The repertoire, or the know-how that emerges, is not, strictly speaking, ‘language’ (in its abstract sense), but rather, a meshwork of ‘skilled linguistic action’ in the analysis of which embodiment and materiality are highly significant considerations. Re-configuring ‘language knowledge’ as personal know-how, or, as a personal repertoire, the focus is shifted to investigating how individual agents cope with different types of semiotic resources in their social and material environments, and how they use different modalities for this. At the same time, this point of departure also points out the inadequacy of seeing language learning as acquisition of a ‘mental grammar’ – a collection of abstract knowledge that does not embed any reference to social use or bodily performance. Instead, language is approached from a “first-order perspective” (Love, 2004) and regarded as languaging, as different sets of embodied agentive activity that take place in a variety of social and material contexts. The objective is to question the acontextual, dematerial and disembodied conceptualisations of language that were typical of classical psycholinguistics and SLA (second language acquisition). The chapter is a theoretical discussion of personal know-how of language(s) in the context of applied linguistics, particularly in the study of language learning and development. The viewpoint transcends the alleged gap between social and cognitive orientations of language learning research and discusses learning and use of language from an ecological point of view as ‘languaging’. The repertoire, or the know-how that emerges, is not, strictly speaking, ‘language’, but rather, a meshwork of ‘skilled linguistic action’ in the analysis of which embodiment and materiality are highly significant considerations. Bringing together ‘old’ and ‘new’ arguments for materialism, personal repertoires are examined focussing on how embodied agentive activity is intertwined with the socially structured environments and their specific material features, tools and artefacts. It questions conceptualisations that understand language learning as acquisition of abstract, decontextual and disembodied language knowledge and argues that learners’ know-how is not based on any kind of ‘mental grammar’, but on a personal repertoire of different multimodal semiotic resources. This distinction is most obvious when dealing with individual speakers: the repertoire approach requires a lot more data about aspects of the individual's linguistic diversity and linguistic ecosystem.The chapter is a theoretical discussion of the concept of personal repertoire and its application in the context of applied linguistics, particularly in the study of language learning and development. In some studies, repertoire-based approaches to sociolinguistics contrast with variationist approaches.
That would make each accent and each performance one of the "pieces". I can also imagine the performative aspect of drama and theatre might require a range of accents to be part of the "repertoire". Gumperz's original example was about the varieties of the Hindi language that a Westerner might need to master in New Delhi, and the pitfalls along the way. Indeed, accents do form varieties that are within the scope of the "repertoire". The term also seems to have found a niche in describing the acrolect-mesolect-basilect / tformal-informal / rhetorical-communicative axis. The term is widely used in studies about code-switching environments, including natively multilingual ones. John Gumperz is credited with introducing it to sociolinguistics, as linguistic / verbal repertoire:ĭefined as the totality of linguistic forms regularlyĮmployed within the community in the course of socially significant interaction. However, unlike in musicology where the "pieces" are quite well-defined, in sociolinguistics the "speech varieties" in one's "speech repertoire" are generally defined by the authors of the study. Just as in music, the use of "repertoire" implies a range, and various different items. developmental neurolinguistics and sociolinguistics. This was later adapted to other linguistic fields, e.g. The use of the term "repertoire" in music appears to be relevant, but each "piece of music" was equated to various phonetic properties, defined by the study. The term "speech repertoire" actually came from phonetics research in the 1950s.
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