Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

Sociolinguistics, Language Teaching and New Literacy Studies 295
• use of classroom activities and student tasks that would ‘engage
learners in the pragmatic, authentic, functional use of language for
meaningful purposes’;
• use of the teacher as ‘a facilitator and guide . . . Students are therefore
encouraged to construct meaning through genuine linguistic interaction
with others’.
This characterisation refl ects a widely accepted professional understanding
of what passes for ‘communicativeness’. However, this rendering
of ‘communicativeness’ departs quite signifi cantly from the early
Hymesian aspirations. As Hornberger (1989) points out, Hymes’s conceptualisation
of communicative competence was intended as a heuristic
device for empirical exploration of actual communicative events in specifi
c contexts. This is not the same as saying all individuals involved in
any given speech event must have identical competence. Indeed competence
‘varies within individuals (from event to event), across individuals,
and across speech communities’ (Hornberger, 1989: 218). Furthermore, to
go back to the four questions raised by Hymes, it is possible for something
that is not feasible (from the point of view of an individual participant in
a speech event) to occur, for example a person may fi nd himself/herself in
a conversation in which there is codeswitching involving a language/s
that s/he has little knowledge of. Instead of observing what goes on in
actual communication in specifi c contexts, the emphasis has now been
placed on promoting successful language communication in learning
activities. Instead of fi nding out how participants use linguistic (and other
semiotic) resources to communicate in specifi c real-world contexts, the
teacher is asked to use their ‘expert’ knowledge to assist students to
achieve meaningful communication (with their peers and teachers) in
classroom activities.
Sociolinguistics in classroom ethnography
In this section we will link the work cited above in the area of communicative
competence and the meanings attributed to the term, with some
examples of actual practice in classroom settings, especially with regard to
the uses of literacy. It is undoubtedly the case that the impact of the concept
of communicative competence on language teaching has been direct
in that it has spawned a teaching approach, CLT. There are, however, other
sociolinguistic studies of communication in linguistically diverse settings
that have made a contribution to this discussion on language teaching at
the level of both theory and pedagogy. At a societal level, answers to questions
on patterns of use such as ‘who is speaking what to whom in what
contexts’ can be used for policy making and planning, and resource allocation
(e.g. Kaplan & Baldauf, 1997: Chapter 4; Ohannessian & Ansre,