Cultivating communicative repertoire awareness via participatory engagement with middle school teachers

This paper is a brief methodological reflection on the process and product(s) of one year of engaged participatory linguistic research in urban Italian middle schools which, literally and figuratively, turned the lens toward teachers. By adopting an exploratory framework of communicative repertoire awareness (Rymes 2010; García 2016), teachers and researchers together reflected on textual and audiovisual data collected in their own classrooms as a means of raising awareness about the salience of language and non-linguistic communication in the teaching and learning of all subjects, for all students, and for all teachers.