Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

166 Part 2: Language and Society
First, teacher classroom language implements norm choices, of code
and register, made from those available to the participants in that setting,
that is the learner and the teacher. Teachers’ authoritative position as regulators
and controllers of permitted language (topics and arguments, what
can be said), and their role in ‘policing’ how things are said, constitutes the
teacher as a LP authority. Teacher-enacted choices may confi rm, modify or
subvert what is required by the curriculum.
Second, teacher classroom language refl ects subject or disciplinary
codes, that is specialised terminologies, discourses and vocabularies.
These structure and organise the content which is conveyed in classroom
interactions.
Third, teacher classroom language contains moments of metalinguistic
refl ection, observation and analysis. These are occasions during which
teachers might attach connotative meaning, that is value, emotion or
ideology, to linguistic form.
Fourth, the literacy and literate practices of the teacher and what the
teacher promotes and validates as acceptable literacy practice from the
students, involve teachers implementing written language norms and
standards in a similar way to those teachers implement for spoken
language.
However, teacher classroom language necessarily interacts with students’
communication and in this dialogic relation with student talk,
teachers cannot simply impose norms and expectations of how communication
itself should be conducted. Instead, teacher talk contains persuasion
and rhetoric as well as making and limiting choices in what students
are encouraged to say and write. Student talk and writing is responded to,
promoting and discouraging, in subtle and overt ways, modes of politeness,
permitted topics for discussion or personal disclosure, how questions
are asked of others, word choices, taboo subjects etc. In this way
teachers attempt to socialise learners into conversational competence,
concerning entire behaviours regarding the conduct of conversations (see
Rymes, this volume).
Perhaps the greatest effort of classroom teacher language is directed
towards mastery of the required register of school education for example
‘educated school English’. Essentially, teachers enact the past language
policy; what it has been agreed constitutes educated speech and writing
and how this agreed form will be assessed. This is rarely set down explicitly
as required norms but is known through the kind of language found
in textbooks, examinations and other procedures for public display of
knowledge. By contrast, multimodal texts and the literacy demands of
multimodal texts are more recent and teachers and schools are required to
make overt efforts to introduce, extend or defend multimodal texts in curricula.
As a result, the language surrounding multimodal literacy is more
promotional and defending, and more obviously counts as LP activity. In