Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

Sociolinguistics, Language Teaching and New Literacy Studies 297
What the authors mean by a microethnographic perspective and what
they hope to accomplish by applying it to classroom events and practices
is encapsulated in the claim that ‘people are situated, they act in terms of
the situation in which they fi nd themselves whilst simultaneously creating
that situation’ (Bloome et al., 2005: 2). They are critical of approaches
that start from too far outside of classroom ‘events’: rather, they want, to
‘hover low’ over the immediate data, as Geertz (2000) would have it. The
book is full of accounts of classroom events and practices – teachers speaking
and gesturing, students responding, students talking irrespective of
the teacher, texts weaving through the talk, researchers commenting, what
New Literacy Studies would see as the ‘literacy events’ of small interactions
that eventually can be seen as patterned sets of ‘literacy practices’
(Street, 2000). The authors, then, build upwards and outwards from the
participants and the language and literacy events in which they participate.
They argue that we can only claim a ‘warrant’ to draw larger inferences
when research is ‘grounded in the setting itself’ (Bloome et al., 2005: 3).
But this does not mean that they are focused only on the ‘micro’. However
critical they may be of approaches that impose outside ideas and concepts
upon the immediate and the local, their larger aim is to help us understand
‘macro level contexts’ – or rather ‘to address the relationship between
microlevel contexts (specifi c events and situations) and macro level contexts’
(Bloome et al., 2005: 4).
The tools the authors provide offer a distinctive contribution to the
description of both the broader relationships in which people participate
and their immediate enactments of meanings. In that sense such studies
also contribute to the development of the fi eld of sociolinguistics, especially
that sector that is concerned with educational contexts and the learning
and teaching of language and literacy. Drawing upon other traditions
in sociolinguistics, such as interactional studies (cf. Roberts et al., 2001),
Bloome and his colleagues invoke and adapt terms, taken from the surrounding
disciplines of interactional sociolinguistics, discourse analysis,
ethnomethodology, New Literacy Studies and so on, such as ‘intertextual’,
‘contextualisation cues’, ‘boundary making’, ‘message units’, ‘turn taking’
and ‘literacy events and practices’ in order to probe closely the inner workings
of these broader features of communication.
The authors, then, link close analysis of linguistic features of social interaction
with what Gee (1999) terms the ‘social’ turn in language study that
we noted above. In doing so, they complement other recent studies that
have attempted to link issues of power and identity to literacy (Collins &
Blot, 2002), to the ethnography of communication (Hornberger, 2003) and
to education (Street, 2005).
This book, then, links a number of the traditions in sociolinguistics that
we have seen in the debates regarding communicative competence, language
learning, etc. Moving beyond traditional microlinguistic approaches,