies of the classroom as such. The refinement of critical language
awareness in off-task language play revealed by our analysis suggests that increased attention should be
paid to this type of language practices, since it demonstrates how students’ language awareness may
manifest itself in unexpected ways and potentially be overlooked by both teachers and researchers.
The study is based on empirical classroom data from grade 9 and 11 collected in the research project XX
(funded by the Danish Research Council), which investigated student language awareness in the context of plurilingual teaching
at different educational levels.