Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

Sociolinguistics, Language Teaching and New Literacy Studies 309
students from the local areas who were still in the process of learning
English as an additional language; it was hoped that participation in the
Programme would enhance both their ‘A’ level performance and their
chances of entering higher education.
The team members who taught on the Programme also engaged in ethnographic-style
research. They were interested in the relationship between
the programme objectives and actual experiences and perceptions of the
sessions by the students and the tutors. As one of the tutors who both
taught the course and engaged in research with it noted:
The ALD programme tries to challenge some of the expectations
students may have met at school . . . about language as narrowly
defi ned . . . the course involves issues of discourse, genre, writing as
social process . . . within a notion of building on what they already
had and bring to the programme rather than treating them as a defi -
cit and just fi xing that. (Street, personal communication, 2006)
As Scalone and Street (2006) noted in their analysis of the Academic
Literacy Development Programme, by expressing personal styles and learning
strategies during classroom activities and engaging with their related
genres, students participated both in the community of the academy and in
the community formed by the students during the course. Furthermore, by
engaging with the types of literacy required in higher education in the
United Kingdom, they collaboratively constructed an understanding of offi -
cial requirements and participated in earning- oriented activities, such as
discussing in groups how they might write the ‘personal; statement’ required
for university applications and engaging in different forms of argument
described by one tutor on the course. Interaction with other students and
with tutors was therefore fundamental in making explicit the different types
of knowledge that students already used and that they needed to develop
and customise to fi t Higher Education standards. Linking these fi ndings
with the three models of academic literacy proposed by Lea and Street
(1998), namely study skills, academic socialisation and academic literacies,
the report by Scalone and Street (2006) concludes:
Treating such students as collaborators in the development of the academic
literacies necessary for engagement with HE in the UK, can
perhaps offer a different and more supportive route to ‘Widening
Participation’ than the more traditional focus on either study skills or
academic socialization. (Scalone & Street, 2006: 133–134)
Concluding Remarks
We conclude by refl ecting on some of the ideas and developments discussed
above, and then offer a view on the emerging issues that bear on
both sociolinguistics and language and literacy teaching. Our comments