Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

296 Part 4: Language and Literacy
1979; Whitely, 1979). Sociolinguistic surveys, for instance, have been carried
out to provide information on students and languages in multilingual
communities. As an example, the Linguistic Minority Project (1985) provided
insightful information on patterns of language use and language
teaching among different groups of Asian and Eastern European minorities
in England. That said, this kind of survey work has yet to be carried
out systematically and regularly. One such contribution has been Extra
(2006), who discusses the urgent need for accurate sociolinguistic data on
ethnic and linguistic minorities in the increasingly diverse populations of
the European Union for education planning purposes.
A related strand of sociolinguistic work has been ethnographically oriented,
examining patterns of language use in specifi c classroom contexts
(as opposed to large-scale societal patterns of use). We will now turn to
this line of sociolinguistic study and show some examples of the kinds of
contribution it can make to our understanding of the ways language communication
is enacted in the classroom. One of the best-known early collections
of papers representing this body of work is Functions of Language
in the Classroom edited by Cazden et al. (1972). This is a point made by
Hymes in the Introduction to the collection:
For language in the classroom, what we need to know goes far beyond
how the grammar of English is organized . . . It has to do with the relationship
between a grammar of English and the ways in which English
is organized in use by teachers, by children, and by the communities
from which they come; with the features of intonation, tone of voice,
rhythm . . .; with the meanings of all those means of speech to those
who use them and those who hear them, not in the narrow sense of . . .
naming things and stating relationships, but in the fuller sense, as
conveying respect . . . concern or indifference, intimacy . . ., seriousness
or play . . .; with the appropriateness of one or another means of
speech, or way of speaking, to one or another topic, person, situation;
in short, with the relation of the structure of language to the structure
of speaking. (Hymes, 1972a: xiii)
The key to understanding language in context is to start, not with language,
but with context. (Hymes, 1972a: xix)
The classroom context
A recent volume on the microethnography of the classroom by Bloome
et al. (2005) provides an apt link between the different traditions under
consideration here – the social turn in sociolinguistic work with particular
reference to studies of classroom discourse, and the social turn in literacy
studies, with particular reference to ethnographic approaches and cross
cultural studies (as we will see below).