Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

Sociolinguistics, Language Teaching and New Literacy Studies 291
has been developed and in this chapter we will give examples of the
strengths and weaknesses of the approach. Key research fi ndings and
directions for further research include the recognition that learning literacy,
particularly academic literacy, in socially and linguistically diverse
educational contexts involves more than learning language as structure
and literacy as a set of generic skills and fi xed genres. We will explore the
relevance of these fi ndings for teachers and students as they engage in
classroom interaction. Classroom examples will be used to illustrate our
arguments where appropriate. We will draw particular conclusions for
additional/second language education and bilingual education as well as
for mainstream classroom teachers.
Social Theories of Language
In the fi eld of language studies and in particular of language education,
and as we shall see below, with respect to literacy studies, there has recently
been a shift away from dominant assumptions that language could be conceptualised
and taught as though it were independent of social context. We
will mainly draw upon two lines of developments in describing this shift.
The fi rst is the body of work broadly associated with ethnography of communication.
In this respect, the work of Hymes and the Ethnography of
Communication tradition has infl uenced not only how language is conceptualised
for language education, but also how the social can be taken into
account in complex linguistic and educational environments. The second is
the development of systemic functional linguistics (SFL), with particular
reference to the work of Halliday and his colleagues. The fundamental
insight of SFL has been that the use of language is itself a constitutive part
of social action and that linguistic resources, for example lexis and grammar,
themselves embody social meaning.
We will briefl y indicate where these currents in sociolinguistics have
fed into language teaching and the role of literacies. In this discussion the
term ‘language teaching’ is used broadly; examples will be drawn from
the teaching of a language to students for whom it is not their mother
tongue, for example English as a foreign language in Japan or English as
an additional/second language in Australia for linguistic minority students,
as well as the teaching of mother tongue. The context of teaching
will be made explicit where appropriate. The fi rst half of this discussion
will be taken up by a largely descriptive account of the points of contact
between sociolinguistics and language teaching.
Sociolinguistics in Communicative Language Teaching
The development of the concept of Communicative Language Teaching
(CLT) was generally associated with a break with the grammar-focused