Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

292 Part 4: Language and Literacy
approaches to language teaching that dominated practice up to the 1960s
and early 1970s. The emerging work with a social orientation in this
period, for example Austin (1962), Halliday (1973, 1975), Halliday et al.
(1964), and Savignon (1983) (among others), was in many ways the vanguard
of a paradigm shift in language teaching. At a conceptual level, the
work of Hymes (1972b, 1974) on ethnography of communication and communicative
competence was particularly infl uential. His 1972 paper – fi rst
presented in 1966 at the Yeshiva Conference on Language Development
among Disadvantaged Children – presented an ethnographically oriented
formulation of the notion of communicative competence. This paper
explicitly addressed language education issues and in part it represented
a critique of Chomsky’s (1965) highly abstracted notion of linguistic (grammatical)
competence. It was designed as a call to language educators to
pay attention to ‘differential competence within a heterogeneous speech community,
both undoubtedly shaped by acculturation’ (Hymes, 1972b: 274,
original italics).
For Hymes (1972b: 277) a child learning to communicate through language
has to acquire ‘knowledge of sentences, not only as grammatical,
but also as appropriate. He or she acquires competence as to when to
speak, when not, and as to what to talk about with whom, when, in what
manner’. In other words, there are social rules of use, a dimension of language
use ‘without which the rules of grammar would be useless’ (Hymes,
1972b: 278). This inclusion of the ‘social’ makes it necessary to raise questions
of context of communication and aspects of socio-cultural practice
when working towards a theory of language in use. In this connection,
Hymes (1972b: 281, original emphasis) suggests that four empirical questions
must be raised:
Whether (and to what degree) something is formally possible:
Whether (and to what degree) something is feasible in virtue of the means
of implementation available;
Whether (and to what degree) something is appropriate (adequate, happy,
successful) in relation to a context in which it is used and evaluated;
Whether (and to what degree) something is in fact done, actually
performed, and what its doing entails.
The key implications of Hymes’ position regarding language teaching,
and language education more generally, were quickly taken up by language
educators. A notion of competence that appeals to the actual use of
language in context is potentially very useful in helping teachers to ground
their professional work in concrete terms.
In the move away from grammar-oriented approaches to language
teaching, the Hymesian notion of communicative competence offered
language educators a dynamic and situated perspective on language and
language use. Building on the works of Hymes and others, Canale and