Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

Language Policy and Planning 167
addition, when computer technicians and teachers negotiate around technical
terms and ways to talk and write about moving image, still images,
graphs and charts and their role in teaching and learning, and how to
assess and judge quality work that uses multimodal texts, they are also
‘planning’ the language that surrounds this area of learning. This activity
is largely taken for granted in teaching speech or print literacy.
Language teaching as LP
Similarly, the LP function of teachers who teach language subjects is
more easily perceived. Specialist language teachers (e.g. ESL support staff,
or Reading Recovery tutors), foreign language teachers and general literacy
teachers, but also primary/elementary classroom teachers, are directly
concerned with language and therefore with metalinguistics. The object
and focus of instructional activity centre around aspects of language and
its use. Such teachers forge the lingual capabilities of learners for the various
roles the now-young will come to play as future citizens and workers,
and in their professional, personal or recreational and intellectual pursuits.
This LP is not in the hands of remote policy makers in the broad and
distant realms of national capitals, testing agencies, curriculum bodies or
grammar and dictionary textbook writers. Instead, this LP is located in the
activity of performing language for instruction, in which the focus of talk
is the forms of talk and writing. As a refl exive kind of LP, language teaching
involves iterative processes, that is to-and-fro communication between
teachers and learners. This ‘surrounds’ the language used to deliver
information and impart skills, that is the message-conveying language. As
a result, the entire process of dialogical exchange of information, routine
interaction and classroom tasks between teachers and students, or students
and other students, constitutes dynamic micro-LP.
It might be objected that neither the four classroom language functions
nor the specifi cally language focused work of specialist language teachers
counts as an example of LP, seeing them instead as the elaborated
implementation of broad goals for schooling established by others. This
would be an unacceptably reductive understanding of both policy and
teaching. Teachers, both language/literacy specialists and non-language
specialists, develop learners’ language skills and attitudes, norms and
expressive practices. Mandated curricula, syllabus, textbook activities
and assessment expectations establish only generic policies but teaching
exceeds the intention and aspirations contained in curriculum statements
or textbooks. Both pedagogy and the needs and circumstances of learners
in their immediate network of communication peers require of teachers
active, personalised and class-specifi c LP in a myriad of micro- interactions
governed by explanation, abstraction, generalisation and application of
knowledge.